June 12 Struggle For Democracy

June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori
Femi Obayori
June 12 in Perspective
[Five Critical Essays]
1
Femi Obayori 1996
This edition is published by

OBABOOKS Publishers
e-mail: ifafemi2001@yahoo.com
First Published 1996

By Lumumba Memorial Bookhouse
P.O. Box 504, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria
Second edition, 2003
No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise without the prior
permission of the copyright owner
2
Contents Page
Preface to first edition ………………………………..4
Preface to this edition…………………………………5
NADECO-CD Alliance: Vanguarding June 12……….6
Area Boys In June 12: Of Heroes, Villains

And Scapegoats………………………………………23
Kongi’s March For Justice: Rebel Laureate………….43
On The NUPENG Strike……………………………..54
The 40-Hour Strike: A Consummate Expression

Of Total Decay……………………………………….72
Postscript……………………………………………..98
3
Preface to the First Edition
The June 12 in Perspective (Five Critical Essays) is a collection

of essays which attempt to analyse the June 12 upheaval.
Majorly materials for the purpose of self clarification and
circulation among elements crucial to the problematic aspiration
of the Nigerian peoples, the author deems this publication a plus
to the much needed enlightenment and conscientisation of
the interested public. This more so, perhaps, on account
of the fact that much as the ideas expounded represent the
author’s views, they equally reflect to a greater degree the
viewpoint of a cross section of certain social classes and social
groups.
If in places the reader finds the opinion
expressed and manner of expression rather “vitriolic”, it
is to the extent that the forces being opposed have not
been less venomous in their onslaught on the people, more
especially in the days the lines were written.
Nor is the author to be expected to camouflage his views
behind certain “detached”, “objective”, or “academic”
analysis. He dares declare that the June 12 Struggle,
rather than being another occasional outburst, partly
ideological and largely sentimental, remains in his view, a
consummation of a people’s struggle for democracy at a
stage in its development.
Finally, this pamphlet is dedicated to the urban and rural
dispossessed and those who have laid down their lives that
Nigeria, and indeed Africa, may yet witness a glorious rebirth in
the age of new human values.
January, 1996
4
Preface to this Edition
5
NADECO-CD ALLIANCE: VANGUARDING JUNE 12
I
Every political vanguard organisation must continually make
critical appraisal of its strategy and tactics and alliances it is
objectively conditioned to enter in the process of the
struggle. The Campaign for Democracy cannot be an
exemption and, of course, has never pretended to be such.
On July 5, 1993, Campaign for Democracy pulled the
wool from the eyes of self-defeating progressives, paper-tigerish
radicals, as well as cynics and opportunists of both the Left and
the Right by successfully mobilising the mass of our people for
street protests over the annulment of the June 12 election. This
feat was re-enacted in the following months in novel forms
including sit-at-home protests and neighbourhood rallies due to
the cold- blooded massacre of our people on the third day of
the July event. It was the leadership provided by CD that sent
Babangida sobbing out of Aso Rock in the dying days of August
1993, and later, the Interim National Government (ING) on the
night of November 17, 1993. Thus far with the first phase
of the June 12 Struggle. The emergence of National
Democratic Coalition, NADECO, and by its side, the Eastern
Mandate Union, EMU, in the early days of May, 1994, ushered
in (in concrete terms) the second phase of the June 12
Struggle. This ‘great beginning’ also marked the end of all
illusory hopes of the half-hearted pro-June 12
bourgeoisie, the petty-bourgeois, as well as the mass of our
deprived people, compelled under confusion and the pain of
extinction in a struggle whose main weapon stifles and
strangulates its bearer to finally rest their fate in a hope for a
change of heart by the Abacha Junta, a change which would lead
to the handling over of power to the bearer of June 12 mandate.
6
The role played by Eastern Mandate Union is now part
of history. The EMU dramatised its mission by giving an
ultimatum to the Junta to quit office and install the winner of the
June 12 election in power. But the Mandate Union finally
decreed itself out of relevance when in response to the Junta’s
threats it conducted a furious retreat. This notwithstanding, a
couple of mandators again made high-flown speeches
reminiscent of the last kicks of a dying horse but simmered down
shortly after. The rest of the mandators, home and abroad,
scampered for cover, their feathered caps beneath their armpits.
Thus far with the mandators and their mandate. But for now let
us be assured that at another moment, and as may be
opportune by fate, the mandators shall return to gather
their scattered mandates. In time we trust. So it happened that
NADECO became the undisputed vanguard of the second phase
of the June 12 Struggle. And it was with NADECO that CD had
to row in the same boat on the course of glory. NADECO
captained the boat.
Let us recall that during the first phase of the June 12
Struggle, CD co-opted a host of platforms and interest
groups into an alliance it was able to dominate by dint of
its superior tactics and preponderant audacity. But when CD
entered the second phase of the June 12 Struggle it did as a
member of a coalition notwithstanding its status as a coalition of
about 42 affiliates. It is important to note that right
from the very first day CD’s rank-and-file became aware of
‘our’ role in NADECO only very few had any hope in the
coalition. Although one often heard, informally, that CD was at
the centre of NADECO, the rank-and-file had little confidence in
an alliance led by ‘these NADECO people’.
The ‘NADECO people’s’ approach to mass
struggle started coming to light when on May 22nd, 1994, the
eve of the Constitutional Conference
7 elections, only very few
posters and leaflets appeared. It is now on record that while
people, especially in the South West and the Edo home state of
the NADECO stalwart and renowned nationalist Chief
Anthony Enahoro, answered the NADECO call for a boycott,
nothing serious was done about physical stoppage of
elections. Living history as recorded in police
statement pads, dungeon graffiti and court records would have it
that most of those arrested for electoral offences on that day
were CD activists, perhaps the NADECO people were more
tactical and successfully avoided security agents by using
esoteric power (?).
At the same time as NADECO openly rejected
mass action it devoted the bulk of its flabby strength to
exhuming the corpses of democratic structures butchered by the
Abacha Junta in the wake of the November 17th sneak to power.
It would appear that NADECO had predicated its eventual
victory over the Junta on mere threats on pages of newspapers
and its ability to make the corpses of the State and National
Assemblies, like Zombies, walk our streets, like ghosts out
of Hamlet striking fear into their foes who disturb their
sleep by holding their wards, the people, captive. They wanted
to make these structures, in their shredded shrouds,
sprout to nature once more! But as it turned out, the ghosts
and sabre-rattling of NADECO notwithstanding, Nigerians
soon realised that May 30 wasn’t quite different from any
other day after all.
And have we not seen how these walking corpses
have faded before the slashing sabre of the Khalifa like the
mist before the rising sun and how the captains have been
dismounted from their cockroach horses and shoved into the
dampening recesses of dungeons, albeit, bourgeois, civilised fashion. And
the last of it was yet to be seen. There is much more behind six
than seven, say the Yorubas.8 Now NADECO was going to
release its programmes piecemeal like jokers in a casino.
Meanwhile, the people must wait for the Big Bang. For when
the bearer of the June 12 mandate would finally announce his
government, the mere proclamation was bound to send the Junta
fleeing into the barracks where it belonged. These events
loomed and hovered like a ‘haunting’ Messiah over the
consciousness and being of our people than their real existence.
The magical pronouncement came after a couple of hide-and-seeks
theatrics and left in its wake a couple of no less monumental
appearances and disappearances. The scenario was so clear
that no activist was to be left in doubt as to what was left of
NADECO.
But more importantly, no event has ever provided us with a better
opportunity of understanding our ruling class and politicians as
well as our people than the events of the last one year, if only we
bother to take a keener look. What is the character of this
NADECO? What is its understanding of the June 12
Struggle? And did CD go wrong in allying with NADECO?
To use the words of a foreign electronic outfit, most
members of NADECO are “respected members of their various
communities,” and not one or two but quite a number of them
are known to be “basically honest politicians.” But need not
somebody tell them that the issue went beyond communal
respect and basic honesty; that the essential nature of these
people and their position within the political economy of Nigeria
made them the wrong specimens for the cap they
pretended to wear. NADECO chieftains, no matter how we
look at it, are members of the discredited ‘political class’, if
indeed class be the appropriate definition of this motley
aggregate of self-seekers and hustlers. And indeed, has
their history of hustling and political opportunism, nay, self-
delusion, not bloated our voluminous book of inglorious history?
Is the present generation not 9a living witness to how the
political class endorsed the subversion of the Politburo
Report because of its socialist contents? Did not the political
class hail to the high heavens the implementation of SAP? What
about their connivance, open and covert, in the banning of mass
organisations, including the NLC, ASUU, and the NANS in
the blooming days of IBB’S fascism? And what is more, did not
the political class North, South, West and East, united by
opportunism and settlement, allow the dissolution of political
associations in 1989? What indeed stopped them from seeing in
the first place that they ceased to be the determinants of their
fates the very day they allowed these things to happen
unchallenged? And what is more, did they not, in the pursuance
of their opportunistic egunje line, start to scramble to ‘belong
somewhere’ the moment the Junta burst two parties into the open
from the blues? And are we not also living witnesses to the
scheming, infamy, vagabondage and vagrancy that streaked our
shredded history book in the last three years of transition before
the June 12 bubble burst?
As in Germany in 1919-33, Bulgaria 1919-23,
Spain in the 30s and countless other places, bourgeois
democratic illusions and liberal inconsistencies have always
oiled the wheels of ascending fascism. The movement to
full-blown fascism is always blessed with copious donations of
opportunism and vacillation on the part of the so-called political
classes.
This holds true for our political class, whether respected,
honest or dishonest. But at no other time has this manifested
more vividly than the short-lived existence of the
legislative assemblies whose corpses, as earlier
mentioned, and tried to walk our streets once again.
Imagine an elected legislative arm of government bearing the
peoples’ mandate (or rather with people’ mandate forced into its
hands) being sworn in by an10unelected Junta! This National
Assembly, could not even deliberate on matters to which it was
restricted - monuments, antiquities, motor parks. For
six months it deliberated on matters of its members’
welfare and salaries. And the Junta made sure the ‘new breed’
legislators got enough NICON-NOGA HILTON spoiling
treatment both bodily and spiritually as to make them forget
that they were indeed supposed to be legislators,
deliberating on the interests of our people and accountable to
their various constituencies. And have we not seen how these
assemblies-upper and lower houses alike- allowed
themselves to be turned into a Babangida’s weapon for stifling
the June 12 Struggle? Did some NADECO chieftains not aid and
abet the imposition of an Interim National Government [ING] by
60 to 30 overwhelming majority votes in the Senate? And what
is more, need not somebody ask why the legislators refused to
resist the dissolution of the Assembly but waited only to regal us
with some voodoo spectacle.
Enough of this nauseating political scenario. Let us now
take a look at the kind of economic arrangement that has made it
the lot of our people to be ruled by such an aggregate of
disparate lot.
There is no way the roll call of developing countries is to
be made without Nigeria bursting forth to seek for itself a first grade in the
rank, nor is Nigeria, though a neo-colony, to be passed off with a
mere wave of the hand in the gathering of capitalist countries.
But it remains to be seen how a capitalist country can stand
without capitalists.
The Nigerian capitalist manages capital without
employing productive labour just as he has ran a nation in
more than three and a half decades without the spirit of
nationalism. The Nigerian capitalist inherited an agriculturally-
based productive economy from the colonial master which he
soon turned to an oil money-gulping,
11 usurious, contract-based
economy in which the nepotic habits and psychology of ‘man-
know-man’ and ‘kick-backs’ have become official state policy.
Eight years of Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment
Programme (SAP) was later to introduce into this pathetic
national economic scenario the now hegemonic culture of
settlement and money-as-a Godhead. Indeed, whenever
the history of this generation is to be reappraised by the future
generation (if we assumed that the present curse upon us would
have passed by then) one wonders what an uphill task it would
be understanding that over 100 million full-blooded Nigerians
allowed their homeland to be maimed, sucked and raped in eight
inglorious years of ascendancy of military dictatorship. Need we
quickly step in to save this yet-unborn generation this agony by
pointing out that sections of this 100 million found themselves
places of dishonour either as key actors or as back-ups in this infamous
drama of nation-breaking.
He who wants to accuse Ibrahim Babangida of leaving
without having taught our people any lesson should look at our
emerging middle class. Examine the banking sector and see the
level of ramification and upliftment” it witnessed in the past half
a decade! Look at what fat profits they declare. Or take for
instance the Labour Movement and check out how, in step with
the worsening of the conditions of the working class, the
conditions of their leaders in the trade union movement have
continued to improve courtesy of ‘new thinking’ and ‘scientific
trade unionism’. And what about the car ‘loans’ given to army
and police officers in the dying days of the Ibrahim Babangida
Junta. It was also to the glory of the Junta that at no other
time, under no other regime, did the contractual system
fatten the pocket of the ‘capitalists’ than the one under scrutiny.
The skeletons and carcasses of abandoned projects that
strewn our scotched landscapes bear testimony to the wanton
fiducial lawlessness of the era 12under examination, just as the
large number of the members of the middle class that committed
monumental landed properties to the care of God leaves
nobody in doubt as to the resting places of funds flying
out of government coffer. All this courtesy of an endlessly
black gold.
It should be clear by now that we are grappling with a
class whose outlook is limited by crass parasitism. Concretely
speaking, it has not been able to define itself as a capitalist class
in the classical sense of it. It is wholly unable to engage
labour for the production of surplus wealth for its
accumulation, but has defined itself by a mode of appropriation
which amounts to stealing from the public treasury through
inflated contracts, over-invoicing and direct day-light
robbery. It also fronts for foreign multi-national finance and
commercial interests for which it has earned the well deserved
name of ‘agbero bourgeoisie’ after the motor park touts.
Significantly, its politics is just a reflection of the parasitism,
opportunism and long-throatism that mark its mode of economic
existence.
II
Having x-rayed the political and economic essence of the

political class, inclusive of their NADECO allies, it is important
too to analyse June 12 as an object of the strategic coincidence
between their interests and popular interests. As has been reiterated
over and over again by countless Nigerians, some of who have never
bothered to attempt a profound analysis of the struggle we are
into, the struggle for the actualisation of the June 12
mandate is not a struggle for Abiola, nor is it a struggle of the
Yorubas. June 12 is the culmination of a whole lot of events
bordering on the very existence of the geographical entity known
13
as Nigeria. The June 12 victory symbolises on the one hand the
blowing of the final whistle for the oligarchy to quit the pitch.
The June 12 election and its annulment as well as
subsequent scheming cannot be separated from the events of the
60s viz:, the Western Nigeria Riots, the Nzeogwu-led coup, the
anti-Igbo pogrom and the 30 months officially sanctioned
pogrom called the Civil War. Nor can the truth of it all allow us
to carve a gulf between the 1914 amalgamation and June 12. We
should also not lose sight of those sad realities that lumped the
fate of a people whose leaders moved the motion for
independence in 1956 with the fate of another who resolved
against independence in 1957.
To understand June 12 properly, we must also be able to
fit in its proper place the pioneering effort of Governor
Yohanna Madaki. His unapologetic removal of a
powerful vassal of the Caliphate like the Emir of Muri
preceded the election of non-Hausa-Fulani majority into
local councils among those hitherto cowed people of the
Mambila range.
The religious/ethnic riots that spattered the historical
landscapes of the Middle Belt and South of the North in the 80s
and early 90s are but part of the real foundation upon which the
June 12 victory was built. In citing the history of June 12,
chroniclers must also always define a place for the April
22 Movement of Major Gwazor Okar and its agenda of self-
determination notwithstanding its tactical flaws.
The June 12 Struggle in its essence, therefore,
represents the consummation of the people’s political
consciousness, an active contest for political power by the
politically conscious and mature section of the country
opposed to the hegemonic cabal. May God help us! (Power no
be breakfast bread).
14
From the economic angle, the ordinary man in the street,
maimed, sucked and animalised in seven years of IBB’s SAP
programme, could see salvation in god image of the great
philanthropist and humanist multi-millionaire, Chief M. K. O.
Abiola. And did not Abiola Milk and Rice begin to appear in
the market square even before his resounding victory. To
the common man be he Hausa or Ibo, Christian or Muslim,
Abiola was simply a messiah. On June 12, he felt he must claim
his freedom by thumb-printing the stallion, Abiola’s party’s
symbol. And once the Junta made bold its intention to annul the
people’s decision without scruples the quest for salvation
became a revolutionary quest. Hence the June 12 Struggle
embodies the elements of self-determination and economic
empowerment, in other words, a nationalist as well as economic
struggle.
The southern section of our political class, nurtured in
the art of whipping up ethnic and tribal sentiments whenever it
felt marginalised in the game of treasury-looting, saw in the
struggle another opportunity to settle account with its northern
allies. This was after it had become clear that the
oppressed people, especially in the South West, would
challenge the Oligarchy, in spite of their elites.
Sadly, even this decision they could not arrive at in good
time. To most of them the crumbs from the Oligarchy’s table
represented a bird in hand, which was worth more than the
prospects of equal access to power. And so it was that most of
them continued to vacillate and play hide-and-seek until the
midnight of November 17, 1993 when Abacha stuffed horse shit-
soiled hay into their ever-open mouths. Then it dawned on them
that there was the need to fight. That was really true-to-type in
the sense that they always ran to their “people” each time they
got their noses bloodied in the tempestuous terrain of booty
sharing by their more advantaged15 Hausa-Fulani brothers. Even at
that, they always harbour an overwhelming suspicion of the
people since they are conscious of the strength that inheres in
their unity and resolve. However, and this is extremely
significant, they try to lead the people using tactics that would
minimise their accumulation of political experience. This is
because the Southern elites understand too well that, they could
also be fair game when the time comes for the masses to settle
scores with the elites on a multi-national scale.
Thus, the elites would rather have placards, petitions and
the likes rather than full-scale resort to political street-craft.
It is therefore understandable why the political class, in
pursuit of the actualisation of the June 12 mandate, would rather
prefer a carnival of market women to a cannibalistic charge of an
angry youthful mob. To the political class, a few sporadic
outbursts here and there, a few acts of thuggery and
banditry which they can effectively control and use to bargain at
negotiation table, is more appealing than a self-moving, dynamic action of
the people against the status quo. NADECO could not put its
members out in the streets to lead mass actions. The
NADECO to which we belonged belittled propaganda work.
In short, it would appear that, within it, we never could reach
beyond our arm’s length politically. As such initiative
eluded us.
If July 5 to November 17, 1993 represented an
authentic people’s movement slowed down by the people’s
representatives, May 30th till date represents a movement
of the people’s representatives facilitated and accelerated by the
people to the dismay of the representatives. Oh Lord, protect us from
an accursed generation!
Ordinarily, the people would appear so vague, fluid and
innocent just as they appear like saintly-pawns in the hands of
the evil politicians they elected. But can the people be separated
from the politicians they elected, 16 or rather can the people be
isolated from and set against the society that produce them
or rather the society they produce as the case may be? And
would there then have been a society at all in the first
place without the masses? Indeed, must the people not admit
the responsibility for the deeds of their leaders or rulers as the
case may be once they are yet to realise their oppression (that is
when they are yet to be oppressed) or when they have realised
such but have not purged themselves of all hindrances, both bodily and
spiritually, as to enable them face the oppressor in a pitched
battle? Indeed, the leader must be spared the burden of bearing
both his own blame and that of the led no matter how
inconsequential in weight the latter may seem.
Caught in the very web of its own selfishness, and puerile political
speculations, the Nigerian mind, denuded of even the
semblance of contemplative strength, rose up to an imaginary
American intervention on the eve of the struggle to actualise the
June 12 mandate. Churches, mosques and, indeed, tagless seers
saw on the horizon of apparition the colossal image of the
American Marine bearing at the muzzle of his flaming bazooka
the flower of freedom, a farcical antidote to fascism. Only that
the same Spirit failed to reveal to this seers what they would
otherwise have read in living history: that the Marines, like
heaven, only help those who help themselves and in the
interests of the United States.
But what do we expect of such a people? What do we
expect of a people whose whole social essence has been
destroyed (or rather a people that allowed their social essence to
be destroyed) in eight years of uninterrupted, unabated
ascendancy of individualism as a state religion and settlement as
social ethic? In eight years! Eight years of deprived humanity, eight years
of raped humanity, eight years in which all the colourful
legacies, no doubt of diluted essence, of past ages were torn
down and replaced with gilded 17death-robes and gowns of torn.
The Babangida years saw the reduction of our people to the
whims of one man-Ibrahim Babangida. For once a people and a
man stood face to face in opposition and yet, with their
fates inseparably bound. Never in history has the success of a
people been so dependent on the failure of a man; never in
history has the success of a man been so dependent on the
naivety and stupidity of a people.
III
Thank God July 5th came to pass and the hope in our people
rekindled! Thank God our people separated their fate from the
fate of a scoundrel. Thank God we have our people, we have the
CD and now we have NADECO, all one and the same - the
product of a common existence. We must return to where we
started out. As belated an effort as it may appear, and no matter
how inconsistent its members have been, NADECO represents
a gigantic leap forward in the expansion of our democratic space.
For the first time in the course of our
disgustingly interrupted, bloodstained history, the
‘political class’ has come forward to challenge the military
under a banner not sanctioned by the Constitution or by decree.
For the first time our bourgeoisie come out to defend the
people’s mandate illegally. For the first time, sections of our
political class are organising and learning the methods of
struggle their colleagues in other parts of the world like Latin
America and Europe take as a matter of right and responsibility.
It could also mark the beginning of the emergence of
bourgeois statesmen who would insist on bourgeois liberal rights
and structures as becoming of a true capitalist class.
It is also significant that this is happening at a time when
the oil dependent political economy, the basis of the
squandermania of the ruling18elites, is in troubled waters.
Without oil money (or similar revenue) of Nigeria’s scale, no
nation can sustain a mammoth class of retainer capital ists the
kind we now have in Nigeria. The demand for
autonomy, self-determination or independence as the case may be by the
oil-producing communities is a demand for an end to the
personalisation of public wealth. In fact, it is a demand for the
abolition of that class whose existence has been based on oil
money.
And since the current political scaffolding called Nigeria
is based on oil, the re-configuration of the balance of
nationalities could well mean that oil- money would no longer
be preyed upon by the Oligarchy and its junior partners
supported by a huge state machine.
The implication then is that those politicians who are
likely to dominate the affairs of this country or what would
become of it in the not-too-far future would be those who
have purged themselves of the leprous plague of
parasitism and contract-greed. For those few elements within
NADECO who have resisted Abacha’s baiting with oil-money
and contracts, the hardship they now experience may as
well be a dress rehearsal of what would indeed be the rule
of the future - a future in which every capitalist would have to
prove his worth as a capitalist only by his ability to organise
labour for the purpose of wealth creation rather than dipping
fingers into public purse.
For the majority yet to see the difference between
NADECO and the SDP or say UPN/NPN we only hope that the
ridicule they would receive would not dwarf the type of demise
that would befall them a hundred folds. And so far as the spirit
that brought NADECO into existence is concerned, they are
aliens, or rather, mere fellow travellers. The sooner they are
yanked off as the journey progresses the better. In essence, the
fewer the better, a la V. I. 19Lenin. Initially the base of the
struggle broadened in size, now the broadened base must acquire
a new quality.
It would have become clear by now that there is nothing
fundamentally wrong in working with NADECO, given its
support for the actualisation of the June 12 mandate.
What needs to be tidied up, and was never properly
done, was the nature of the alliance. On the other hand, we have
an already existing umbrella organisation or a coalition based on
the programme of the restoration of democracy via a Sovereign
National Conference (SNC) and the expulsion of military from
power; that was CD which was tested in action, the problematic
is precisely the subsuming of the CD into another coalition
which was yet to stand the test of real, practical struggle. That
was problem number one.
Secondly, there is also the problem that the exact role of
the CD within the Coalition was not clear outside some vague, verbose
designations and heart-soothing pronouncements.
By committing these two initial errors, CD
authomatically stripped itself of playing the role of the tutor of
NADECO, of infusing it with the drive and dynamism
necessary to neutralise and nullify the vacillations and
inconsistencies of the other elements within the coalition.
Notwithstanding the initial oversights, it remains the
duty of CD to lure and draw trusted elements within the coalition
directly and openly against the regime, making them share
responsibilities for the consequences of those actions. But CD
must concentrate its effort primarily on strengthening its own
structures for an independent programme for the actualisation of
the June 12 mandate within the limits of its own human and
material resources while maintaining its position within
NADECO. The first step towards this has already been taken.
********
20
An objective analysis of NADECO’s vanguard role or CD’s
involvement in NADECO cannot be complete without a look at a
couple of events similar in their appearances and representing
links in the chain of events before us.
Whenever our activists criticise the half-heartedness of
NADECO’s leadership and the consequent failure of some of
their actions or when seeming lack of success of our actions are
seen as a reflection of the incorrectness of our
involvement in NADECO, it is often forgotten that the
history of failure on our part has not always been the history of
alliance with NADECO.
It remains to be seen how a link is to be drawn between
our failure to successfully mobilise the masses to stay at home
on May 9th, 1994 and our involvement in NADECO. This is
without prejudice to the claim by CD’s Chairman Dr. Beko
Ransom Kuti and active cadres generally, including
yours truly, that we were satisfied with the outcome of May 9.
There was also the January 2, 1993 ultimatum CD issued
to IBB to vacate office which it could not venture to follow up
with any concrete action not just because we lacked the courage
but also because our courage carried us too far ahead of the
masses. January 2 was a reflection of our alienation from the
unprepared masses at a certain point in their struggle against
fascism. But there was no NADECO then.
Perhaps the problem basically was trying to
work according to some schematic design whether or
not such fitted into the objectively existing situation.
The mammoth street protests of July 5 and 6 cannot always be
re-enacted nor could they always be standards to measure CD’s
popularity with the masses. Just as August 12, 13 and 14 were a
novel advancement over the shortcoming of the nonetheless
more attractive and more inspiring deeds of July 5, 6, and 7, so
21
must we at every point in time, be able to introduce new and
decisive methods to the struggle.
It is in this sense alone that one can begin to understand
Dr. Ransome Kuti, the CD Chairman better when he said
CD was satisfied with the outcome of May 9 Sit-At-Home.
The refusal of the people to stay at home on May 9 was not
deemed by CD to be a reflection of dwindling support for its
agenda unlike ‘The Champion’ (May 10, 1994) would want us to have it.
The posture of the people was a demand for more
meaningful, more result-oriented method of struggle. It was
an expression on the part of the people that the only condition they
could lose what they have is the possibility of getting what they want
either in the present or in the future.
Once more, the current struggle is strictly for
power. It is a revolutionary struggle. What it means is that
the novelties we begin to introduce into the struggle must not
be those that would drag us away from the path of
collision with the state machinery. The people and the people’s
power must come in collision with the ruling order at a certain
point in time. But the question that remains to be answered is
whether we have the wherewithal as an organisation to do this or
not. I have my doubts. Meanwhile the struggle continues. It
must continue on CD platform and on NADECO platform.
Everybody involved in the struggle against fascism and against
30 years of oligarchic domination, no matter his disagreement
with others and his love for his own method, must have a
platform from which to operate and must be allowed to
operate. New platforms are going to emerge and new alliances
forged, but the people’s real movement towards progress and the
future remains one big social movement without a tag. This
movement, I think, is the most important. And surely, it has
passed its first infantile test, now it must go through the ritual of manhood.
15-20 July, 1994. Lagos, Nigeria. 22
AREA BOYS IN JUNE 12: OF HEROES, VILLAINS AND
SCAPEGOATS
I
The June 12 Struggle can hardly be fully appreciated
and chronicled without taking cognisance of the special
contribution of the Area Boys community in Lagos and
their equivalent all over the South West. Of all the classes and
social groups that jumped into the June 12 bandwagon, only the
Area Boys played their expected role most consistently; only the Area
Boys needed the most minimal mobilisational impulse for the
most far-reaching effect. This is true of the June 12 Struggle as
for all popular protests for a reform of the existing order, or for
the pulling to pieces of the existing order. They lurk in the
shadow, bidding their time, waiting for such moment as that
society that scorns them puts forward a demand for scorn upon
itself but by its civility, its advanced culture, could not generate
enough faith to do so, to come out and save the society from its
self-afflicted dilemma. At every opportune moment the Area
Boys come out of their dark alleys to loot by rage and fire, to
impress their stamp on our national psyche. June 12 was one
such opportunity, an ample one.
It would therefore be doing a great service to ourselves
by, once and for all, seizing this opportunity to
investigate and understand the Area Boys phenomenon.
It is essential to go a little bit beyond the chagrin and hatred of
the middle class for this ‘non-class’ to the arena of concrete
deciphering and proper definition of the social relation and the
psychology that always put the society at the mercy of this
lot at the moment of every social upheaval. Their history
dates before June 12. The beginning is where we must begin.
On May 13, 1992 when the Olusegun Maiyegun-
led NANS called a general23 strike and mass action against the
harsh economic realities of the IBB days occasioned by the
Structural Adjustment Programme [SAP], which
intensified earlier in March, 1992 as a result of the deregulation
of the economy, nobody was in doubt as to whether or not the police
would drench the popular movement in blood. What indeed caught many
off balance was the manner of justification of the killings and the
middle class support it generated.
The protest, flagged off at the University of Lagos,
Akoka campus, had been relatively peaceful after the initial
verbal confrontation between the students and the police at the
University gate. At first, it was an all-student-affair. Hoodlums,
street urchins, vandals, vagabonds, in short, all that could pass
for Area Boys in the eyes of a typical student in his
state of elevated ignorance were actively prevented by the
police, ably aided by the students, from joining the protest. But
by the time the protest got to the “Areas” controlled by the
“Boys” typified by such landmarks as underbridge shelters, cul-
de-sacs, dark alleys and ‘fox holes’, the ‘civilised’ students and
the police had lost control. Then the trigger was activated and
by evening, not less than six corpses had been deposited in
various morgues in Lagos and many more people were receiving
treatment for varying degrees of gunshot wounds. The police
had no cause to deny the killings. Those shot were said to be
‘Area Boys’ seizing the opportunity of the protest to loot. And to
further drive home its point the police PRO spent lengthy media
time and resources trying to convince himself and the of the
world about how peaceful and civilised the protest was before
the ‘Area Boys’ took over. But police claims reeked heavily of
falsehood in the light of the reality on the ground. For it
remains to be seen how the schoolboy who was shot at
Ojuelegba could have passed for an Area Boy in his school
uniform and with the very conspicuous satchel, which he
slouched with youthful aplomb. 24 One prime-time lie of a
thousand police PROs could also not have convinced anybody
that the banker whose entrails spilled out of his well-tailored
suit was a ‘hoodlum’. It would appear that the Area
Boys propaganda has become in the hands of the police an
omnibus excuse for their homicidal exuberance - a kind of
‘justifiable homicide’-ala Los Angeles Police Department
(LAPD).
In 1989, the drenching in blood of the Anti-SAP Protest
was also justified by the police, though without any profound
effort, through the claim that they were restoring order and
putting an end to the free looting being carried out by hoodlums
who had taken over the protest. The question that remains to be
answered, however, is whether or not hijacked by Area Boys or
by some other species of marginal people, it can be
possible in our situation to pull off a really peaceful protest?
The answer to this question is definitely to be sought in the
objectively determined social psychology of the various classes,
sub-classes, non-classes and ‘marginadoes’ with which our
society is blessed and among whom you can’t but count first the
Area Boys and their allies.
On the eve of the July 5 event, what troubled every
radical mind the most, apart from the inevitable police interference, was
the fear of free-looting and area boys’ hijack of the popular protest.
However, on July 5, what shocked the radical mind more than
any other thing, having recovered from the spell of seeing the
‘whole of Lagos’ on the streets, was the near-absence of
looting and the cooperation given the protesters by Area Boys
and hoodlums of whatever shade. July 6 was later to shake the
radical mind out of its earlier pleasant shock when it witnessed
free looting by hoodlums. Once more that gave Abacha a cheap
(but needless to say, unnecessary) excuse for unleashing fascist
troops on the South West to ‘maintain law and order’.
25
Although it is clear from all indications that the Area
Boys mean no other intention when they join a popular
protest save the looting and robbing of the society by rage,
it is a matter of opinion whether or not this species of marginals
actually contribute to or detract from the people’s
struggle. Before going further as to what special role was
played by Area Boys in the June 12 struggle, it is important to
quickly put our understanding in correct perspective as to the
kind of conditions of existence and social psychology
that inform the kind of niche this tribe of marginals has created
for itself in our popular struggles.
II
They are merry, gay and deep-witted; the neighbourhood

belongs to them, they belong to the neighbourhood-every nook
and cranny, every inch of the neighbourhood they know like the
back of their palm. They call themselves ‘Omo Onile’ son of the
soil, child of the landlord. Here they were born; here they were
bred. They have drunk of its sweet-sad water and have swum in
its turbulent sea; they are the Area Boys.
They are half-educated, unemployed or semi-employed
young men; those who for one reason or the other, had to drop
out school, those who got tired of school routines and discipline,
those who once had a trade but could not mobilise enough
resources to acquire their instruments of trade or those who
suddenly got tired of hanging out for the trickling income of
their trade, just all sorts of young men who have problem
conforming with the socially acceptable means of earning
income.
Mostly drug (commonly ganja) addicts, they could be
very quick with their knives and broken bottles and are
also flippy-fingered. The 26 communities are training schools
for pickpockets, known in ghetto and prison slang as ‘gold
fingers’. Apart from petty thievery and ‘toll’ (owo ita) collection
from traders and consumers in the area market via half-cajole, half-
harassment and clowning, when pressed, they also make money on the side
by producing fake documents -from tax receipts to passport and
visas-that is, by the big time ones among them.
Their taste too is a thing to be envied by any
hardworking graduate. Making upward of between #300 [$10]
and #1,000 [$33] daily they see themselves as Yankees who by one
stroke of divine ill luck were mistakenly born in Nigeria. To them Ame
(America) is that certainly unattainable paradise on earth.
But for all this, they are merely tolerated by a helpless
society, they are despised by the society and they know it. They
also have their own sober moments. Such moments-days,
weeks, months, and for those unlucky ones, years that they spend
behind bars (for in and out of jail is part of their way of life)
constitute their periods of sober reflection and University for
tutoring on the epistemology of surviving the outside world,
where not only your muscle and luck count but, above all, your
wit and meanness of mind.
Although society, which often makes no distinction
between them and armed robbers, despises them, its members
shamelessly turn to Area Boys’ Capones anytime the law has
to be bent or scores settled out of court, Sicilian
fashion. Presumably, the Area Boys are conscious of the
opportunism which sometimes inform society’s relationship with
them. As such, at opportune moments, they entertain no qualms in
getting back at it by open expropriation of social wealth, ignoring their
usual methods of cajolery. From time to time, as occasion
demands, the god of theft must be given a free reign.
But this they cannot do on their own. They have scores
to settle with the society but can neither initiate the
process nor go into it as a27collective. They, therefore, bid
their time like the vulture with their ears on the ground and their
cannabis-sharpened eyes trained on all, waiting for a socially
acceptable, organised group to seek redress. It is their God-appointed duty
to turn such a process into a riot, an opportunity for
free looting. Although they need redress most, they lack a
clearly defined economic base and place in the productive and
distributive process for such. What unites them is exactly the
same thing that separates them, namely, the tendency to
survive odds all alone as an individual in a hostile environment.
This individualistic survivalism common to all of them is
exactly what divides them. And that is why their rebellious
aspiration can only find expression when another
organised collective settles scores, albeit civilised-
fashion, with the status quo. At such moment, they impress
their stamp on the popular movement and, thus, invite the police
to shoot it down armed with ample excuse. But let no one be
deceived that the police harbour any serious disdain for the Area
Boys. The boys serve them in a double sense, one as scapegoats
whenever there is a pressing need for public relations job to be
done and also whenever they themselves are in trouble and
require the technical know-how of the underworld. They raid
the Boys whenever they are broke and need some ‘relief
package’ (it is easier for the Boys to get in and out of police
trouble than for water to pass through a wicker fish net whenever
there is no need for PR job on the part of the police and the Boys
are ready to settle). In moment they also blackmail some of the
Boys into doing informant job for them, for the Boys know more
than anybody else how things move and their final destination.
Also, as individuals every police man must know when
and how to see the boys when he has to do the ‘illegal’ in the
area i.e. say procure a few wraps of weeds or find consumers for
certain ‘contrabands’!
28
All these are the things that strengthen the Boys in peace
time and make it possible for them to continue to live off the
society by cajolery, trickery, harassment and open extortion with
minimal police interference, except when some particularly
‘troublesome’ military governor who knows not the logic of the
area comes to the fore to perform, only for a while though, the
pitiable dance of the novice-in- town or on the eve of some
events of global significance such as an impending FIFA
visitation.
Just like the police, the politicians also know, use and
pay the Boys. Woe betides the politician who comes to the area
to campaign without first and foremost seeing the Boys. For the
Boys have the capacity to spoil the show if not properly settled.
There is also the highest bidder syndrome. The politicians, in
settling scores among themselves, also have to see and settle the
Boys. For the Boys, thuggery is a well-mastered art which they
prosecute to the degree of efficiency demanded.
We have now seen how our species of marginals, lumpen-
proletariat, have made themselves indispensable to our
rotten society, how the gentleman trying to get around the
law needs to see them, how the forget needs to see them, from
time to time, how the police, either for good or for bad, have to
pay homage and how the politicians, whose quickest power of
speech is the money, equally settle the boys to get things done,
and over and above all how in moment of social upheaval they
come to the scene and impress their indelible stamp on the
social movement on behalf of the popular mass, for the
benefit of the popular mass and at the same time at a great price
for the popular mass. We must go back to the specifics of June
12 Circus in which this category of circus kings performed.
III
29
July 5 did not only shake the minds of the radicals but also those
of the Area Boys. So spell-bound was this tribe of traditional
looters that some of them actually participated in crowd control and in
cases, actually helped in ensuring a successful ignition of the action,
even under the watchful eyes of the arms-of-the-law. Others,
more respected than the rest, having demonstrated their bullying
power in many machete-wielding and charm-throwing as well as
incantation-chanting duels in the past, automatically became de
facto kommandos of processions to the residence of the president-elect.
And it must be said on this day that the democratic forces found
the raw, albeit weed/charm-induced, courage of these
lumpen elements most useful in overwhelming and frustrating police
resistance as well as holding those few Area Boys who would not
show some understanding in check. Though it must be pointed
out too that this surprising attitude of the Area Boys bosses must
have been informed by some other hidden agenda of higher
stakes. Citing one or two instances of the on ground situation
would tell the reader more.
At about 8.20 a. m on Monday, July 5, 1993, a group of
youths charged with the responsibility of mobilising and leading a
contingent of demonstrators to the Ikeja residence of the
president-elect had arrived at Agege Motor Road, Mushin only
to be confronted by armed policemen stationed at bus stops and
by street lamp posts. There was no doubt that the people were
ready to move, as they hung from balconies and windows
expectantly without attempting to go to work. Friday 2nd to
Sunday 4th had been spent doing house-to-house agitation,
leafleteering and pasting posters, so lack of awareness about the
intention was completely out of the issue. But here, the people,
there the police, between them the leaders, prowling in their soft
soles, jeans and khaki or T-shirts. The latter had students written
all over them so to say. Time was running out. Then somebody
came up with the idea of talking 30 to the Boys. It wasn’t difficult
getting to them - they were known and had their bases. After
some cross examinations - asking to see the student’s ID card or
at least a ‘proof’, questions about knowledge of the terrain, the
day’s objective and the like, they declared with enthusiasm that,
indeed, they had all the while been waiting for the students to
come and lead the ‘action’ having seen the leaflets during the
weekend. Then they got down to drawing the battle plan. What
a weird thing it was! Burn a couple of Danfo buses on the road;
fire a couple of shops! -that was action! And it had to
take some painstaking effort explaining the objective of the
day once more to the Boys before they finally agreed to shelve
the ‘original plan’. But all the same tyre was needed for the
‘action’. It meant some token amount for petrol, which they got
promptly. Tyres, petrol, petrol and more petrol - for the tyres
were wet (it rained the previous day) a couple of teargas
canisters and gunshots materialised and the people flooded the
street. An attempt was made by the students’ leader to address
them, but the people swarmed him, they swarmed the police and
the police retreated - the movement had commenced.
All the way to Ikeja, the student leaders kept in close
contact with the Area Boys’ bosses, always reminding them of the day’s
objective and getting them to deal with those boys who would
not abide by this objective in the traditional way - they were
usually bullied and dispossessed of their loots which in most
cases were not fully returned to their owners. These were mostly
wristwatches, trinkets and wallets of passersby defying the
strike, some of who took to their heels after being waylaid. The
unreturned loot apparently belonged to the bosses who,
alongside this, enjoyed every bit of the forced march puffing
ganja - you could not stop them after all.
Having gotten to the destination and listened to what
‘Baba’ had to say, the bosses started trying to ‘identify and
organise’ their respective groups.
31 They definitely had hoped to
get something from Baba, as usual, not realising that the issue at hand
went beyond the traditional politician-Area Boys’ ‘egunje’ connection -
they were most disappointed.
But on July 6, they started a looting spree, and by noon
of the same day, the wanton killing had commenced. By the
evening, Abacha officially backed up the killings and sent out
more troops on the morning of 7th to complete the job. And
once again an excuse was found for killing innocent people.
Throughout the remaining scene of the first act of the June 12
circus, the Area Boys never had the opportunity to fully
exhibit their trait on a mammoth scale. August 12, 13,
14,26 and 27 couldn’t have afforded them such because they
were Sit-At-Home protests; likewise September 29th to October
1st because, mainly, protests never took off before they were
nipped in the bud. On the Lagos Island, however, on September
20th, they defended the democratic process without looting.
On November 10, the day of the Federal High Court
verdict that declared the Ernest Shonekan-led Interim National
Government illegal, the Area Boys were also at Baba’s house to
swell the crowd, also apparently to take crumbs from Baba’s
table, and honestly, they did have their lunch at Baba’s expense
(by right or by force). But to show the true character of our tribe
of lumpen -the very following day, Thursday the November
11th, University of Lagos students returning to their campus
after going to town to call for the resignation of the ING
were attacked with dangerous weapons under the Yaba-
Jibowu Bridge by the Boys for refusing to allow them turn
the peaceful but angry charge into a free-looting exercise.
As Abacha’s sneaky coup of November 17 drew a
curtain on the first act of the June 12 circus, the Area Boys also
rolled back into their traditional shell of living-by-smartness.
We shall encounter them in a more profound colour and shape in
the next act. However, we shall 32 attempt to assess the lessons
drawn by the new Junta from the by no means good showing of
the Boys in the first phase of the June 12 Struggle.
IV
One of the very first ‘sanitising’ acts of the Abacha-appointed
Military Administrator of Lagos State, Colonel Olagunsoye
Oyinlola, was not only to start ridding the streets of refuse and
garbage, but also to clear street traders and Area Boys from the
streets. On Saturday 26th March, 1994, shortly after Colonel
Oyinlola assumed office, seven Area Boys were put on display
before pressmen by officials of the State Task Force on
Environmental Sanitation after which they were sentenced to
varying jail terms without any legal aid of meaning. Their
shabbiness of appearance, resulting more from brutalisation by
the rifle-wielding Task Force troops than their vagrancy and
vagabondage, invariably served as enough evidence against
them before the presiding mobile magistrate who for
obvious reasons was always eager to dispense with the day’s job as soon
as possible.
In the following days, there would even be many more round-ups
and clamping in jail. It became even more intensified with the
opening of the second act of the June 12 circus mid-1994, which
we shall soon come back to.
Ordinarily, it would appear that the Area Boys’ clean-up
exercise was merely directed at stemming the menace of these
‘social miscreants’. And no wonder that middle class and
popular grassroots sentiments (particularly among the traders)
weighed heavily in favour of the anti-Area Boys action at its
commencement. It must, however, be said that behind the
pretence to sanitise was the determination of the Junta
to rob the popular democratic process of one of its major constituencies-
the unemployed youths.
33
For often times, those arrested as Area Boys
were jobless youths and apprentices in the
neighbourhoods who had nothing to do with drugs,
gold-fingering or toll collection, but nonetheless were always on
hand to lend their energy to every popular action against
the status quo that oppresses and alienates them. These are
the people mostly bundled to jail and not the Boys-lack of
identity card (by an unemployed!) is enough to brand him an
Area Boy and be carted to jail.
But just as the battle was indirectly aimed at the ordinary
unemployed youth so was it directed at the Area Boys proper.
The Area Boys that lent their weight to the democratic process,
turning it into riot, nonetheless also have some commitment to
the process to a large extent. Every Area Boy knows fully well that
the community thrives better under a civilian administration than under
the military. The military don’t need paid thugs, for they already
have officially paid ones in the form of soldiers and police, all
belonging to one party-the Establishment. It is the politicians
that need thugs to settle scores. And as many parties as there are
and as many factions and sub-faction as there are within each
party, as many brigades of tough hands must be mobilised, this
many bands of thugs must be constituted. The boys, therefore,
have a stake under civil rule as much as other classes of the
society. With what experience they had gained in the
gubernatorial primaries in 1991, stuffing N50 notes into loaves
of bread and swelling the voters ranks for a fee in the
Agbalajobi-Sarumi imbroglio and in all the previous numerous
ballot peddling exercises that muralled the expensive canvass
of IBB endless transition since the November 1987
Local Government elections and their antecedents in the 1983
kill-and-go Adewusi era and more remotely the pre-1966 coup
Wetie bloody circus-the Boys needed no intelligentsia to tell
them that a civilian government 34was needed badly.
Equally important is the ethnic factor. From afar it
would appear that the boys have no ethnic loyalty - that they
serve the highest bidder. But this cannot be entirely true. Many
of them are Yorubas displaced from their family houses by
‘foreign tenant’ mainly Igbo traders and fellow Yoruba from the
hinterland (Ara Oke). They hate the Ibos as much as the
Mallams (Northerners) and definitely prefer Baba to IBB. So
they must put all their energy into pushing out the Junta.
It must be said also that there are moments this special
group of marginals genuinely side with justice with no strings
attached. In moments of blatant police brutality against one of
their kind or a youth in the neighbourhood, they never failed to
show their solidarity through positive action - one of the very
few moments they ever organise independent action.
The brutal killing of the Dawodu brothers in 1987 in central
Lagos brought out the humanity in the Boys who held Lagos
Island for almost a week until the first move to do justice was
made by the authorities. After the January, 1992 killing of a
Danfo driver by a trigger-happy cop, the Boys were also handy
in effecting the drivers’ one week strike at Mushin where it
happened.
The Boys are therefore not merely trouble-making
miscreants, they are also human beings with hearts in their
breasts. Thus in moments, they break out of the sectarian
cocoon of the underworld to make themselves relevant to the
laws and norms of the outside world, so that it is not always to
be taken for granted that when the outside world moves against
the Boys through parliamentary legislations, council
edicts and military government decrees such are targeted at
the underworld. No! They may as well be targeted at the
already bleeding heart of the society - after all the Boys are a
product of the society, a part of its burden, just as they also carry
its shameful burdens for it. It 35
is not enough to hate the Boys, it
is more meaningful to know why the Boys must be hated and to
what depth this hatred must go so that the society, and more
importantly, the middle class and the oppressed masses do not
end up doing an emotional storm stropping job for the ruling
class where the stakes are not theirs parse. Anybody who wants
to properly handle the Boys must be ready to meet them in
their sober moments in the dungeon houses and back
alleys, perhaps with some wraps of fancy weeds for
enlivening the occasion. The secrets and mutual treachery
shared between the Boys and the Establishment would definitely
overwhelm him.
Meanwhile, let us once more direct our attention to the
practical, on the ground involvement of the Area Boys in the
June 12 struggle and how the (the Junta and its running dogs)
responded to them, as exemplified in the several battles of the
second act of the June 12 circus.
V
The Abacha regime exemplifies the most pervasive and unskilful
use of lies in the history of authoritarian statecraft in Africa.
However, its fate has also dramatised the futility of this
medium as a means of political and social engineering. Clearly,
social reality has left the grip of propagandists and has refused to be
obfuscated, misrepresented or subverted by even the most
degenerate fascist liars. Simply put, to want to convince a man
that he is a woman is about the most foolhardy lying expedition.
And it matters less if at the end of the day, at the bayonet point
or in the grey walls of the calaboose, you are able to get him to
agree he is a woman - the reality is not changed a bit. Indeed,
Abacha and his tribe of power seekers, both within Nigeria and
elsewhere in Africa, now and in the future, must always be
reminded that it wasn’t lies and the naked bayonet that sustained
Babangida for eight years in office. 36 Rather, it was synthesised
lies, embellished truth, cunning and garlanded bayonet that put a
hundred million people belonging to over 250 nationalities at the
mercy of a single man. Skilful machinations made a near all-
time successful cardsharper of IBB. One of the Abacha’s regime
greatest undoing remains the fact that he has failed to realise that
Chekwumerije’s propaganda did more to hasten IBB out of
office than giving him a lease of life.
The history of the second act of the June 12 Struggle, so
far as the junta controlled media and their apologists are
concerned, is that of lies-churning.
The Junta’s functionaries exposed themselves as
formidable czars of lies in the wake of the massive boycott of
elections into the Constitutional Conference conducted on May
23rd, 1994. In entire the South West and, indeed all over the
country, a dismal number, 300,000 voters out of a
registered electorate of over 14 million, turned our in an
exercise that marked the first major defeat in the second act of
the June 12 circus. Although it clearly paraded a bloodied nose,
the junta answered everybody that all was at ease. It would later
claim that the boycott and physical disruption of electoral
activities took place only in the South West.
Predictably, it narrowed down the events to that of timeless
tribe of culprits - Area Boys. While it would be out of the
question to deny that Boys readily participated in the disruption,
it remains to be seen how Area Boys alone could have been
responsible for a total boycott of elections if the people were
really willing to participate. But ‘we haven’t seen nothing yet’ as ghetto
people would say.
On the day of the Lawyers’ protest against the Junta, in
July 7, 1994, an innocent police driver was overpowered and
lynched by an irate mob along Igbosere Road on the
Lagos Island. This was in response to the killing by the
police the same day of a schoolboy37 by overzealous anti-
riot cops. Although the Area Boys visibly partook in the
vengeful killing of the policemen, it would, however,
amount to devaluing the patriotism that motivated the
social fury evinced by the civil populace of that part of the Island
on that day. In other words, the action drew a lot of people from
a host of backgrounds. To use the words of our source, the
people defined the mission, the Boys supplied the courage - it
was a mob action. Yet again the Junta ‘hasn’t seen nothing yet’.
On Monday July 26 when about 70 heavily
armed policemen tried to disrupt a peaceful protest of
youths and women numbering about 4000 at Sangrose Market on
the Lagos Island, Area Boys came handy in forcing the armed
junta dogs to beat a hasty retreat. The Boys had
suddenly appeared from their hideouts, encircled the police
contingent and cut off all possible escape routes. At the end of
the day, outnumbered and overwhelmed, the police had to pacify
the protesters and Area Boys. The Boys heeded but only after
seeking the consent of the women.
The pro-Junta media on these two occasions,
unable to ‘kill’ he event editorially, decided to play up the
Area Boys’ involvement. And true to type they must again
exhibit their trait-they must loot by rage and fire. On the day
following the Sangrose Market incidents, Area Boys went on a
looting spree - their excuse being to instil sense in those ‘penny
wise’ traders who felt they could open their shops without
deference to the June 12 Struggle. Their action invited the full
force of State fury, but also helped in no little way in
demonstrating the courage and resilience of the Boys. Their
mastery of neighbourhood routes and hideouts has always come
handy, giving them an edge over the police. Their sheer raw
confidence in the face of hissing bullets often drew many
more to their ranks, such that, in moments of real struggle,
to distinguish between the Area 38 Boys and an ordinary, socially
infuriated neighbourhood youth becomes difficult for an
outsider. Even the honest journalist not given to ‘risking’ it to the
scene of ‘ugly’ incidents is also susceptible to such difficulty.
And unfortunately enough, since media owners hardly
provide insurance cover for their workers and many
media workers lack creative adventurism, picking rumours from
the streets and formulating conclusions with the solace of whisky
glass become the most attractive options in such
circumstance. Significantly, within this context,
contrary to the Junta’s thinking, junk journalism or
ignorant half-a penny scribbling helps it far more than they help
the progressive movement. Against this background, the
journalist must be careful the way he uses the term Area Boys to
qualify sloppily dressed demonstrators lest he hurls the
proverbial stone into the marketplace. For most of
those people he encounters on the street and passes off
as Area Boys are, indeed, as educated as himself if not better
educated, not to use it to self if not better cultured, and more
responsibly placed in the society. Among them are
medical doctors and medical students, lawyers, Ph.D
holders, engineers, and composers of no mean abilities. They
are intellectuals with full understanding of the philosophical
basis of their actions, with well-conceived notions of strategy
and tactics as well as the likely consequences of such actions.
It is only circumstances that always compel them, in moments of
social upheaval, to discard their airs of middle-classhood and
don the tattered garb of the wretched of the earth. In short they
commit class suicide in the interest of the whole society. And in
so doing they invite the hatred of their class colleagues who have
not recognised the need for or are incapable of such suicide for
selfish reasons. Those who pretend to commit class suicide by
staying indoors or by cheering the protesters from behind the
‘safety’ of their window curtains
39 and balconies do as well as
those who actually come to the street if pass mark is all that is
needed. But to stay indoors only to come our later on the pages
of newspapers or some podium of Junta-backed rallies to
denounce the effort of the people as the handiwork of city vandals
alone is most indicative of slavery-as-a way-of-life. It does not get
anybody anywhere, especially anybody belonging to an
already decimated middle class. Sycophancy on the part of
the middle class is the taproot of blossoming fascism. So
far, so good.
VI
On Sunday, August 14, 1994, the Lagos State Governor,

Colonel Olagunsoye Oyinlola, suddenly appeared on television
to announce to the world that he was rounding up the Area Boys,
as they constitute a menace to the society and a danger to
themselves. This was three days before Abacha’s reckless
speech of August 17, which virtually imposed a state of
emergency on the South West, and the Lagos area in particular.
Nothing could be more satisfying to the Igbo traders just
recovering from their losses in the looting of the last
week of July and the first week of August. The propertied
class and the on looking middle class mob and conformists
also rejoiced. But this wasn’t the first time the
government would be showing interest in the life of the Area
Boys. Earlier in 1993, the People’s Bank had embarked on a
programme of rehabilitation of area boys and girls. Herded into
emergency hostels, trades were taught to them free-of-charge. Soft
loans, loans in kind and all sorts of empowerment schemes were said to be
available to them. Above all, they were counselled against drugs - all on
prime NTA Network time. What success was achieved in this is
there on the street for everybody to see.
40
On September 13, exactly a month after Col. Oyinlola’s
appearance, the Lagos State Command of the Nigerian Police
Force commenced Operation Clean Up Lagos. ‘Robber’s dens’,
gambling hideouts and places where drugs trade and use
flourished were claimed to be the prime target areas for routine
police raids. This was four clear weeks after Abacha’s declared
intention to silence all opposition by all the means at hand, even
the most crooked and base. By Friday, September 16, over 200
hundred boys had been bundled to the dungeon.
But who fools who? Must all the unemployed youths in
an area, who could not successfully dodge the police, be hauled
to the calaboose before the society controls armed robbery and
drug? Does it not amount to sheer dishonesty on the part of the
state to want to pretend that armed robbery is not sanctioned in a
way by the Establishment? And who told the police that they
could control drug use by merely hauling the Boys off the street?
Who told them that only the unemployed peddle and depend on
drugs?
The fact is that drugs abound everywhere like germs
(apology to Carat medicated soap). Evens in the police and
army barracks, and on our campuses. For instance, stories have
been told about rooms in the University of Lagos, Akoka
campus, where at least six out of eight occupants take
ganja. It is a known fact that some of their ladies
won’t go out with a non-drug user. So if the thing is about
drug control then belts must be tightened and more effort
geared towards training competent personnel of The Drug
Law Enforcement Agency and counsellors rather than truncheon-
brandishing, gun-trotting cops.
But the truth is clear as noonday: nobody is about
controlling drugs or armed robbery. The conception on the part
of the state that the June 12 Struggle drew considerable strength
from the involvement of 41 poor dispossessed youth, the
unemployed, semi-employed as well as the Area Boys proper
must necessarily have informed the renewed enthusiasm with
which the so-called anti-hoodlum campaign was carried out all
in the hope that by the time the ghost of June 12 once more
walked the streets, there would be no ‘plumaged redskins’ in the
form of the dispossessed and Boys to join the ‘ghost dance’.
This exactly is where they hit off the mark. June 12 is
not about performing a ghost dance, nor is June 12 a
revolution to preserve the class of the dispossessed. Nay,
it is a call to put an end to all dispossession, a call to protection
for the present day propertied class as well as the unpropertied
class on the basis of the most minimal, most basic rights of men
as universally recognised in contemporary time, as the first step
towards the actual and real emancipation of the Nigerian person
sooner or later. It either does this or put the entity asunder- so
far so good.
So far we have seen how Area Boys give
impetus to every people’s uprising by supplying raw
courage but also impact on it with their characteristic knack for
brigandage, looting and social opportunism, and how their intervention
serves the propaganda and military offensive purposes of the
State. It requires no deep thought, therefore, to see that this
social group-this class of miscreants (as the uniformed middle
class would prefer to call them) is not particularly indispensable
to a people’s struggle, but at the same time, must be carried
along if only in anticipation of its extinction. So that when the
time comes as when remnants of the old order begin to mobilise
opposition for the restoration of injustice and (dis)order, they are
deprived of that constituency of mercenaries who must live by
fire and rage and whose morality is limited by possibilities of
loot and the defence of the rule of that class or party on whose
platform the looting process is predicated. But on the
whole, only a genuine democratic 42 transformation of the
society can guarantee the emancipation of the Boys and the
destruction of the relations within them, on the one
hand and between them and the society on the other hand.
***
It is the tradition of the Area Boys to give their dead a befitting
burial with pomp and vengeful jigs so that the
heavenward journey is not made tortuous for lack of
money to pay the boat-man of purgatory. The Boys that passed
on during the June 12 Struggle were mostly deprived of this
singular ‘honour’ due to the particularly harsh circumstances of
those days. Our struggle owes it a duty to build a monument of
the eternity of their ‘heroism’, if only in anticipation of
the total emancipation of this undesirable class as well as
its total extinction.
March 14-April 18, 1995.
Lagos, Nigeria
43
KONGI’S MARCH FOR JUSTICE - REBEL LAUREATE
I
Enlightenment has always been the greatest enemy of the oppressing
classes and the enlightener their first target of assault. If the
English nobility had declared in the years of that Empires great
Revolution (a Revolution cited in that country’s book of
revolutionary history as glorious and regarded by feudal
chroniclers as an ‘aberration’ occasioning mutual
slaughter of Englishmen by Englishmen), that: “God
preserve us from scribblers and speakers. We will live to
regret the day the press was invented”, it is to the extent that
men of letters, when at the service of the people, are
sometimes more formidable than whole army divisions.
What with their ‘vulgar libels’, their screaming
headlines and ‘junks’ and their sneers at ‘corruption and political
debauchery’, those two enchanting mermaids that have always spiced
the peaceably purulent séance of those ‘incubuses’ that weigh
down on the living like dead weights and those ghosts that suck
out the memory of the living dead. The adage that the “pen is
mightier than the sword” is itself mightier than the few words of
which it is made. And nothing could be more mortifying to the
oppressor than to be a soldier with the barrel of the pen trained
on him by a bloody civilian in mufti. He must get his ‘military
respect and honour’ back at all costs (even at the risk of losing
his honour as a human being in the first place).
The situation becomes even worse for the bloodsucker
when the scribbler is not just another half-a-penny juggler or
famished radical who, realising that his revolutionary heaven on
earth is yet to come, now begins to court ‘settlement’. Nobel
prize-winning rebels are difficult to come by but are equally
‘dangerous too’. They become even more dangerous when they
decide to add political street-craft
44 to their trade, when they align
with the masses with their pens put aside, their leaflets-filled
jackets flying ruffian fashion and their ‘impudent’ lips
reeling and churning out ‘popular grammars’ in readiness
to summon the popular masses to a peaceful but defiant march
against the oppressor.
On Sunday, 24th July, 1994, Kongi marched for Justice;
on Sunday, July 24th, 1994 the Abacha Junta men of guns and
baton marched for injustice. We must begin from the beginning.
II
Several days before the D-day, newspapers had been splashing
the event on their pages. Professor Wole Soyinka was going to
lead a March for Justice as part of the events commemorating his
60th birthday. Other people would have cut a gargantuan cake, a
gangsters wedding affair-ala Graham Greene, but not my Kongi
People conversant with the way of the Junta in recent times
would have known that the march was not going to be, at least
not in the way it had been planned. Everybody knew the Junta in
its usual disgust for even the most harmless expression
of rebellion and defiance would stop this march - and if need
be drench it in blood. But they had come out all the same. Our
people, if not in the quest for freedom and justice but just to
catch a glimpse of the glittering mammy water skin of Kongi
and see the breeze waft that fluffy Martian grey
‘hirsute hell’ crowning his Nobel brain, turned out all the
same.
July 24th was a trial for the people and for the Junta.
Kongi came on time, the Junta was there before the H-hour but
our people came late. Some rather stayed away watching from
the safety of their balconies, windows and streets. With a few
guns and canister launchers trained on residence of
Tejuosho and passers-by, stern-faced troops displayed
few martial steps reminiscent45of those colonial steps-‘Yan
bi ologun’ romanticised and ridiculed by Kongi in his
famous play “ Death and the King’s Horseman” and the
arena was set. It was now Kongi and a few determined
loyalists against the full force of fascist fury. The men of the law
were also armed with their instructions ‘bery bery clear’ as
declared by their citrax-faced commander: Kongi must not
be allowed to march. He was therefore ‘adbised’
(advised, really) to go home so hoodlums would not hijack the
March.
It was a moment of trial; it was a moment of decision.
Should Kongi insist on marching ahead of a mob? Would the
mob allow him to march ahead of it with the gun trained on the
“mob” and not Kongi or should Kongi turn tail and declare
the play ended and risk newspaper banality and press ridicule.
Kongi insisted on marching. In his own judgement he was as free as any
Nigerian and could not be prevented from “taking a walk” with
his “friends” on the occasion of his birthday. But this
only after all attempts by him to blackmail the police with his status
as a Commander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and a Nobel
Laureate had failed. The police conceded to a march with
‘friends’. But such friends must exclude ruffians, rabbles and
even students - all potential materials for the topsy-turvy
characteristic of the July days must be kept at bay.
The rest is now history. The ubiquitous Western press
screamed: a protest march in support of June 12 mandate was
stopped in Lagos by the police. The local press went further to
tell how the Nobel Laureate was sandwiched between a
horde of 20 policemen on his March for Justice from the
Lagos Mainland to the Island and how he later threw away the
insignia proclaiming him ‘Commander of the Republic
of Nigeria’ in vexation over the state of the country and the
refusal of the men of the law to allow him a bottle of drink at the
Island Club after a day’s work. 46 But for the press hype that
followed and for Kongi’s reputation, it would have been a fair
enough judgement to say the Kongi-led March for
Justice was sufficiently managed to ridicule by the Junta.
And the argument has cropped up over and over
again in the recesses of ‘secretariats’ and ‘hideouts’ of
progressives whether or not Kongi had been right in demanding
his right to march with only “friends” and not the rest of the
mob?
But if one must say, the question is neither one nor the
other. The era under scrutiny called for neither of the two
variants of passive struggle save for the symbolism of it - which
the press hype had achieved. An attempt to lead a mass protest
stopped by the fascist is as good as a successfully executed
protest march in the eyes of the world- so long as a Nobel
Laureate of Soyinka’s calibre occupies the center stage. Kongi
could not have performed better than he displayed on the 24th of
July without spoiling the show. And at the same time Kongi,
given some other objective realities, could have performed
better. When the agenda of a people’s struggle has gone beyond
the level of petitions and stone-throwing, but they are yet to
grapple with methodological imperatives commensurate with
these higher goals, the struggle must either continue to
march, petition and rigmarole on a spot like in a circus or
pull the mask of orgy of comedy from its face and drink in the
full glare of shame. The former signifies hope and determination
of a sort; the latter could reflect either a higher courage
or an early capitulation, borne of lack of courage at all. The
former is easier to place; the latter is dual in character.
Kongi has never been a soul deprived of courage - to
hold a region as big as France to ransom at gunpoint in the
name of justice is not a mark of cowardice. July 24th
was never an indictment of Kongi but rather an indictment
47
of our struggle and our nation. To this we shall return at the
appropriate time and place.
If in recapturing of radical traditions of the 60s
America in his remarkable work, “Last Best Hope” ( Peter)
Tauber had written “Demonstrations had run the course of
audience tolerance; it would take greater circuses to move the
populace” (pp.612) this is even truer for the July days in Nigeria.
But if demonstrations would not move the populace, same could
not be said of the bloodsuckers. A regime that would not
hesitate to drench a nation’s honour in the muck by setting
soldiers against defenceless citizens as Abacha did on July 6 and
7, 1993 and by sneaking to power under the cover of darkness
and under sweet pretences as he did on November 17, 1993,
could hardly be trusted to treat another peaceful march of the
same people with kid’s glove-notwithstanding the
presence of a Nobel Laureate. Demonstrations are
more than enough to set the fascist running dogs
cracking. And have we not long since been brought face to face
with this truth? Has it not come to pass how only four days after
Kongi’s March, July 28th, a peaceful protest at the venue of the
Junta’s trial of the winner of the June 12 mandate at Abuja was
drenched in blood leaving at least four people dead, how shortly
after the Junta’s ‘Enough is enough’ fascist speech, Benin and
Ekpoma universities were turned into some rowdy
shooting ranges with the students as targets, and how the regime
has stepped up its campaign of intimidation and violence against
activists and progressives? What else does such a regime require
than that force that would shoot it out of office? The struggle in
the July days demanded more than just marches and protests.
Treason against the existing state, treason, not by mere
declaration as Basorun Abiola did, but an active treason aimed at
destroying and reconstituting the state to reflect the desire of the
people was what the time demanded.
48
III
July 24th, 1994 was not the only novelty Kongi introduced to the
June 12 ‘circus’ to the utter disappointment of a
number of his young admirers. Saturday September 18,
1993, a peaceful rally jointly organised by the Lagos Mainland
branch of the Campaign for Democracy, CD, and Mainland
Progressive Youth Movement, MPYM, came under police
battering. It was at the Evans Square, Ebute Metta, Lagos. The
youths of the neighbourhood gave it back to the police and the
whole neighbourhood became one big arena of running battle
(hide-and-seek and game of wits between the people and fascist
running dogs). Residential buildings in the area were turned into
fortresses and strongholds by the youths from which they
skilfully stone-picked policemen. The ‘dogs’ dared not penetrate
the people’s castle and the people dared not walk the streets, for
both parties were unrelently vigilant. Each party held its own.
Then the spectacle changed. Youths came out of their
fortresses, on guard no doubt but not attacking. The running dogs
stopped prowling, astounded and thankful for the momentary
cessation of the attrition. In the arena, just disembarked from his
Peugeot 505 Saloon car, was Kongi like a god out of the sea,
fluffy-haired, polish-skinned. For a short while, there was peace
spiced with an exaggerated sense of victory on the part of the
rebelling youths.
Kongi’s appearance was no accident; he had been billed
to speak at the rally. And when he had appeared, the
militant youths on ground had expected him to begin his
speech outrightly, using his intellectual charm and unbeatable
grammar to force the police to concede to an ‘illegal
gathering’ against ‘bery, bery clear instructions’ from
Headquarters.
49
The disappointment on the young rebellious faces
around Kongi could best be imagined when he pointed out that
having made the point in the first place by starting the rally at all, the
people should avoid confrontation with the fascist killer squads and
disperse or find a cool enclosure within which to hold
discussions and reflect. Under pressure from the youths,
Soyinka’s attempt to seek out and speak with the commander of
the squad came to naught. And it is on record that at the end of
the day, it wasn’t Kongi’s advice that eventually dispersed the
people but the burning teargas and crashing truncheon. The
Nobel Laureate also inhaled quite a dose of the poisonous gas.
Perhaps if the people had accepted Kongi’s elderly word?
By sundown, 21 youths were in the police dungeon
gaping at the grey walls. Kongi’s attempt to put aside his
Rebel laureate garb for Nobel Laureate gown for the
sake of the youths came to nothing - the police denied
holding anybody.
What other lesson can we learn from September 18th
than that running dogs know not what it means to be a Nobel
Laureate; that running dogs deserve none other than dog
treatment.
When the running dog is confronted with the
spellbinding aura of the intellectual, the ease with
which he reels out ‘big grammar’ and his demonstrated
understanding of the secrets and logic of that law which the
running dog claims to protect, he is taken aback. The running
dog cringes, shivers, then simmers to a sudden realisation that
not only must he necessarily carry out his ‘bery, bery clear
instructions’ but must also defend his person against the
oppressive air of the intellectual. Such defence would
definitely not come in the form of intellect or logic in which the
opponent is most learned. It must come by brute force. But even
50
at that, each blow of this attack comes with such half-
heartedness that bespeaks an acute inferiority complex.
The dilemma of the running dog becomes even more
compounded when he sees the ‘Professor’ in the midst of
ruffians and Area Boys haranguing the ‘breakers of law and
order’ to ‘bloody rebellion’; when his intellect and logic could
not dissuade him from associating with street urchins
and trouble makers. And soon, in the eyes of the running dog,
the Professor becomes the greatest problem -the Chief Area Boy
who must be dealt with according to the law, but with some
dignity. He must receive the gas, but only enough to make him
clear from the scene of trouble. He must see the
truncheon crashing, but only to the extent that it does not yet
draw more than a few splashes of blood here and there. He may
even be hustled into a station but only to the extent that such is
defined as a ‘protective custody’. And when he is finally taken
away from the scene of trouble it is to clear the shooting range
for easy target practice.
The Professor is not only a problem to the
running dog because he harangued the trouble makers or
because he sometimes pretends to play the role of troubleshooter,
but also because he obstructs his targets and bears a poetic
witness to his atrocities, magnifying them in the imagination of
the world with such linguistic flourish as to move even the Rock
of Gibraltar.
And what is more, with a background spiced with a rich
crop of mythical images of gods and supermen, fetish and
omnipotent deities, the running dog could hardly comprehend
the origin of the Professor’s enchanting erudition save by some
celestial power. For if the Quran had been revealed to
Mohammed in some fast and prayer-inspired trance and it had
taken forty nights of communing with God on the mountain for the Ten
Commandments to be revealed51 to Holy Moses, who else would
say some gnomes in the Mountain of Ascension at Ife or some
mermaids in the River Osun had not inspired the Professor’s
condensed metaphors.
This is what the intellectual must count on, but only to
buy time and impose some sanity on the rowdiness
characteristic of all encounters between an embittered
people and fascist running dogs. For the running dog is
nothing but a dog. His universe in the final analysis is
not the spellbinding rhetoric and aura of enigma in which the
intellectual is encapsulated but his ‘bery, bery clear
instructions’. Those instructions are his daily bread, his
freedom, his future, and the future of his children, of
his wife. In short, the instructions mean the difference
between life and death. Not to carry out his instructions is to put
himself between the jaws of the lion - the instructor. He, must
therefore recoil from whatever spellbinding rhetoric the
intellectual presence has cast upon him and carry out his
instruction. And this he must do with exaggerated zeal and
diligence. For those few words of compliment and those soothing pats
on his sore, weather-beaten back from the immediate
instructor count so much to him. And the
recommendations and pips.
This, the intellectual must count on to cast his spell,
which he must also do in good time except there are some higher
points to be made. Kongi was not prepared for those higher
points on July 24th 1994, just as he was not prepared for same on
September 18, 1993.
But July 24 was a success so long as the objectives were
gotten correctly in the first place. Kongi marched in Lagos and
cast a spell on a few running dogs while Lagos sprawled
unhindered, but the same march cast a spell on the whole of
civilised world, a debilitating foreign relations blow.
52
***
In the dying days of the earlier Junta, the Association of Nigerian
Authors, (ANA) had honoured Nigeria’s sole Nobel
Laureate with a befitting award- “A Triple Heritage
Award”. And so Kongi was at the Museum Kitchen in the midst
of poets and storytellers representative largely of the younger but
already frustrated (not wasted yet) generation.
Here again, as usual, poetry and politics found
harmony. In Kongi’s opinion the unilateral cancellation
of the presidential elections’ primaries by the IBB junta
was nothing but “dictatorial, undemocratic”, nay,” fascistic.”
He searched but could find no ‘lavender’ word for it. Evident
from the ‘tortuous, convoluted, circuitous’ nature of the Junta’s
transition programme, it was clear that it would not leave unless
pushed out of office by the people.
And what was more: that if the Junta would not allow
people to meet and discuss at home we would “go to Republic of
Benin and hold our discussion.” So it was that Kongi in a
brief moment, like a prophet, prepared the young minds
before him for the tasks ahead in the coming year. Kongi left the
kitchen like all else in a sober mood - so near to feast but without
a feast.
In the third month of the year prophesied by Kongi as
the year of intensified struggle, letters on Africa Democratic
League (ADL) letter-headed papers and signed by Kongi himself
went out to groups, etc., inviting them to a conference on the
theme: Consolidating Democracy, to be held in Cotonou, Benin
Republic come August. Then there was June 12 and its products.
Kongi again had to hurry another missive to his democratic
colleagues in Nigeria regretting the inability of the League to go
ahead with the democracy workshop as scheduled and urging
them to use any means within their power to prevail on the Junta
to handover to the winner of53 the June 12 elections. After all,
even meetings abroad could also become difficult. Meanwhile,
the dynamics of the struggle later made meetings at home
inevitable and people found the means to meet and
discuss, and even brought their meetings to the street in the full
glare of the Junta, albeit with some painful losses. At any
opportune moment Kongi had joined these meetings - objective
reality teaches after all. Let us say sixty poetic cheers to
Kongi at sixty and wish him many selfless, novel
contributions to our struggle. Even with airport harassment,
hovering choppers and ‘portrait hunting expeditions’, Soyinka shall
outlive our ‘last dictator’.
***
A critique of Soyinka’s novel contributions to the June
12 struggle as exemplified by the July 24th event cannot in
anyway be complete without due tribute to one man who has
equally contributed in no little measure to the struggle for a
better Nigeria. He was a hardworking man, a disciplinarian, an
educationist and over and above all, a man of principle
- honest in a society where to be honest is to be out of the
ordinary, where to uphold one’s honour and dignity is to stand
for poverty and tribulations.
Tai Solarin took time off convalescence to speak with
the people at Evans Square on September 18, 1993.
However, the police honoured his presence with some
show of fascist bestiality - but he even tually spoke to
them that had come to listen.
On July 24, 1994, himself and his wife, Sheila, were also
with Soyinka at Tejuosho. Uncle Tai insisted he was going to
march and he did march, not alone, but with friends - more than
Kongi was allowed, perhaps on account of his age.
“Talo so pe ao ni baba? Kai ani baba. Tai Solarin baba
wa kai ani baba”. Three days later on Wednesday 27th July,
1994, Baba Tai Solarin passed 54 away in active service to the
nation and mankind. And according to his will, he was buried on
a piece of the farmland at Mayflower School, Ikenne, which he
founded 40 years ago. He wore his inevitable khaki shirt and
shorts on this last journey home - to mix and mingle with the
elements and as such with nature. Even in death he clung to his
principle. Indeed, it must be said that men like him are not like
‘pieces of cloth on the market square’. They are hard to come
by.
4-8th December, 1994

Lagos, Nigeria.
55
ON THE NUPENG STRIKE
I
Those who claim that oil is the basis of Nigeria’s unity are
indeed more than mere enunciators of what appears like
the absolute truth. Oil -petroleum- confined to a small
corner of the geographical entity known as Nigeria is indeed the
lifeblood of the nation. This is true not only in the sense that it
constitutes more than 90% of the nation’s source of foreign
exchange but also that the sections of the country that control
this oil are exactly those outside the geographical limit of
the oil sources, and are expectedly dependent on it for the
running of their comparatively advanced economic life. He who
controls the oil and all the activities associated with it controls
the nation. He who holds sway in the oil sector, either for the
progress of the oil industry or for its temporary disablement,
controls the economic life of the nation. In the hands of an
oppressive regime, the oil becomes a source of financing
reckless economic spending, life of debauchery and corruption
as well as mean of sustenance of the instrument of repression of
the people. In the hands of the opposition, to hold the oil
industry and hold it firmly is to have sounded the death knell of
the ruling clique.
The NUPENG pro-June 12 strike, commenced on
July 4, 1994 with overwhelming enthusiasm and hope, and
ended on August 17 unceremoniously, has more than
demonstrated this. And what is more, than that a whole array of
even more salient points has been thrust out from the dark
chambers of our collective national tragedy of absurdity to the
full glare of dispassionate, naked self-criticism. The potency of
labour strikes, strike in the oil industry, political strikes, the June
12 errors of strategy, the gulf between rhetoric and action, the
relationship between the leader 56 and the led, the dichotomy
between sentiment and clear philosophical (ideological)
commitment and many more are issues on which lessons must be
learnt.
We must, as usual, always endeavour to begin from the
beginning without boring the reader with unnecessary
details. For this is not a mere chronological record of the
events of that time but, rather, an attempt to locate the chronicle
itself in our social consciousness.
The much awaited but hurried declaration of government
by Basorun M. K. O. Abiola on Saturday June 11, 1994 in one
remote corner of Lagos was predicated on certain assumptions.
Among these, we must count first the readiness of the labour
unions to embark on political strike, the mobilisation of the
people for civil disobedience by pro-democracy and human
rights bodies, the winning over of the mass of the
soldiers and officers of the Nigerian Army to the side of June
12 and the realisation by Abacha and his cohorts that the most
honourable thing to do would be to handover peacefully to the
winner of the June 12 elections. History has proven these to be
none but fatal assumptions. We have seen how the July 13 civil
disobedience was checkmated in the street, how those officers
and men of the Nigerian Army exhibited their patriotism over
bottles of beer and pepper soup plates in the mammy market
rather than spill their entrails on the altar of nationhood,
how the police, destined to aid rather than harass the
people, had at the last minute reckoned only with wither their
daily bread flowed. And have we not also seen the dilly-dally of
the labour movement, the struggle to adjunct the pro-June 12
demands to some more immediate economic demands on the
part of the worker? And has it not come to pass how,
disillusioned and desperate for a new comedy to the circus, the
Basorun had come out of hiding on June 22, was arrested in the
small hours of June 23rd and 57 hauled off to the calaboose to the
dismay and disillusionment of our helpless and hopeless masses?
For what was June 12 if not the hope of the hopeless and heart of
the heartless. June 23 did not put the Basorun in jail. What
was imprisoned was a people’s collective willingness to
put an end to three decades of misrule and despotism. The ability
of the people to break out of this prison would determine
whether or not their fate is once and for all settled.
But it turned out also that June 23 was another fatal
assumption. All labour unions that had earlier threatened heaven
and hell if the Basorun was ever harassed much less arrested by
the Junta kept mum. All politicians who had tried to make the
corpse of democratic institutions disbanded in the wake of the
November 17, 1993 Abacha coup walk the streets again,
Zombie-fashion, had either been spirited to the calaboose or had
scampered for cover; the students movement was in disarray; the
pro-democracy bodies had not yet recovered from the
paralysis and mass impotence of the days immediately
following the declaration. This done, it would only have required
a self-deluded simpleton not to see that an early death had been
pronounced on the second act of the June 12 circus. Now the June 12
opposition must prepare itself for the post-defeat ridicule accruing to
every defeated opposition irrespective of the loftiness of ideas
professed.
Then came NUPENG. July 4 not only rekindled the hope
of the hopeless but also practically shook the Junta to its
foundation. The gains of popular struggle in those July days
were doubtlessly gains predicated upon the foundation
laid by the NUPENG strike.
For the purpose of this discourse we shall
recognise three [3] periods in the NUPENG strike, each
differing in its purpose, intensity and the enthusiasm that greeted
it and as such in the mass psychology of the time. The first
period spanned the period58 of preparation for the strike
before July 4 and the early days of the strike ending with the
‘arrest’ of NUPENG General Secretary, Comrade Frank Ovie
Kokori, the second period embraced the period of Kokori’s
‘incarceration’ ending on July 23rd. The third and the last period
enompased the period from July 23rd to the time of the official
breaking of the strike.
[i] Preparation and Pronouncement of the Strike

As earlier mentioned, this was a period when the hope
of the hopeless was rekindled. But at the same time a period of
doubt. The days before July 4 had seen the NUPENG leadership
mobilising its members at all levels for the strike. The fact that
the strike was meant to be a political strike aimed at achieving
the objectives of June 12 did not prevent the NUPENG
leadership - good tacticians that they were - from introducing all
kinds of mobilisational subterfuges. For the oil workers the
actualisation of June 12 would be meaningless without the
amelioration of their economic hardships. The struggle for wage
review by the tanker drivers must be joined with the June 12
agenda, a place must be created on the June 12 platform for the
struggle against mass retrenchment, the question of
condition of service and the danger of total collapse looming
over the oil industry - all these must find expression in the
mobilisational slogans of the June 12 Struggle. And they did.
But it must be said that these points were never
raised to the position of dominance over the substantive issue.
As Chief Kokori himself would later articulate on the Voice of
America [VOA] on the eve of the strike “NUPENG wont go
back until June 12 is met, because military rule has paralysed the
economy, and the Constitutional Conference cannot solve the
problem.”
For those who had seen the effect of NUPENG
involvement in NLC strike in591993 during the first act of the
June 12 Struggle there was definitely no doubt as to what
NUPENG was capable of doing. And there was no doubt as to
the panicky, last minute fire brigade attempt of the Junta to
‘settle’ the NUPENG leadership against commencing the strike.
This also informed the attempt by the government,
when persuasion, settlement and threat had failed, to resort to
disparaging connotations and defamation of character. Rumour
mongers went to town - the NUPENG leaders had taken millions
of Naira from Abiola to prosecute a political strike against all
labour ethics; the NUPENG leaders were using their union to
further ethnic agenda; the strike was an attempt to make people
suffer unnecessarily; etc.
Indeed, sycophancy is the cheapest of trades and
sycophants must abound in every immature ‘political zoo’.
Abacha set to work with his own agents within the first few days
among the so-called Northern NUPENG - a rebel faction had
emerged. It only required the NTA to orchestrate this, air some
protracted, well -rehearsed press interviews and the deal was
done. We have seen how far this went in breaking the spirit of
the oil workers, how far it went in detracting from the fact that it
is not the desire of any NUPENG in the Sahel or Guinea
Savannah that would determine the impact of the strike but
the determination of the workers involved in refining and
pumping the fuel at the source down south.
July 4 was a nightmare for the Junta, though the strike
got off to a faltering start with a number of rebel factions either
claiming that the strike was superfluous, given that the Nigeria
Association of Road Transport Owners [NARTO] had agreed to
new wage agreement, or others obeying some inexplicable
authorities beyond their comprehension, thereby withdrawing
from the action without actually knowing why. By Wednesday, July 6
NUPENG was already in a position to tell the world that the
union had survived the initial 60 opposition experienced on
Monday and was determined to sustain the strike. The
same day soldiers were deployed to depots, as members of
Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria
[PEGASSAN] warm up to join the action. It was also at this time
the Nigeria Labour Congress [NLC] made a shamefaced
statement of its readiness to join the strike if the June 12 crisis
persisted. On the night of the same day the State Security Service
[SSS] suddenly woke up to the realisation that it must
immediately move in to cut the wings of NUPENG by
incarcerating its leaders. Chief Kokori narrowly escaped their
midnight call, disappearing from public view. Thus
began the era of confusion in government circle. By now,
social and economic life in the country had started grinding to a
halt.
The fire brigade attempts to create emergency fuel
outlets did not help, fuel depots continued to grow by the hour -
it was a dress rehearsal for the situation that would become the
order of the day in the months to come. As news of Kokori’s
disappearance filtered out to the outside world, the mood of the
strikers, their sympathisers, the masses and the government
automatically changed. The struggle had entered a new more qualitative
stage.
[ii] The Period of Kokori’s Purported Arrest

This was also a period the effect of the strike intensified and
general panic gripped the government. On July 9, a
statement from Kokori’s family expressed anxiety over his
continued detention, the NLC gave 12 days ultimatum to the
government to release Chief Kokori or face a nation-wide strike,
just as PENGASSAN gave July 12 date for the commencement
of its own action. By July 10th the Delta State NUPENG, earlier
reported to be against the strike, achieved a hundred percent
61
action in their zone and on July 11 the Warri plant oil depots
were shut as more local unions joined the action.
The government was in a double crisis - one was politico-
economic, namely the economic hardship and social confusion
occasioned by the intensifying strike and the other a moral crisis,
as it could not explain the whereabout of Chief Kokori and
different arms of the state’s instruments of repression began to
suspect each other of being responsible for the arrest. In fact, in
their lousy manner, some government bureaucrats even
had occasion to defend the ‘arrest’. Never before had the State
so doubted itself. Meanwhile the strike continued to bite.
For the NUPENG and their sympathisers the ‘arrest’
now became not only a weapon for mobilisation of sentiment in support of
its demands and highlighting the high handedness of the state
and its disrespect for the peoples fundamental rights, it also
became in itself the source of a new demand -a kind of ransom -
Kokori must be released before any negotiation.
By Monday July 12 when PENGASSAN commenced its
strike, a clear week after NUPENG commenced its own, the
beleaguered regime had become tempered and was now ready
for negotiation. All sectors of the economy were already
groaning under the weight of the strike, NEPA was in trouble
running its gas powered plants, banks had to prune operations, streets
around petrol stations had become parking lots -
negotiation! negotiation! negotiation!.
But what would be the content of the negotiation. The
transport Minister Retired Brigadier Sam Ogbemudia was deemed the best
candidate for the tough job, being a veteran of several military
juntas and a short-lived civilian junta. Expectedly
PENGASSAN and NUPENG refused the negotiation
offer. They equally indicted the NLC of double agency. For the
NUPENG any negotiation must be predicated upon Kokori’s
release or else... That was July62 14. In the following days four oil
terminals would be shut thus cutting export of crude oil
drastically.
In the case of PENGASSAN the government was
further put in dilemma as a result of the myriad nature of their
demands which summed up a whole lot of ills in the oil industry
and the Nigerian society at large, now using the June 12 issue as
a string to tie these together into an ant-ridden faggot for the
regime to carry on its survival trek. As articulated by Chief M.A
Dabibi, General Secretary of PENGASSAN in a newspaper interview
[Guardian, Monday July 11, 1994, pp.11]:
“…the military government has devastated and
abandoned the oil sector, the backbone of the nation’s
economy. Greed, graft and crass corruption have rendered the
government unable to meet its own share of the operating cost to
its joint venture partners [in the oil sector]. Consequently,
thousands of our members have lost their jobs over the last one
year with no hope of securing new ones.”
The union gave the government ultimatum to pay the owed
partners. This was indeed an impossible demand, especially
when dropped on the lap of a regime peopled by a gluttonous
pack of hounds who, like the proverbial leaky purse, only takes
in money without fattening up. And PENGASSAN knew this.
It was now clear that the oil workers had some other
things in view, reason why they kept evading negotiation on the
strike. There was equally no doubt as to their realisation of the
fact that their strike alone would not completely break the regime.
What indeed NUPENG had counted upon was sympathy strike on
the part of other unions [not the NLC per se]. In the early days
of the strike many unions had threatened to join it. As at the end
of the first week not less than 18 industrial unions had indicated
such. But we have seen how these strikes never got beyond the
pages of newspapers - paper tiger unions that they were, and how
those that took off had been63largely opportunistic moves
calculated to ride on the back of NUPENG for gaining
selfish concessions from the employer [see the 40 Hours Strike].
Except few unions, among them, the Lagos Taxi Drivers
Association, the Airport unions, the Iron and Steel Senior Staff
Association [ISSSAN], and a couple of others, all the
strikers of those days were double-tongued opportunists,
and one way or the other played into the hands of the regime.
Their inertia assisted the Junta’s recovery and eventual
clampdown.
Towards the end of the third week of the strike, at the
time the oil workers/government negotiation ran into a deadlock
as a result of disagreement on procedural issues and lingering
uncertainty over Kokori’s whereabouts, the Lagos NLC was
celebrating its successful negotiation and asking its
members to go back to work having won concessions for them
in the form of allowances and welfare packages that would
ameliorate the impact of the strike - [opportunism of the basest
order no doubt]. That was July 22. It must be said, however,
that whereas the labour unions had blatantly betrayed
the oil workers and the peoples’ struggle for genuine
democracy - the same thing cannot be said of the pro-democracy
organisations as represented by CD and NADECO. The role
played by these two bodies in facilitating and
coordinating the oil workers action with the general pro-
democratic agenda must be mentioned, if only for historical
reasons.
It also has to be pointed out that the intensification of the
strike and the worsened socio-economic conditions it occasioned
was rendered more relevant to the process. The mass anger and
fury in those July days- the violent resistance and civil
disobedience that spattered the second period of the oil workers
strike and which became intensified in the latter period were
catalysed by the preceding 64 strike itself. The use of
delay tactics and subterfuge to evade negotiation and
prolong the strike played a most revolutionary role in
advancing the course of June 12.
It was little surprising therefore that the regime,
apparently incompetent and un-coordinated, gleefully
breathed with relief when Chief Kokori appeared to the
world hale and hearty on Saturday July 23rd, 1994
ushering in the last period of the NUPENG strike according to
our own delineation.
[iii] The Appearance and Aftermath

Kokori appeared on July 23rd to tell the world that his disappearance was
nothing more than a prank aimed at putting the Junta in bad
light. In his words “I was in a place without coming out. You see
how the government was in a mess. They said they were experts
in propaganda we said okay if it is propaganda we will give it to
them. They met their match in NUPENG”.
And if anybody had thought, as indeed the government
had done that Kokori was coming out to negotiate an end to the
strike it was a wrong assumption. For at the press conference officially
announcing his appearance NUPENG reiterated its commitment to
the strike until all its demands were met. This posture
NUPENG and PENGASSAN would maintain till the
junta regained the strength to bring the circus to a close.
The first few days following the reappearance and
declaration of willingness to continue with the action occasioned
renewed enthusiasm among the people to continue the struggle.
But as days went by it became clear that the strike would likely
peter out on its own. The third period was characterised by an
initial intensification of the effect of the strike and increased civil
disobedience as Chief M. K. O. Abiola continued to be brought
to court without his release or bail up to the NLC 40-Hour Strike
which, though calculated 65 to save face and negotiate a
watered-down concession, actually brought the nation to a
standstill within its short span. From the end of the 40-Hour
Strike the people had already gotten used to the hardships, the
government had succeeded to a considerable degree in getting
independent outlets for supply of petroleum products in
such quantity as to ameliorate the hardship considerably, and
the rank of individual tanker drivers compelled by economic
hardships to break the strike had grown considerably while many more
continued to pressurise the leadership for a rethink or at least a
suspension of action. The third period is therefore that of
decline in terms of the popularity of the action as well as
the capability of the workers to go on with the strike. This
explains also why in the last week of the strike the regime did
not appear to be too keen on negotiation. The August 17
speech by Abacha which declared the executive councils of
the NUPENG, PENGASSAN, and NLC dissolved in the
interest of the nation was a hollow ritual. It is like a dwarf
hacking at the remains of an already fatally wounded giant and
claiming to be itself a giant by virtue of its action.
The third period of the oil workers strike actually came
to a close before Abacha made his speech. All the
farcical rehash called popular support and the calls by this
band of popular supporters for the trial of
NUPENG/PENGASSAN leaders in the days following
August 17 were actually insignificant to the breaking of that
strike, for the strike had already broken long before then. Such farcical
displays could only make meaning if understood as part of the dress
rehearsals for the consignment of NUPENG and PENGASSAN
leaders to the calaboose in one moment of vengeful fascist fury.
The part II of this essay will address some specific
tactical issues as well as matters of principle concerning the oil
workers strike.
66
II
That the oil workers made a good showing of

themselves during their pro-June 12 political strike is no
longer a matter for debate. Nor is it even to be of any service to
them and the struggle in general to start singing their praises.
What such time as this requires is to objectively
scrutinise the objections raised by the opposition in
power against the strike in their unrelenting attempts to
disparage the people’s contribution and also to point out areas of
shortcoming in the way and manner the strike was conducted - that is, the
limitations inherent in the strategy and tactics of the oil workers.
Exhortation has outlived its purpose, for the play is
ended and the good and bad actors alike, confined for the time being to the
fatiguing greyness of the dressing chamber must ruminate on their
roles. Bad plays indeed offer more materials for improved scripts
than acclaimed performances. The argument raised by
Abacha and his cohorts, both dubiously and ignorantly,
that political strikes went beyond the bound of trade
unionism has been dealt with elsewhere [see the NLC 40-
Hour Strike]. We are therefore more interested in the specific
limitations of political strike from the standpoint of the wielders of
the weapon. The strike-derailing role played by all the treacherous trade
unions that mouthed their supports for the NUPENG action but
could not transform their verbal buckshots into cannonades
cannot be underestimated. But the question must be asked that
even if they had joined the strike, would the Junta have
collapsed? And also that was it even right to have thought they
would join the strike?
The fact exactly is that in those days no amount of strike
and civil disobedience could have sent Abacha packing
because he was still in control of all the organs of the State,
to which there were no alternatives.
67 History has never known
strikes not backed up by rebellion from within the rank of the
State or an assault from without leading to the overthrow of an
incumbent power. Political strike, whenever the question of
political power is at stake, is only a part of the weapon but not
essentially the entire weapon itself. If indeed Abacha had
ran away because of mere strikes without dissent in his
own apparatus he would have gone down in history not only as a
most lily-livered tyrant but also a deplorable fool - a disgrace to
the institution of statehood.
All this is being said taking into cognisance the
fact that the June 12 opposition must also have counted
on dissention in the military rank induced by degeneration
in social condition as a result of the strike. But this in itself is a
naive assumption - a question of once beaten twice shy. For this
was exactly what happened in 1993 during the first act of the
June 12 drama. And we have seen how it ended, we have seen
how it took away power from the hands of a more refined fascist
(a machiavellian) and gave it to an uncouth primate instead of
actualising June 12. The fact is that history has never failed to
lump impotence with illusions. Political impotence is the mother
of believe in some imminent political miracles. Once this is
established, it is of little significance whether or not the political
eunuch realises his infertile state. The June 12 struggle suffered
much infertility. Its frigidity is not limited to its instrument of
manhood alone, but also its porcupined skin and insensitive lips.
On the question of betrayal of NUPENG and
PENGASSAN by the NLC one must really be interested in some
meaningless (un) intellectual discourse to carry this too far, for
the history of the NLC prior to the event has been that of
treachery and strike-breaking-it raises the hope of the people,
then enters into some secret mutually benefiting agreements with
the regime and comes out fire brigade-fashion with water hose to
douse the fire of the hope. It did 68 it several time before the first
act of June 12 circus and it did it even many more times during
the circus. After all, minimal opposition is the surest means of
ensuring that the name of an opposition power features in the
payroll of a fascist order. Thus far with the question of political
strike.
The argument by Abacha and his Northern NUPENG
that Kokori and his people were prosecuting an ethnic agenda, an
argument later to be raved with foaming mouth in the post-
August 17 days by the Abacha Popular Support Party, is one
deserving of particular attention. To start with, the June 12
Struggle is a national struggle so far as the mandate being
defended is a national mandate. It does not matter if in breaking
down this mandate to its constituent parts it is discovered that a
particular ethnic group, tribe, clan or collection of sub-tribal
communes have no share in it. A mandate is national under the
present dispensation so far it is a mandate backed up by the
majority. For if the minority denies the national essence of
democratic will of an overwhelming majority one thing and only
one thing alone can be rightly concluded: that the nation
itself is due for a break-up or that an Oligarchic rule of
the minority is being instituted. Nigeria, it must be said, is torn
between these two extremes. The final resolution of
this is the historical duty of June 12.
Still on the nationalness of the mandate. In
defending such a mandate as expressed in June 12 it does not
matter whether or not some elements that voluntarily voted for
this mandate with their thumb prints now see reason to back out.
The mandate remains national still. One other thing that has to
be pointed out without fear of contradiction is the fact
that nationality struggle is legitimate. In fact, it even
becomes a duty when nationality oppression and
discrimination reaches a frightening level such as we presently
have in Nigeria. The attempt69to always cringe back to their
hovels whenever progressives are accused of prosecuting
nationality struggle plays into the hands of the opposition in
power. There is no fetish about the country Nigeria. To
continue to insist that the unity of the country and the survival of
its people are paramount is to also persistently bear in mind that
equality of opportunities must be ensured to all the peoples of
the nationalities constituting the nation. To place unity
before the fulfillment and attainment of meaningful existence
is to be guilty of establishing an imperial order. If John F.
Kennedy had admonished his people to “ask not what your
country can do for you but what you can do for your country” it
was to the extent that he recognised that every citizen of the
country, being a part of that country is also doing something for
himself as well as for others who in turn reciprocate, resulting in
a sort of balance. In short, at the end of the day the society
contributes something meaningful to the life of the individual.
It is only right therefore that those members of
NUPENG from the oil producing areas, seeing the
devastation of their communities as a result of oil prospecting,
the destruction of their environment, poisoning of their lives, the
destruction of their culture, the devastation of their ancestral
cradle all in the name of Black Gold, should rise up and take the
challenge to fight for a meaningful existence. They are right in
feeling more aggrieved against the Junta than any other people.
For them the June 12 Struggle represents a step forward, for it
would afford them the ground of bargain as equals. And they are
not to be held responsible if somebody in Ogbomoso, Minna or
Sokoto could not fathom why they put their political
interest before a certain national interest. In the words of Bob
Marley “He who feels it knows it all”. As for those in power and
their civilian cohorts outside screaming hell about ethnicisation,
they are merely exhibiting that well known stock-in-trade of
their breed - giving the opposition
70 a bad name in order to nail it
to the inquisitional pillory of despotic rule. And what is more,
that history knows fully well that these elements, these
motley collection of ‘nationalists’ never failed for one
moment to fall back into their ethnic shell to rouse their deprived
kindred in inaccessible hamlets and villages to ethnic rebellion
whenever they felt marginalised in their traditional game of cake
sharing and treasury-looting. We owe no duty to consider them
seriously for they are merely politicians playing
politics. At the auspicious moment, they would come back
begging cap-in-hand for one vote here, one mandate there. But
then the people must tell them “we have seen through your lies
like the glass in the showroom; off with you and your
carpetbag”.
Now we must turn away from those objections invented
by the opposition in power, the Junta, with the aim of
disparaging the contributions of the oil workers to those which
are founded on truth, albeit with certain distortions. The
debilitating effect of the strike is not for us to recount or lament.
The endless queues, the grounding of production and
commercial activities, the disorganisation of domestic
life, the several fire disasters occasioned by hoarding
of fuel in inauspicious places, the return of the entire
social life to stone age equivalent and many more horrendous
realities. But has it not been said that ‘you cannot eat your cake
and have it’. If the people must have freedom, they must also be
ready to pay the price of freedom. More so that the people have
always suffered, the only difference being that the agony of
several years is being lumped together in a sudden inferno to
cleanse the heart in preparation for a better future.
This side of the fact does not, however, discount from
the other side of the fact - that the moment it became clear
that necessary supports were not forthcoming from
expected quarters the NUPENG 71 leadership ought to have
worked out a face-saving arrangement for calling off
the strike ‘in the interest of the people’. This in the realisation
that the oil workers themselves were already battle weary and
were being compelled to make extreme sacrifice by continuing
with the strike after Kokori’s appearance.
Though the question also comes to fore whether or not
even if NUPENG had done this, the regime would still not have
gone ahead to hatch its evil ploy against it? Whichever way,
the regime would still have been the ultimate victor as it
turned out to be, at least so far as the particular battle was
concerned.
The last major question of tactics we shall touch
is that of Kokori’s disappearance and reappearance. In
fact, this is one major question of tactic. The decision of the
NUPENG executive council to put their General Secretary in
hiding while accusing the Junta of keeping him in detention
without hearing was most ingenious. As earlier mentioned,
nothing could have been more demoralising and confusing for
the regime than this, just as it did mobilise mass sympathy
to the side of the strikers. What indeed made nonsense of
the ingenuity was the way and manner of the ‘detained’
General Secretary’s reappearance. Kokori made a fool of
himself and all those people who had clamoured for his release
and inveighed against the Junta when he came back on his two
feet hale and hearty beaming with smile to say that he was in
hiding. By this singular act he contrived the swapping of role
between the Junta and his supporters. Then it was the Junta that
was confused and demoralised; now the strikers and strike
backers donned the cloak of moral crisis and confusion. Then
the strikers mobilised support, now it was the turn of the Junta to
mobilise sympathy.
What indeed NUPENG ought to have done would have
been to present Kokori to the72world in the garb of a detainee
dumped somewhere in the bush along the express road by a
desperately despotic Junta. This would have been a more
mobilising and more novel climax to the drama of
disappearance than the deflating humour rendered on July 23. It
has to be pointed out though that such a humorous ending would
have been most welcomed were it to be that the strike had
successfully consigned the Junta to the waste bin of inglorious
history and the occasion was the celebration of victory.
All this said it must equally be recognised that the
argument on the part of the strike supporters that at least
NUPENG should have given them a benefit of information
regarding the actual state of things is either uniformed or
opportunistic. For who can be so trusted in such time as those
turbulent July days? The implication of NUPENG error in
Kokori’s reappearance, is first and foremost, that such
prank can no longer be repeated and, secondly, that the
regime henceforth could also engineer disappearances
without trace and blame such on some trumped-up
propaganda motive. That reappearance will go down in history
as one of the gravest blunders of the June12 strike and the one
with the most far reaching implication for the people’s struggle
against fascism in the nearest future, more so when a most
bestial regime is in power.
***
Since the second act of the June 12 circus was officially
confiscated to the cooler with one Herculean speech on
August 17, 1994 and the Junta unleashed fascist gangsters
on the people and their leaders, the NUPENG and
PENGASSAN leaders have been hauled off to some
remote Sahel concentration camps and ‘normalcy’ has returned,
if only for a while. But does this discount from the unique contribution of
the oil workers to the June 12 Struggle?
73 Or does it even mean an
end to the struggle itself? Definitely not. The struggle of our
people has become even richer since the strike than before it.
June 12 is a spirit that will continue to haunt the memory of the
nation until the contradictions it reflects are resolved. The
struggle of a people cannot be confiscated to the waste bin of
history by confiscating their leaders to the calaboose, or by
defeating one nascent phase of it.
-30/31 January, 1995.
74
THE 40-HOUR STRIKE: A CONSUMMATE

EXPRESSION OF TOTAL DECAY
I
The 40-hour NLC’s Political Strike of August 3rd and 4th,
1994 has helped answer more questions than it bargained
for but left many unanswered - at least so far as the burnt out will
of the pawny mass is concerned.
But need it be said that only RUSE itself
reserves capacity for springing up unsurprisingly
predictable surprises as had been demonstrated by Pascal
Bafyau’s NLC. At no other time in the history of both the trade
union and the labour movement in Nigeria has honour and dignity been
consigned to the refuse dumps of Lagos streets than the period
under examination.
And to hear that this 40-hour strike, this lame strike, half
heartedly embarked upon by an equally lame labour movement,
has been seen as totally uncalled for, as a step too gigantic for
the fabric of the sick (not weak) Nigerian system to absorb! And
what is more, that these objections, these complains, and NTA
Network-orchestrated grumbling and side-talks
predicate themselves on the mere (inexplicable) argument that
trade unions are not bodies set up to participate in politics - why
then must trade unions embark on political strikes? Short memory - short
memory indeed, sickeningly glaring demonstration of lack of
memory!
But far more important is the fact that if all these woes
have been the result of lack of knowledge, our problem (or rather
their problem) would have been half solved. Before us,
however, is a classical species of mischief-makers and dishonest
labour confronting an equally mischievous opposition. That is why no
matter how boring or unpleasant 75 this story of infamy may
appear, we have no option but to go over it. And if we have
chosen to do this, then it must be done with the thoroughness it
deserves. The rotten Congress is not to be helped by sparing it
the agony of bashing its rotten essence against the brick wall of
reason. The rottenness of the Congress cannot be masked
from reality, just as it cannot be magnified in our
imagination beyond the reekiness and foul of its reality.
It is the duty of revolution theory in our time, no matter how
unpleasant this may be, to kill in images and vivid pictorial
details the rottenness of the Congress as it is today in order that
a space may be created for the rejuvenation of the
labour movement. Pascal’s Congress must necessarily come
under the barrel of our revolutionary pen ala Ngugi. Then and
only then will it be possible to properly locate and appreciate the
arguments of the accused and accusers alike in their utter nudity. The
congressional political strikers and their congressional and non-
congressional non-political strike advocates are
identical twins of the same pair of monstrous beings-a
consummate expression of the opportunism characteristic of
our social life. We must begin from the beginning.
II
To begin from the beginning, so far as the 40-hour NLC strike is

concerned is to invoke the ghost of the unenthusiastic spirit of
the 1993 involvement of the Congress in the June 12 Struggle.
The pro-June 12 strike of August 27th, 1993 was forced
on the leadership by the rank-and-file workers. The CD’s
demonstration of the feasibility and ease of calling an
effective strike in spite of the influence of the traditional
Labour cannot also be overemphasized. The July 5, 6,7 street
protests and August 12, 13, 14 sit-at-home protests made
meaning to Pascal’s labour in76so far as they were a practical
challenge to its false image, as the sole repository of knowledge
of mobilisation of the people for mass action, that the domain of mass
action and strikes belong to the working class alone. And for Pascal to
reclaim his mandate, he must ride on the back of the exigencies
thrown up by the June 12 mandate and would have no other way
of doing it than to resort to that weapon he had so mastered
- scientific trade unionism - (scientific indeed). And there was
a huge deal of science in Pascal’s ways. What, indeed, could be
more scientific than a strike that commenced on a weekend
through two days of public holiday? And by the peculiar
logic of his science a strike need not necessarily be
mobilised for? Reality must be made to stand on its feet.
This strike lasted six days, three of them holidays, and
were it not for the NUPENG initiative, which necessarily
paralysed transportation, rank-and-file workers wouldn’t
have known there was an action in the real sense. But this was
not all as far as scientifism in trade union struggle was
concerned. Pascal and his cohorts subverted NLC’s historic
August, 18 Enugu demand for the installation of the winner of
the 12 mandate on or before August 27. These scientists settled
for a rather dubious demand for a return of the country to
constitutional rule and hand over of power to the Senate
President. And just as they had begun this psychedelic dance,
the chicken-hearted rebel, Uncle Chukwumerije, furiously
thumped the drumbeats of an impending fuel price hike.
Pascal’s men fell for it in a manner that suggested a sort of secret
agreement between them and the government. For NLC became
wholly pre-occupied with the Interim Government’s hike of fuel
prices by 700%, that it abandoned June 12 and actively sought
to yank its institution off the national agenda. Another
evidence of criminality of these scientific unionists was
their practical recognition of Shonekan’s universally derided puppet
complex. By affording that fumbling 77 contraption the benefit to
negotiate the prices of fuel with NLC, Pascal and his followers
invariably conferred some legitimacy on it. It is now part of
history that the November 17 midnight putsch by Abacha and his
gang was helped to legitimacy at a time when the ruling clique
had almost completely lost all initiative and capacity of further
surprises when Pascal’s Congress relegated all democratic
demands to the background, got 350% increment in the prices of
petroleum products as against the government intended 700%
and came out to hurrah before our wearied people- “we got three
quarters of what we bargained for”, isn’t that excellent? This
was a congress many people had thought would play the leading
role in the June 12 Struggle. Indeed, on the 23rd of June,
1993, the day of the annulment, of University of Lagos students
stormed NLC’s Secretariat to impress on Pascal’s ‘people’ the
imperative of taking over the struggle as becoming of a
trade union centre. Ironically, the same stu dents invaded
the building on the 30th of June, 1993 in an attempt to put to rest
Pascal’s Congress self-denigration after it know-towed before
IBB and agreed to betray June 12. From grace to grass could be
less than a week’s journey indeed.
From the foregoing it could be seen then that the 1994 half-
heartedness of the Congress in responding to the renewed
struggle for the mandate’s actualisation was not a new thing. That it had
to take ten key unions including NUPENG, the Dock Workers Union,
the National Union of Bank, Insurance and Financial Institutions
Employees, the Civil Service Technical Workers Union, the
National Union of Local Government Employees among others
to threaten the NLC with independent action before the
leadership even took the decision to address June 12 concretely
only goes to show this. Then what about the demands?. Initially
the NLC merely insisted that the president-elect, Chief M. K. O.
Abiola should not be arrested should he go ahead to declare
himself as president. Arresting 78 him, NLC felt, would lead to
‘tension’. Later, a clause was non-committally added, viz., that
the military should disengage from politics and return the
country to democratic rule as soon as possible. So that it would
appear that if the perpetration of injustice would not lead to the
heightening of tension Pascal’s NLC would tolerate it. The same
thing also goes for the second demand; how ‘soon’ is ‘soon’
remains to be defined, and what is meant by democratic rule
outside the context of June 12 which has been agreed upon by
both the people that voted and those who did not vote out of
contempt for Babangida’s endless transition, and the world
community at large as the fairest and freest in the history of
Nigeria remains a mystery before every Nigeria with a speck of
sincerity left in him.
But even on these half-hearted demands the Congress
remained as inconsistent as ever. Several times the
declaration of ultimatum was postponed and several times
the psychology of our people was assaulted with undulating
hopes. If there had ever been an organisation in this country that
has promised heaven and hell and raised the people’s hope with
its verbal ejaculations, it was the Congress. And if there was an
organisation that has ever dashed the hope of its membership or
rather an organisation whose membership allowed the centre to
pull the wool over their eyes it was this same Congress.
Against that background, the general expectation of
people in the streets and rank-and-file workers was that state
branches of the Congress and those affiliate unions that had
opposed the centre on its decision to shun pro-June 12 strike
would immediately catch in on mass sentiment and the
awakening of the masses by CD to join the June 12 train and
once and for all rid themselves of the collective muck the centre
had invited on the mass. But the reality was that the Congress
fish - and this was indeed a big fish - was not only rotten in the
head but right through to the tail.
79 And so it was that it had to
take the decisive, patriotic action of NUPENG, once
more, to restore sanity to the rank of labour. The
demands for the release of President M. K. O. Abiola and
the immediate actualisation of the June 12 mandate made by the
NUPENG, though initially scorned by the Congress at large, was
what saved the face of the entire labour. It has to be said,
however, that even at this decisive moment, opportunism was
never for a single moment discarded as the major stock-in-trade;
one union after the other, one local branch after the other,
sporadically and trickishly declared indefinite strike action - not
in solidarity with NUPENG, not because of the need to actualise
the June 12 mandate, but solely for the fact that the NUPENG
action which had disrupted transportation made it impossible for
their members to go to work.
In a country with a genuine central labour organisation
the series of mass protests that accompanied the NUPENG strike
and the attendant paralysis of social life would have provided the whole of
labour in conjunction with other pro-democracy organisations the
impetus to push the Abacha Junta from power or at least wrest
meaningful concessions from it. But the NLC kept convincing
itself and others who would still listen that the domain of pro-
June 12 strike was for rabble-rousers and those who wanted to
tear the country apart [let’s pray that the NLC itself does not tear
apart before the nation does].
It is interesting that all through this period, the NLC
Secretariat was always in flight between Aso Rock and 29,
Olajuwon Street, Yaba - Lagos. But as the saying goes, “nothing
in this world can stop an ‘idea whose time has come’. The air-
borne crisis-ridden Secretariat eventually landed. And when it
did land on Saturday July 30th at Olajuwon, every soul present
had thought it would declare a strike from Monday the 1st
August. But it picked mid-week again, giving the Abacha Junta four clear
days of negotiation. Even this, I80 later learnt from good authority,
was arrived at only after the rank-and-file in the corridors of 29,
Olajuwon Congress headquarters had threatened the leadership
with physical and esoteric assault. The same authority
also had it that when one of the reporters present asked Pascal to
clarify whether or not the strike was only for the release of
President Abiola or for the actualisation of the June 12 mandate,
the Congress president went into something like a fearful mock-
fit reminding all the pressmen he could see around that the
Congress was only interested in the release of ‘Chief Abiola’ and
nothing more. He begged not to be misquoted. Pascal Bafyau
promptly signed the document declaring the strike action before,
once again, fleeing the Congress headquarters.
And so it was that we had the 40-hour strike. And what a
particularly strategic time it was to fix the commencement of a
strike? NUPENG had already made the country ungovernable
and, the masses, suffering under the impact of the NUPENG
action and conscious of their historical responsibility as
the ultimate power that could determine how long the Abacha
Junta would last, were already psychologically prepared for an
open revolt and only leadership was needed. Only a semblance
of credibility and they would shake out their gourds of
gunpowder. And what is more, CD activists were always at
hand to forward the ‘season of protests’ agenda at every
opportune moment.
The colours that attended the [indefinite] 40-hour strike
were the handiwork of proficient CD hands and the ever-ready
mass of our people. The declaration alone was what belonged to
the Congress. Or how do we explain the fact that while the
Congress leadership had four clear days of grace between the
declaration and the commencement of strike action, some local
union bodies still came out to say that their non-participation in the 40-hour
event was due to breakdown of communication between them and the
centre, a fact [fact indeed!] which 81 COMRADE Pascal Bafyau
himself confirmed on NTA Network news within the first 18
hours of the action? Meanwhile, during those four days,
four days within which the Congress must put everything in
place for its rebirth, it still had the time to answer an ‘urgent’ call
from Aso Rock.
It has been said over and over again by people of varying political
persuasions that a Congress’ strike was not a thing to be taken
seriously, and really not many conscious politicians [at least
those familiar with the workings of the Congress] really took
Pascal Bafyau and his lieutenants seriously when they declared
their action. Many progressives, including this writer, saw in
the Congress strike only an attempt to kill two birds
with one stone- i.e. save face by acting but at the same time
dousing the fire of the NUPENG strike by calling off a strike it
never began in the first instance. It was an old trick of the labour
aristocrats.
But even then one would have expected that the face-
saving act would be done in such a meticulous manner as not to
end up scalding this moon face in the hot water of mass fury. Or
what is to be said of that labour leader who because of breakdown of
negotiation commenced an industrial action against the employer [and
thereby oppressor] only to turn round and call off this action on
the mere strength of assurance that such suspension of action
would facilitate the renewal of negotiation? If Pascal Bafyau had
assured 30 million Nigerian TV viewers 18 hours after the
commencement of action that in the next 48 hours he expected
more success if not a total strike, a hundred percent strike, then
the question must indeed be asked why he did not wait for this
Zero Hour before seeking argument in favour of suspension of
the action. With the indecently hasty suspension, every observer
had expected that the Congress-orchestrated circus show should
have come to an end. But Labour’s capacity for laborious
comedy seemed inexplicably strong. 82 A few days earlier, and for
the first time in recent years, comrade Pascal Bafyau had
travelled by road [!] all the way from Abuja to Lagos - a fact that
drew strong notes of commendation from foes and
friends alike. Now another no less commendable feat was
also performed - he hung in the corridors of Aso Rock for hours all in
the interest of the NATION: definitely not a material for cynical
reproach! So it was that Pascal Bafyau and his
labouring delegation got some ‘positive assurance’ from the
‘Head of State’ that the ‘Basorun’ was going to be released and
the fatherland shall forever know nothing but peace and
tranquillity. So it was that the court had to commence sitting
after closing hours, and granted bail behind the backs of counsel
and accused alike. Who would say then that labour did not try?
Who would claim that labour’s ‘positive assurance’ was not
positive enough? Or that the 5th of August dusk
judgement was not a positive indication of the thoroughly
positive essence of the positivity of this ‘historic’ assurance?
And who would say such a case has no precedence in history?
No matter how short the memory of the nation is it has to be said
in testimony to the ‘honour’ of our judiciary and the
‘competence’ of the presiding judge that one year is not too long
a period to obliterate an event such as the midnight [or rather
midnight-minus 3 hours] judgement by Justice Ikpeme less than
48 hours to the June 12 elections which attempted to stop the
elections. The only unique difference was that then the key actor
in the first circus was the Association for Better Nigeria [ABN],
a fascist organisation with millions of spurious members across
the country and an arms ‘trader’ as Capone.
From the foregoing it must have become clear to the
reader that Pascal’s Congress never intended going on a political
strike in the first place, nor did it ever embark on one. The
Congress had a strike forced on it by the exi gencies of
our time and it betrayed it and 83 also betrayed itself. Any trade
union that mismanages the weapon of strike opportunistically
must be ready for an unpalatable repercussion when it will desire
this instrument in its sharpest, most dependable form. Thus far.
If we have had to go through this tortuous and
convoluted thought process in order to highlight the role played
by the central labour in the June 12 event up till the great victory
of unsigned bail bond, it is for no other reason than that the
event before us is as much tortuous, convoluted and
unthinkable in a society of people of honour. And once we have
embarked on this tortuous road, once we have tasted of the craze
of this crazy route, we must follow it through to the end, so that
we may be able to learn from experience and may not by any
stroke of ill-luck find ourselves lured back like junkies to the
convulsing appetite of this convoluted route. The
Congress’ opportunistic load of yam must be emptied to
the rounded bottom of the pot and eaten hot without delay, for
to tarry is to risk eating a tasteless, sickeningly cold dinner of
pounded yam. This is the domain of the next part of this
scrutiny.
III
In the analysis so far made, so much has been ascribed to

‘Pascal Bafyau’ and ‘Pascal Bafyau’s Congress’ to the extent
that the error of over-personalisation of concrete social issues on
the part of the reader cannot be completely ruled out. It is,
therefore, of utmost importance, before going further, to make
clarifications, namely that: Pascal Bafyau, in spite of his many
and nonetheless boring appearances in the ongoing analysis,
makes meaning in so far as the leader of the NLC in its most
inglorious era is concerned, the other elements within the
Congress, be they members of the Central Working Committee
(CWC), members of the National 84 Executive Council (NEC) or
the National Administrative Council (NAC), are no less
responsible for the present state of affairs than Pascal Bafyau
himself. And finally that all these people, all these individuals,
are products of a particular historical development of the labour
movement, not as a body existing independently of and outside
of the society at large, but rather as that constituting a highly
consequential component of a whole.
It suffices here to mention however that neither the
history of the labour movement nor that of the NLC constitutes
an objective of this work. The domain of history belongs to
chroniclers and palace griots. Chronological record of the
activities of the Congress must be sought outside of here and at
some other time. The links in the chain of events that led to the
kind of NLC that found it difficult embarking on a successful
political strike is the focus of this section.
The NLC along with the National Association of
Nigerian Students [NANS] which in its programme and agitation
proved itself too hard to be crushed by Buhari/Idiagbon’s
sledge hammer, wet the ground for the ex-dictator, IBB’s ride
to power when they exposed and fought the fascistic tendencies of that
regime. IBB’s gimmicks about respect for human rights and
military democracy and the orchestrated IMF debate gave his
regime the much-needed time to consolidate in office. The “Ango-Must-
Go” student protest of May/June 1986 which swept the whole
nation like harmattan fire in the savannah grassland exactly nine
months after IBB came to power and the lackadaisical attitude of
the regime to the crisis was what first brought the NLC and the
regime together in an open confrontation. If the regime had not
recognised the decisive and revolutionary potentials of the proposed
4th of June, 1986 nation-wide protest by the Congress, then
under the leadership of Comrade Ali Ciroma, and moved in to
crush it even before it took off, perhaps the history of the
Congress and the nation could 85 have acquired a significantly
different colouration from what it is today. More so that this was
a regime that had just carried out the execution of purported
coup plotters 3 months earlier without any considerable popular
support.
For a conscious dictator like IBB [a Machiavellian] the
June 4 confrontation was a shave too close. If the kind of
fascistic programmes he had in focus for the people must come
off as planned, then the wings of the Congress must be clipped.
His earlier hurried attempt to prop up a Ben Shamang
[nevertheless an old time opposition] shortly after the June 4
event did not come off well enough perhaps because it was
rather hasty. But by February 1988, the NLC convention held at
Benin City featuring Shamang and his gang under the exotic
name of ‘the democrats’. Meanwhile before February, IBB had
suffered more Congress bashing which convinced him more than
ever before that the body must be tamed. Throughout 1986 and
1987 the relationship between Comrade Ciroma led-NLC and
NANS [though purportedly banned] waxed stronger. A product
of this was the embarrassment elements within the Congress, and
NANS, in league with progressives across the country, caused the
regime when the pro-Apartheid British Prime Minister,
Margaret Thatcher made an unpalatable visit to Nigeria
on January 8, 1988.
That the regime should proscribe NLC following the
crisis that attended the Benin Convention and after which
the Shamang group, having lost out, attempted to seize the
secretariat, is inexplicable except that there was a government
‘hidden agenda’. It would appear [and this is being said
without fear of contradiction] that the Shamang opposition was
a calculated move on the part of the government to seek an
opportunity to hammer the Congress. For if it was that easy for
the State to have moved into the NLC and take over in order to
restore peace, between the warring
86 factions, nothing stopped it
from using the same machinery to call to order the erring party in
the conflict. The Babangida approach of jailing both the wronged
and the wrongdoer is, to say the least, opportunistic and
completely criminal.
In the 9 months of the Michael Ogunkoya Caretaker [undertaker if
you like] Committee set up to administer the NLC following the
state take over, what was left of progressives in the NLC was
either decimated or turned into trade union eunuchs. In 9
months the ‘progressives’ in the Congress had their spirits
and bodies tempered and sobered. For who could wait any longer
to see the work of several years destroyed and washed away! Of
course if these progressives had been revolutionary progressives
in deed as in word, Ogunkoya could not have been able
to administer anything, for the leadership would have fought
resolutely the government intervention. But it has to be
acknowledged that these progressives were also a pack of labour
aristocrats. They were learned in all the methods of articulation
and sound theoretical grounding from the East while from the
West they borrowed liberalism. The Congress since its inception,
even in the days of esteemed Comrade Hassan Sunmonu,
has always been a bureaucracy, sometimes mistaken for a
government parastatal by the man in the street - at least its
creation and organisation was also backed up by decrees. This
reminds me of an account by a friend. Sometimes in 1993,
shortly before the June 12 event, he came across a perfectly
dressed and apparently educated fellow standing in front of the
Olajuwon headquarters of the NLC, awe-struck as though seeing
this unexpected ‘edifice’ for the first time. My good friend, a
curious fellow, wanting to know what had struck this man,
moved closer to him - only for him to see that this man not only
gaped at the edifice but was also thinking aloud. ‘N-L-C’ he
spelt out, then asked genuinely “what can it be that goes on this
house? Nigeria Labour Congress, 87 may be an unemployment
office”. At this point their eyes met and the soliloquising man
came to his senses, obviously embarrassed, and left. To
this man, the Congress could have been another government
institution where strange things aimed at making life difficult for
the masses take place. There is also the problem of the general
secretaries in whom are vested so much powers constitutionally
and by convention such that in most unions without the support
of the General-Secretary, an employee of the union and a
professional trade union bureaucrat, nobody can hope to become
the union president. The consequence of this is that in the last
three decades, the trade union movement has produced a crop of
trade union chieftains, some Capones, whose whims and
caprices determine the strategic direction of their unions. One
only needs to go to the factory floor when a ‘GS’ is coming
‘from Lagos’ to see the cringing reverence they accord him. The
General Secretary was [and is still] the Alpha and Omega. There
is no doubt that if the Colonial District Officer [D.O] were to be
around in one of our post-independence factories on such occasion, he
would readily become green with envy.
The labour aristocracy constitutes a privileged social
group within the labour movement. As such, when the NLC came under
IBB’s hammer, the aristocrats could not have been expected to
put their lives on the line and concretely mobilise the workers
against such ban in a revolutionary way. Their instinct was to
protect their job, their privileged position, especially by
unprincipled compromises. Throughout the time the aristocracy
was in the cooler, little was done in respect of the conditions of
workers. All hands were on deck to ensure a speedy return to
normalcy. The aristocracy, working with the government-
imposed administrator, was more interested in regaining its
position. Labour’s involvement in the April/May 1988 protest
over the removal of oil subsidy initiated by NANS was a
product of the effort 88of elements outside the
mainstream aristocracy. However, most of the key
organisers of the Joint Action Committee (JAC) idea were never
part of the negotiations and compromises that rescued
IBB from the frustration occasioned by the workers’
nationwide action. Irrespective of whether it realised this fact or
not, the April/May JAC action helped the aristocracy in
regaining the Congress. For it was only after this that the IBB
regime took seriously the issue of restoring normalcy to the
Congress. The regime was quick in realising that with the NLC
there would always be a place to run to whenever negotiation
became necessary and that it would be more difficult dealing
with individual unions p and there were 41 of them] given the
vastness of ‘settlement” the whole exercise would entail.
But the aristocracy too was equally temperate and ready
for compromise. The compromise eventually led to the
emergence of Pascal Bafyau as a consensus candidate of both the
progressives and the democrats in the December 1988 mock
elections. In the states too the same compromises, consensus and
horse-trading obtained.
That Pascal Bafyau was sponsored by IBB is open to
debate. But what is absolutely clear is the fact that IBB found in
Bafyau’s NLC an organization he could work with in the pursuit
of his fascistic programme for the nation.
The covert and, later, overt opposition of Pascal’s NLC
to the mass revolt of May/June 1989 [anti-SAP riot], NLC
acceptance of the ban on the Labour Party among 12 other
political groups in September 1989, the corporate
participation in SDP, its non-participation in the September 5,
1990 National Conference organised by democratic
organisations under the umbrella of the National Consultative
Forum NCF and its nonchalance towards the just and democratic
agitations of the students movement in the period spanning the
May 1991 Academic Reforms89[ACAREF] students protests to
the events that led to the historic June 30th 1993 storming of the
29 Olajuwon Congress headquarters are but a few of the helps
rendered to the IBB regime by Pascal Bafyau’s Congress.
Fascism cannot rise to power without taking effective
control of the trade union movement. Liberalism in trade
unionism makes the unions a fertile ground for fascist take
over. Where the trade union movement refuses to be
settled or assimilated into the system, then it must be smashed.
But every wise fascist knows fully well that he can never
completely smash trade union agitation - he settles the union or
raises inconsequential cronies and nonentities to the position
of relevance. IBB was a wise fascist. His regime alone
witnessed more government backed labour workshops and
seminars than all the seven regimes before him put together.
Before the Babangida years labour seminars were meant
to sharpen trade union agitators ideologically and
expose the worker to his true condition of existence as a
representative of an oppressed class. But the IBB years
taught labour leaders that seminars, apart from being a
forum for churning out junks on ‘industrial harmony’, ‘scientific
trade unionism’ and ‘collective bargaining’ could also be dollar-
making ventures for a privileged few. The hustling that attended
Labour functions in the last two years of IBB were
indeed legendary beyond that which could be explained by
selfless love for union cause. The culture of settlement in
Babangida time and as it is today [1994] know no class barrier.
It is equally on record that the elections that returned
Pascal Bafyau to office for a second term was fully financed by
the State. Every other person in the street had thought that
time was up for Pascal. In fact for the more optimis tic
ones, December 1992 was a magical date during which affiliates
would not only voice out their anger against the leadership but
also show the leadership out in90a democratic fashion. But were
the affiliates disgruntled? Or rather, were they disgruntled
beyond being disposed to some bundles of oil money? It is on
record that only NUPENG did much as speak out against Pascal
Bafyau’s 4 years at the helm of affairs. The remaining 40
affiliates were not ‘disgruntled’.
What other evidence do we need, therefore, to show that
Pascal is not the problem of the NLC, but rather that we have
before us the case of a cancer-afflicted system through the length
and breadth of which malignant cells have metastasised. Pascal
Bafyau’s Congress has done more work for fascism in Nigeria than a
hundred thousand completely loyal national guardsmen would
probably have done. The generation that stormed the Congress
on June 30th 1993 would be building upon its past effort by
immediately going to the drawing board and putting together
plans for the seizure of political power from that class that has
created the conditions for the emergence of the treacherous
central labour organisation. The destruction of the present
Congress and the realisation of a better Nigeria in
which social and economic justice, fair play and moral
uprightness shall be the watchword are paramount.
The generation that stormed the Congress must repeat its
action at some other time, some other place and some
other level. Combative intellectual assault is part and
parcel of this much needed generational action.
IV
When a government for which subterfuge, petty

intrigues and misinformation are official instruments of crisis
management and an official state religions suddenly declares that
political strike is outside the domain of trade union politics and
this declaration is echoed and parroted by a degenerate labour
movement, nothing can be better 91 than to ignore them to the fate
of all tailers behind time. The rabble-rousers in power and
bandits in labour are better allowed to steep in the murky waters
of their self-afflicted delusion. Their footless imagination must
of necessity be left to the test of the wind tunnel of history that it
may sort itself out.
The notion that propaganda is blatant lying can only gain
currency in a society where people have not developed the
mental faculty to enable them differentiate between falsehood
and truth or where they have already lost it.
In Nigeria, strangely enough (and this is true for most
other things), it is difficult to estimate whether we suffer from
the latter or from the former. Hitherto, we have learned to live
with government lies, laugh them off, take them for granted and
tragically enough, shape our realities according to these lies.
The damage done to the psyche of the Nigerian person under 100
years of colonialism, 25 years of irresponsible ‘self’ rule and
another 8 years of Bonapartist rule is a material for
further research in social psychology and philosophy.
But for now what can only be done is to take up issues
as they may affect the resolution of immediate problems at hand.
And as such, if not for the purpose of immediate import but for
the purpose of historical record so that coming generations may
have a point of reference in the struggle against opportunism and
in trade unions, it is important to theoretically combat the
erroneous notion that political strikes are inimical to the national
interest.
The basis for political strike in general and a pro-June 12
strike by the NLC are to be sought partly in the economic
interests of the workers. The constitution, ethics, decrees, orders and
epileptic judicial proclamations of a state that has played itself out of
favour with the mass of our people cannot at the same time be
used to assess the correctness, effectiveness and, more
92
importantly, the objective necessity for the action of our people
or the working class.
What does the recent history of the NLC show other than
that the arena of politics, more so partisan politics, is not the
exclusive prerogative of the so called political class, that it is not
in the interest of the workers organised in the trade unions to
offer themselves as pawns on the various political cheese boards
of the ruling class known as parties, but also for them to create
their own chess board, or at least define within the existing
parties their own collective class interest. The formation of the
Nigeria Labour Party in 1989 following the lifting of the ban on
partisan politics by the IBB regime was the handiwork of the
NLC in conjunction with progressives and left forces across the
country. And the fact that the party crossed the many
hurdles created by the regime to become one of the
political associations approved by the National Electoral
Commission (NEC) is a prove of the conscientiousness with
which the task of party building was carried out - at least within
the limits permitted by labour opportunism and government
hypocrisy.
If, however, the NLC had failed to oppose the banning
of the NLC along with other approved political associations by
invoking the instrument of strike, it goes only to show the
compromising and opportunistic nature of the then one-year-
old Pascal Bafyau leadership and not necessarily that
political strike goes beyond the calling of the trade unions.
The Northern NUPENG and those northern branches of
the NLC that dissociated themselves from the 40-hour strike on
the basis that it was a political strike can only be guilty of same -
opportunism. Not even their northernness can explain the
parochialiness of the views they held. For where were these
workers when the NLC sent representatives to the
Social Democratic Party [SDP]? 93 Where were they when
the political commission of the NLC officially called on
workers to join the SDP. If only we learn from our past, our
present would definitely be more glorious. But we fail to learn.
Honour, dignity and glorious deeds, we can only speak of in the
past tense. The involvement of the Nigerian working class in
partisan politics in the late 80’s and early 90’s are but a parody
of the glorious deeds of our fathers in the colonial era, just as the
attempt of those surviving actors of the glorious deeds of 1940’s
and 50’s to make advances over their past by creating exclusive
working class parties in the 60’s paved way for the emergence
of left opportunism in practice.
Even then, it cannot be considered beyond our brief to
call the attention of our disparate working class to the political
essence of the two greatest strikes in our history.
The COLA Strike of 1942 and the General Strike of
1945 were at the same time economic and political
strikes. The demands for better conditions of service for
‘native’ [Nigerian] workers were, more than their immediate
economic essence concrete challenges to the political domination
of our people by the colonial power. It is on record that the 1945
General Strike, the participation of the Nigerian working class
under Papa Imoudu in the National Council of Nigeria and
Cameroon [NCNC] and other fronts of political struggle not only
gave impetus to the struggle of our people at home, but also
earned the struggle international acclaim. The 1945 5th Pan-African
Congress, which has been said to be the most important in the history of
African people, did not fail to give a place of pride to the
Nigerian working class. Though the Nigerian working class
delegation was not in London for the Congress, key organisers of
the Congress were in constant correspondence with the
Nigerian working class under the leadership of Pa
Imoudu. The Nigerian working class enjoyed the attention of
George Padmore and W.E.B. Dubois 94 among others.
The role of the Nigerian working class in facilitating the
fund-raising for the delegates of the NCNC on the Pan-
Nigerian delegation to the colonial office in 1946 cannot
also be over-emphasised. And what is more, that the Pan-
Nigerian delegation was really Pan-Nigerian in essence, not a
Southwest delegation. The 13,481 pounds Pan-Nigerian delegation money
bore no regional/ethnic mark. Ilorin, Bida, Adamawa,
Minna, Owerri, Port Harcourt, Bonny, Calabar, to mention
but a few, gave their mandates and money to this delegation. We
were indeed once a great people.
The political role of the Nigerian working class
movement in our struggle for independence is on no
where better captured than in that epochal book “Imoudu
Biography: A Political History of Nigeria [1939-50]” by Baba
Olumide Omojola, a renown economist. Baba shows how the involvement
of the working class in the struggle for independence gave a
national meaning and impetus to the struggle and how its
exclusion from it earned us the type of flag independence we got.
The 1964 General Strike was part of the quest of the
Nigerian working class to call the attention of the ruling class to
their obligations as rulers. As Baba rightly put it “the 1964
General Strike was kicked off by Imoudu as a strike against the
enemy of democracy and social welfare. The Marxist Socialist
Workers and Farmers Party and the Nigeria Labour Party of
1964/5 are a product of this political effort”. Thus far with
political strikes in history on a national scale. We shall definitely
have cause to return to this particular issue on a more universal
scale before rounding up this piece.
The attempt to draw a hard and fast line between an
economic strike and a political strike is a product either of half-
knowledge or dishonesty. Often times, in the case of the bulk of
the fellowship, it results from half-knowledge, while on the part
of the leaders and the government,95 it is more of dishonesty
and fraud, an attempt to mislead innocently ignorant
rank-and-file workers. And in our case they exist in large
numbers.
The erroneous view that politics is all about standing for elections,
campaigning, sitting in parliament, lobbying, and
scheming, often times gentleman fashion but intermittently
in open violent battles involving thugs, hired assassins and mob
is that which must be corrected.
So long as politics boils down to how the society shares
among its members the product of social production, then the
workers cannot shy away from politics and reserve the right
to use any instrument at their disposal to advance their
collective political aims.
It was not the name or the flag of the SDP that attracted
the NLC to it. Granted, there are no significantly fundamental
differences between the programmes of the SDP and NRC, the
fact that the SDP had the semblance of a welfarist programme,
especially in the areas of education and health, reflect more the
economic interests of the worker than the NRC’s avowedly
conservative programme. While it is true that the most
immediate economic interest of the worker is served by wages
and allowances and other conditions of service in which case he
relates to his employer as against relating to the government, it is
important to note that the most far reaching effect on the
economic condition of the worker is not the correctness or not of
decision taken by the employer at factory floor level or sectoral
level.
Government policy-politics on a provincial, state
or national scale or international scale put the final seal on
the economic fate of the worker. If majority of Nigerian workers
therefore had voted for an economic programme as represented
by their overwhelming vote for the SDP and such a programme
96
has been scuttled by scuttling their votes, they reserve the right
to challenge such infringements.
Economic struggle of the working class as represented
by struggle for wage increase, leave bonus, transport allowance,
lunch ticket and rebates of all shades are reflective of a
comparatively low level of consciousness. To challenge
fundamental programmes of government as they affect
the workers is to operate at a higher level. To recognise the
inflationary effect every wage increase would have on the
overall economy and as such on the welfare of the worker is
for the worker to have realised the limits of this so-
called economic struggle, which of course appeals more to the
appetite of opportunists in labour and reactionaries in
government.
To be partisan, to take position in partisan politics, is for
the working class to have come to realise itself. It is a recognition
that the interest of the class coincides with a particular overall
programme of politics and social economics. The arena of
politics is not a stage for the exclusive use of politicians to
demonstrate and act out the oddities, absurdities and
intrigues characteristic of that category of people deeming
themselves the natural ruler over the people by God’s grace.
If anything at all, far from having more than its own
share of politics, the Nigerian working class is guilty of too little
partisan politics. This again is traceable to the opportunism in the
labour movement. We cannot here, however, afford to put the
reader through the pain of recounting this woeful tale of the main
issue at stake.
From the point of view of simple logic and morals, the
fact that the Nigerian workers are part of the Nigerian society
against which an injustice has been committed, presupposes that
the labour movement must also lend a voice to the people’s
effort. In so doing all forms of 97legally recognised and hitherto
illegal means are open to application. For if the constitution in
the first place does not recognise the application of the weapon
of strike as a means of resolving political crisis, the same
constitution also has no place for an act of annulment which
equally constitutes illegality in more than a way. Firstly, in the
sense that the annulling government is that without the
people’s mandate, a government that stole its way to
power brandishing the bayonet under the cover of darkness,
and has maintained itself in power trusting the bayonet in the
people’s heart. Secondly, not even the decrees promulgated by this
regime created any room for such annulment as it carried out.
The argument that the Abacha Junta was not responsible
for the annulment of the elections and/or that it must not be held
responsible for the deeds of its predecessor is equally untenable.
A Junta is a Junta. The Abacha Junta rode to power on the wave
created by the peoples struggle for the actualisation of June 12
mandate. The best such regime could do for itself and for the
society at large would have been to actualise the mandate. But
the Abacha Junta has demonstrated more than anything else that
it only came to help sweep the ‘remains’ of June 12 from the
memory of our people through cosmetic changes in the
command structures of the army, a caricature conference of
‘his’ [not our] representatives called Constitutional Conference
and the laying of bayonets in waiting for brutish blood letting in
moments of ‘irresponsible’ popular anger.
Abacha was the one who sent out the bayonet and tanks
to crush the June 12 movement in its infancy when Lagos
witnessed its biggest demonstration in history on July 5, 6,
and 7, 1993. This same regime could therefore not have been taken
seriously when it spoke of opening a chapter different from its
predecessor.
The rejuvenation of the June 12 Struggle in May, 1994 is a
testament to the fact that our 98 people, at least a section of our
people, have realised themselves [woken up from time
immemorial slumber] and come to recognise the need to defend
their honour and dignity. The refusal of a people to crumble
before the bayonet is not an act of stupidity as a trader ‘friend’ of
mine once pointed out, but rather a declaration of the human
element in such a people. There was the aspect of honour and
dignity to the June 12 Struggle, which indeed in the final
analysis determines the extent to which any people can
pursue their struggle. This, more than any other thing,
propelled the Vietnamese; it pushed the Palestinians
just as it did the Koreans to mention but a few. The 40-
hour strike, far from being an overzealous act on the part
of the Congress, in fact shows the wretchedness of the lots of
which the Congress is made up. The declaration of the 40-hour
strike was an act of cowardice in politics and reaction in thought
rather than too much radicalism, as the opponents of
political strike would want us to believe.
Ours is a country of uniqueness and several absurdities.
What else can be expected of a country of 250 (ala
Abacha) nations and nationalities (and of course tribes)
fused together by the order of the British Crown into a nationless
Crown Colony, and later, a nationless state, other than absurdities in
250 different shades?
Today, thirty-five year after independence, and on the
threshold of the twenty-first century, the ghostly figure of the
working class once again dons the misty shroud of
cowardice, in a particularly reverted fashion. The
working class was marginalised from the struggle for
independence; today the working class marginalises itself from the struggle
for democracy-what a colourful addition to our many self-
identities. 251 absurdities! - To score 100.4% is to a genius in
the field of the absurd.
99
The fact that Pascal Bafyau’s Congress carved for itself
the role of being the pall-bearer of our pro-democracy struggle
to its final resting place must not blind us from locating this
struggle in a world perspective vis-à-vis the global
working class movement. Rather, it is this that has made it even
more imperative that Pascal’s Congress be seen through a global
pro-democratic prism before its final confiscation to the evil
forest to join other untouchables preceding it and prepare the
place for other untouchables soon to come - our untouchables are
countless and the season of cleansing has come. No matter how
unpleasant it may be and no matter what role the imperialists
have carved out for themselves in the present pro-
democracy wave that started sweeping across the world since the
last year of the 80s, the objectivity of the changes going on in the
world cannot be underestimated. For the countries of the former
Eastern bloc it was a radical, disorderly, yet the only possible
retreat from a communism that has rendered itself useless to the
human person because it had purged itself of humanism or doled
out too much of humanism where bestiality and moral decay - a
legacy of more than three millennia - determined that
socialist humanism be spiced with such Western barbarisms as
strip-tease, drugs, gun-totting and the likes. For us (that is the
whole of Africa) the pro-democracy movement,
promoted by the imperialists for whatever reason, is a
training school to give back to our people their humanism, which
a hundred years of colonialism has stolen from us, a condition
which another thirty years of neo-colonial independence
has perpetuated and compounded rather than obliterate,
unsurprisingly though.
This humanism - no matter how it comes and no matter
on whose instigation - is necessary so that our people will be
able to enter the race for human development as human beings
and not a park of toothless hounds
100 behind a handful of ancient
whining lions. The oppressed strata of our society bear the
heaviest burden of this.
Perhaps this is why the pro-democracy dove, wherever it
has landed, never resumes flight until it has infested the working
class with the enlivening rhythms of strikes, street
protests and, inevitably, riot - bloody riots.
We must here recall the role played by the
Polish Dockworkers in the Solidarity under the
leadership of Lec Welesa in enforcing the disorderly
retreat-nay, flight-of Polish Communism; the role
played by the Soviet workers in crushing the August, 1991
hardliners’ coup and a host of other Caucasian contributions to
the pro-democracy experience.
In Africa the picture is even more glaring - Zaire, Benin,
Togo, Zambia, everywhere, the workers have been at the
vanguard of pro-democracy movements, introducing their own
inventives and colours.
Only at the same time as the Pascal Bafyau’s Congress
got its much needed state- bashing for its half-heartedness, in
Lesotho, the working class seized the gauntlet by plunging
headlong into a strike - a bloody strike-to protest the King’s
unconstitutional dissolution of the Parliament. The Congress of
South African Trade Unions (COSATU), an umbrella body of
trade unions just like our own NLC, played by far the
most significant role in the process leading to the
convocation of the CODESA and was never excluded,
overtly or covertly, from the CODESA effort when it eventually
took fuller shape. Everywhere in Africa, the working classes are
waking up to their strength as a political force to reckon with.
And this is in order.
At this juncture, to continue to rummage in the jungle
for reasons why the opponents of political strike should be
confiscated to the waste bin101 of a famished present and an
unenviable future is to continue to speak to the deaf. He who has
not seen reason here and now can never again see reason - he
must be spirited out of existence to make place for new test
specimens. Pascal’s Congress belongs exactly here.
August, 1994
Lagos, Nigeria
102
POSTSCRIPT
Since the foregoing lines were written, one unbelievably

horrifying event has tumbled over the other, and with June 12
always impressing its indelible mark on it, cropping up over and
over again like the proverbial bad coin.
There had been the unconvincingly rendered coup-plot
charade, the series of sporadic bombing incidents, attacks on
journalists and media houses and a host of other no less
disturbing events, all pointing to the fact that Nigeria is slipping
into anarchy. On the labour scene, events have become even
more dramatic. Pascal’s Congress’ opportunism never saved it
from the axe of the regime, which is presently, by decree,
restructuring the NLC into 29 unions and plotting to install its
agents in power. But we are glad that if this would make it more
“manageable” for the regime, it would save the progressives of
the Congress’ epileptic interjections in the people’s struggle.
Good riddance!
Sylvester Odion-Akhaine, CD General Secretary was
hauled off the CD Secretariat Rambo fashion on January 17,
1995 and was never charged to court until he was released
on the eve of New Year of 1996 under circumstances
leaving no one in doubt as to the intention of the state to
eliminate him by “accident”. His case mirrors those of countless
others currently languishing in jail or constantly on the
run, away from fascist terror.
But no event has further demonstrated the extent the
clique holding Nigeria hostage would go in sustaining its
hold on to power as did the conviction and subsequent
execution on November 10, 1995 of Ken Saro-Wiwa and
eight other Ogoni minority rights
103activists. The bestiality of the
regime is not only demonstrated by its timings of this atrocious
act to coincide with the Commonwealth meeting in Auckland,
New Zealand and the visit of FIFA president, Joao
Havelenge, but also in the frenzy of fascist “popular support”
it unleashed using the instrumentality of settlement and coercion.
The state governors who addressed the frenzied rallies of these
inglorious November days were fascists in the making. The
20,000 Nigerians who on November 21 converged on Abuja
in the “national interest” were a “fascist mob” in dress
rehearsal. The sudden recourse to anti-imperialist lampoon on
the part of the Junta’s ministers is a slip into quasi-pan-
Africanism and caricature nationalism in the face of global anti-
fascist uproar. The creation of the Federal Character
Commission and the National Reconciliation Committee last
December is an attempt to do the unfinished work of the defunct
Constitutional Conference and institutionalise fascism. Ditto for
the creation of the ‘Elder’s Committee’.
All this points to one fact: that the only way the Nigerian
ruling class can sustain itself in power under its current state of
economic debauchery is by political brigandage - by fascism.
The people must therefore learn to fight fascism. The people,
in fighting fascism, must avoid the recourse to
“rowdyism”, which is the most potent weapon in the hands of
the fascist. Popular (mass) action, led by popular organisations
is the soul of every popular struggle against fascism.
The large turnout at the December 19, 1995
NADECO rally, coming closely on the heels of Ken and other
Ogoni leader’ state-murder and the December 14 disrupted
“politicians summit” is an indication of the readiness of our
people to defy fascism. The January 4,1996 Ogoni Day rally
even further demonstrated this. The people must learn to defy
and never tire, fight and never tire, until the fascist tires.
104
January 29, 1996
Lagos, Nigeria
105

June 12 Struggle For Democracy

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June 12 In Perspective Femi Obayori

Femi Obayori 1996

This edition is published by

First Published 1996

Second edition, 2003

No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system,

Preface to first edition ………………………………..4

Preface to this edition…………………………………5

NADECO-CD Alliance: Vanguarding June 12……….6

Area Boys In June 12: Of Heroes, Villains

Kongi’s March For Justice: Rebel Laureate………….43

On The NUPENG Strike……………………………..54

The 40-Hour Strike: A Consummate Expression

The June 12 in Perspective (Five Critical Essays) is a collection

Having x-rayed the political and economic essence of the

They are merry, gay and deep-witted; the neighbourhood

On Sunday, August 14, 1994, the Lagos State Governor,

4-8th December, 1994

[i] Preparation and Pronouncement of the Strike

[ii] The Period of Kokori’s Purported Arrest

[iii] The Appearance and Aftermath

That the oil workers made a good showing of

-30/31 January, 1995.

THE 40-HOUR STRIKE: A CONSUMMATE

To begin from the beginning, so far as the 40-hour NLC strike is

In the analysis so far made, so much has been ascribed to

When a government for which subterfuge, petty

Since the foregoing lines were written, one unbelievably

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