1st July, 2015
By Lanre Arogundade
Upon learning about the unfortunate demise of Emma Ezeazu, I wrote on my facebook wall on 18 May, 2015 as follows: “The news of the death of Emma Ezeazu, NANS President in 1986 is saddening and shocking. Emma’s presidency witnessed the continuation of mass students’ resistance to education commercialization and violation of students’ rights. He played his part when it mattered. May his soul rest in peace.”
In addition to the foregoing, I am pleased to contribute the following piece in honour of his memory being an updated version of a paper originally presented at a lecture organised by the students’ union of Michael Otedola College of Primary Education, Epe, Lagos State, western Nigeria on Friday, 31 October, 2014.
Historically, Nigerian students have staged major interventions and played critical roles in many of the important struggles that have one way or the other shaped the destiny of this nation. In the colonial era for example, Nigerian students as members and co-leaders of the West African Students Union (WASU), lined up behind the nationalists to demand independence for Nigeria and other countries in the sub-region.
In the immediate post-independence period in 1962, Nigerian students organised under the umbrella of the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS), protested against the then proposed Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact which would have made Nigeria a military satellite of its erstwhile colonial master – Britain.
By 1978 NUNS had to pick the gauntlet against the military regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo which had decided to commercialise education by introducing and increasing tuition fees in Nigerian universities. That struggle is what is famously referred to as Ali-Must-Go, since the then Federal Commissioner for Education was General Ahmadu Ali, one of the recent chairmen of the Peoples Democratic Party.
Under the civilian regime of Shehu Shagari from 1979 to 1983, Nigerian students, now under the umbrella of National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) and armed with a NANS Charter of Demands, consistently protested misgovernance characterised by outright looting of the treasury as well as the imposition of anti-people austerity measures like the preceding Obasanjo regime.
The Buhari-Idiagbon coup of 31 December, 1983 marked the return of the era of prolonged military rule that spanned up to sixteen years. As a NANS President during the period one could testify to the fact that the cumulative struggles of the period contributed to the eventual collapse of the military and the return of civil rule in 1999; hence, the common refrain that Nigeria is now under a democracy. The struggles were waged against corruption, anti- people capitalist policies including commercialization of education and health care, introduction of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), denial of the political right of the people, attacks on fundamental rights and press freedom, attacks on the right to independent students unionism, attacks on workers and trade union rights, the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election, etc.
Democracy however pre-supposes many things: that life would be much better for ordinary citizens especially as the country is abundantly endowed with vast natural and human resources; that the rights of students, workers, etc. would be respected; that ordinary working people would be able to come together, form political parties and contest for power without the encumbrance of costly registration fees and other obstacles designed to favour only the parties of the millionaires; that education and health care would be easily affordable; that there would be good roads and other public infrastructure, etc.
If we make an honest assessment of the state of the nation since 1999, these vital ingredients of democracy are largely missing and in some instances Nigerians are actually worse off. Doctors and other health workers have repeatedly gone on strike, making the same demand for adequate funding to enable accessible and affordable health care delivery system; Teachers have repeatedly gone on strike making the same demand for adequate funding to make education affordable and accessible to the poor; students, as was recently the case at LASU, OOU, OAU, etc. have staged protests and demonstrations against increase in fees; publicly owned institutions have been repeatedly privatised or commercialised and sold to private individuals or entities with the attendant increase in prices as it is happening to electricity and job losses; pensioners are repeatedly protesting and dying as a result of non-payment of their pensions, etc.
The question then is whether we should be talking of continuity of democracy or the discontinuity of undemocratic rule. But whichever way one addresses the question, there can be no doubt, that students have a role to play in the struggle to end oppression and replace the rule of the minority rich with that of the majority poor.
It is in this context, for example, that questions have been raised about what has become of NANS in the recent period. This is especially so given the absence of centralized coordination of the various struggles being waged on individual campuses in defence of the right to affordable education and independent students’ unionism. My answers to such questions have remained the same. Basically that though the much talked about degeneration of NANS is a reality, it should be properly situated in the prevailing social-political context and not presented as if it is peculiarly unique.
In this regard, what is happening in NANS is equally a reflection of the decline – ideological and political – in the mass movements particularly as it concerns the central labour organizations, the trade unions, etc.
On this note, let me quickly say a few things about the state of the labour movement today. Primarily, this is to stress that the current factionalization of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), which to the best of my knowledge is not based on any ideological differences, is an ill wind that blows no one any good. Indeed, it is injurious to the struggle of the Nigerian workers and masses to bail themselves out of social-economic deprivation, which is the hallmark of the capitalist system.
The kind of labour movement that is needed today is one that is united – but in opposition to the continuing attacks on workers’ rights. With the backdrop of unpaid salaries at the federal level and in many states; continuing ruthless exploitation of workers in the name of casualization; imposition of high electricity tariffs even when power supply remains very erratic; increase in cost of education, healthcare etc, such a labour movement would, for example, have called for an immediate occupation of the National Assembly to protest against allocation of insensitive wardrobe allowances and squabbles over leadership positions.
As a matter of fact, the situation today, requires a national warning strike. This much the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN) said in response to calls for strikes in states where salaries are being owed. Excerpts of the statement read: “We of the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN) call on the national leadership of the two trade union centres, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) (of both the two factions) and Trade Union Congress (TUC), to immediately call a one-day warning nationwide strike action with mass protests over the gale of unpaid salaries of workers across the country. This should be the next step in the struggle over the issue which has already broken out in a number of states.
“We welcome the directive by Ayuba Wabba, the factional President of the NLC, in his May Day speech to labour leadership in the affected states to embark on individual action. We, however, hold that it is not good enough. Given the scale and spread of this callous attack on the livelihood of workers, centrally coordinated activities of the struggle are the minimum required of the national labour leadership. Unleashing the might of Nigerian workers with a warning national strike as part of centrally planned actions by the national labour leadership can help force the defaulting state governments to pay the salaries.
“While the unpaid salaries affect only public sector unions, which belong to Ayuba Wabba’s faction of the NLC, we call on the Joe Ajaero faction to ensure that it declares open support and holds solidarity action whenever strike or any action is declared by Wabba’s faction nationally and at state level.”
But the class actions as proposed here cannot be possible if we continue to have degeneration of values across the social strata; particularly with the right wing shift in the orientation of the labour leaders just like that of the political class. We need a radical and left wing shift in orientation.
Poverty reigns amidst abundant wealth as corruption becomes the defining feature of this epoch. On the other hand, the campus hardships occasioned by near total submission to IMF and World Bank policies of education commercialization pose objective threat to vibrant unionism.
If we therefore look back again, we would see that the NANS of the mid-1980s was a NANS that was as radical as the mass and labour movements not just in Nigeria but internationally that were witnessing left wing radical upswing in the defence of publicly funded social services. Put in another way it was an era of popular mass struggles, in South Africa, in Latin America, etc. It was within this radical context that NANS during our period formed alliance with the NLC under Hassan Sumonu and jointly fought for the right to independent unionism with ASUU, to cite few examples; the underlining principle being similarity of ideological socialist orientation – and political vision for change in the larger society.
Struggles boomed as the economy boomed during the economic upswing of the period that was occasioned by high petroleum prices in Nigeria. Even at that time however, the threats were emerging. Thus while our 11-day nationwide boycott of classes in May 1984 stopped the re-introduction or increase in tuition fees by the Buhari-Idiagbon regime, it and other actions could not prevent the eradication of the subsidized cafeteria feeding system under which a meal was a mere 50 kobo (mark you not 50 Naira) across the campuses. Students were able to easily pay the dues with which their unions as well as NANS were run and for which the union leaders had to account through committees composed by the democratically elected students’ representative councils or similar bodies.
But it was also a period of transition to right wing economic and political ideology internationally and nationally with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which by the way had deviated from genuine socialism and was being bureaucratically run. So also the ascendancy of the international apostles of privatization and commercialization as symbolised by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
In that dying era of public ownership and publicly subsidized education, mass organizations like the students unions that stood in opposition to neo-liberal policies came under vicious attacks from the state including the use of cultists against radical students’ leaders. Only unionists that subscribed to the new right wing orientation would be tolerated. That was the sole purpose of post-students’ crises panels like those of General Abisoye and Justice Akanbi that were set up by the General Ibrahim Babangida regime following the nationwide protests called by the Emma Ezeazu-led NANS over the killing of four innocent students of the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria by security forces. The panels essentially recommended the dismantling of the right to independent unionism, through the so-called ‘voluntary students’ unionism’, which, for example, meant that students were no longer going to pay automatic dues to their students’ unions. One of the long term effects is the NANS of nowadays that is not actually funded by the mass of the students or the unions but could be rich enough to regularly hold conventions and meetings at Eagles Square in Abuja and sometimes inside expensive hotels.
Against this background, there is a very urgent need for the student movement to be rebuilt. One way to do this is for students to begin to organise from below to reclaim their unions and NANS from rightwing leaders. Students must begin to demand that the local union leaders and the NANS leadership should defend their interests otherwise they should be kicked out. However, if the mass movement, the trade unions, the NLC, etc. return to pro-people ideology and philosophy it would greatly help the process of re-building NANS and enhance the ability of Nigerian students to ensure the continuity of democracy or the discontinuity of undemocratic practices.
In the larger society, that would mean counter-posing to privatization and commercialization, pro-people policies of public ownership of commanding heights of the economy to make available the resources needed for all round societal development. On campuses, that would mean supporting the fight for independent unionism and associated rights. It is laughable that students unions now call themselves governments but lack the basic ingredients of governance. In our time, we were simply unions but we run self-governing but democratically accounting structures like the executive, the students’ representative council and the judicial council. So, for example, when the result of the presidential election was hotly disputed in the 1981/82 session in the University of Ife (now OAU), it was the students union judicial council that heard the case through the candidates’ ‘lawyers’ drawn from the Law Faculty and eventually pronounced the winner. There was no interference whatsoever by the university authorities despite the palpable tension. Rarely can you find that these days.
To conclude therefore, the point should be stressed that nothing about NANS should be held as sacrosanct. After all, it took the effort of radical students’ organizations to form NANS in the early eighties as replacement for National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS) which the Obasanjo regime had banned in 1978 following the Ali-Must-Go protests led by the late Segun Okeowo. A united central union is always desirable but it must be one that genuinely represents the interest of its members. In other words, Nigerian students do not have to operate under a NANS that neither stands for nor defends their aspirations. While seeking change, two, three, four, five, etc. unions can always come together and offer alternative perspectives such as platforms like the Education Rights Campaign (ERC) is curently doing. In essence, students’ unions have to be armed politically and ideologically to be able to link the struggles on the campuses with that of the working poor masses.
—Arogundade, NANS President, 1984 and member, Democratic Socialist Movement, DSM presented this piece at the colloquium in honour of Emma Ezeazu, NANS President 1986, by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) in Abuja on Monday June 29, 2015.