Mass struggles, organised labour and the left in 21st century Nigeria

First published at Socialist Workers League (Nigeria).

Working-class people and youths have waged struggles of great significance over the last twenty-five years. These have been mass resistance that transformed into counter-offensives of the exploited classes and oppressed people.

They all started spontaneously, as opposition to the government’s anti-poor people policies and their impact on us, or against the repressive machinery of the state, particularly the police. But, like all uprisings, revolts and revolutions, organisation was involved throughout the life of these moments of mass struggles, in one way or the other; igniting them, helping shape how they grew, ended and the impact they had on the future growth and popularisation of radical ideas and independent organisation within the working people and fundamental change seeking youths. There will be more outbursts of mass struggle in the period we are entering. The Nigerian state is keen on pushing through a series of neoliberal reforms that will make living, which is already terrible for the people, worse. This will trigger what would be even greater mass struggles than we have witnessed thus far.

As working-class activists and revolutionary youths, it is very important that we understand the underlying dynamics of these recent mass struggles.

This is for us to draw lessons from them so that we can be better prepared and more strategically oriented and thus able to deepen incoming mass storms of revolts towards revolution. The three milestones of mass struggle in 21st century Nigeria which we shall look at in the following sections have been the #OccupyNigeria January Uprising in 2012, #EndSARS Rebellion in 2020 and the waves of #EndBadGovernance/#EndHunger protests in 2024.

#OccupyNigeria: the January Uprising

In June 2000, President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government increased fuel pump price from N26 per litre to N40. This was part of the neoliberal agenda that the civilian regime, which took over power from the military in 1999, pursued with a passion. The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) declared a strike action. They called it off after winning a partial victory. This strike started what was to become a general pattern as the government increased the price of petroleum products virtually every year.

The pattern was that organised labour’s leadership would reach out to labour’s civil society allies — basically left groups and coalitions, particularly the United Action for Democracy (UAD) — to organise mass protests jointly with the strike. The trade unions reach a deal with the government without carrying its civil society partners along. The trade unions call off the strike at its peak after reaching the deal. Civil society activists feel short-changed, and the mass of working-class people are disappointed, often labelling the labour leadership sellouts.

The strikes and mass protests got bigger in 2003 and 2004. The federal government attacked NLC, saying it was acting like an alternative government. This underscored the power of the working class which organised labour brought to bear. When the 2004 general strike and mass protests were again cancelled by NLC and the Trade Union Congress (TUC), the leftwing civil society allies of labour insisted on a formal coalition with the trade unions to avoid such unilateral cancellation from happening again. That is how the Labour and Civil Society Coalition (LASCO) came into being. The following year, a Joint Action Forum of the left organisations was constituted as the civil society bloc of the coalition. LASCO then tentatively became a tripod comprising NLC, TUC and JAF.

The Obasanjo government raised the price of fuel once more in its twilight days. This was successfully resisted. The popular classes won a full reversal for the first and only time, from the incoming Umar Musa Yar’Adua government. But, as it turned out, the struggles of the 2000s were rehearsals for what was to come as a gale of waves of crises and revolts swept across the world in the wake of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s.

The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, Occupy Wall Street, the Squares movement, and the entire heady moment of rebellion seeping through every pore of the world inspired insurrection, in the combustible situation of a fuel pump price hike, too many, in Nigeria..

The streets erupted in immediate protest over President Goodluck Jonathan’s 2012 New Year’s Day 120% fuel price increase. People trooped out in their thousands across all parts of the country to demand an immediate reversal of the price hike.

Under pressure from below by rank-and-file workers which was expressed at the emergency National Executive Council meeting of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), both the NLC and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) began an indefinite strike action on 9 January. It lasted eight days, deepening and generalising the mass protests.

The shutdown of economic activity inflicted billions of dollars in damage on the capitalist class. The union federations said they called off the strike “in order to save lives and in the interest of national survival”.

The civil society left under the platforms of JAF and UAD, and more moderate civil society formations like those from the Save Nigeria Group, called for the continuation of demonstrations after the strike was called off. They did not have a base to push this through.

For the reformist civil society groups, and members of the opposition parties that joined the mass protests, it became a launchpad for the formation of the All Progressives Congress (APC) two years later, and its victory in the 2015 general elections.

Some sections of the left also concluded that the key lesson they learnt from the January Uprising was to establish semblances of parties that the working masses would simply flock into. The short-lived Democratic Party for Socialist Reconstruction (DPSR) and Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN) were two of such efforts, which never had any root in the working-class or radical youths.

#EndSARS: Rebellion against police brutality

National and international rights bodies have documented police brutality in Nigeria as being as vile as it gets. Resistance to it also has a long history. The Special Anti-Robbery Squad, being the most deadly of the Nigeria Police Force’s units, became a metaphor for police brutality. Online campaigns using #EndSARS began in 2016/2017, sparking intermittent protests. the unit’s slaying of young Nigerians in Lagos and some other cities from 2017 to 2019.

The Take It Back (TIB) movement and the African Action Congress (AAC), its aligned revolutionary party, intensified street resistance to police brutality. It also took the popular resistance of a critical mass to the next level when it launched a #RevolutionNow, on the platform of the Coalition for Revolution (CORE) which it was at the heart of, in August 2019.

In the fourteen months from then to the #EndSARS Rebellion in October 2020, it organised a series of local, national and global mass protests. The last of these before “EndSARS” was the 2020 #October1stProtest.

Whilst TIB/AAC was organising to deepen radical struggle with its youthful membership in the thousands, organised labour’s leadership, representing millions of workers in the formal sector, was more concerned with avoiding a popular confrontation with the state and the ruling class.

Across the length and breadth of Nigeria, young people stood up against police brutality for two weeks in October 2020. The Take It Back movement sparked the rebellion in the wake of news that SARS operatives had killed someone in Ughelli.

Omoyele Sowore, the National Convener of the movement, called for mass action. And he matched this call with action. #RevolutionNow activists, who were members of TIB, headed to the Police headquarters in Abuja. Other people then joined them.

TIB, the key player in the Alausa demonstrations, collaborated with other mobilisation efforts like the Lekki Tollgate protests before the police and soldiers drowned the rebellion in blood. TIB/CORE was the left force of significance on the ground throughout the life of the protest movement.

Days before the Rebellion began, the two trade union centres called off a general strike they were to organise to protest against the hardship that working people were facing at the last minute. The reason was because they wanted to avoid igniting popular confrontation with the ruling class and its state. But their action did not get to douse the flames, which engulfed the system with the EndSARS movement.

It is instructive to note that within the #EndSARS movement, there were moderate reformists who were keen on limiting its demands. These liberals attacked TIB and Coalition for Revolution (CORE) activists in the first week of the protests.

But by the second week, the demands of TIB/CORE such as #BuhariMustGo and #EndBadGovernment became the movement’s dominant slogan. Some of these, especially #EndBadGovernance, helped define the poetry of the next mass struggle milestone, four years later.

#EndBadGovernance: Waves of anti-hardship protests

President Tinubu made it clear from the beginning of his reign that he was to General Muhammadu Buhari what the Biblical Rehoboam was to King Solomon. Where Buhari used whips of capitalism on us, Tinubu used scorpions to elevate the hardship.

The steps he immediately took on taking over the reins of power in May 2023, such as removing fuel subsidies and floating the rate of the naira to the dollar, compounded an already terrible cost-of-living crisis for the poor.

The trade unions threatened strike action in June and October. On both occasions, despite great expectations from the popular classes, the would-have-been strikes were called off after largely empty promises were made by the government.

Things took a new turn from below as we entered 2024. The year opened with a slogan of anger born out of the hardship and hunger that held the vast majority of the population in a vice-like grip: no gree for anybody this year.

It struck fear into the heart of the state, even before the people moved in resistance. The spokesperson of the Nigeria Police Force, Muyiwa Adejobi said it was “a very dangerous slogan that can trigger crises”.

But it was not the slogan that triggered any crisis. It was the hardship which had also triggered the slogan in the first place. Led by women who were peasants and poor market traders, mass action started spontaneously in the Northern cities of Minna, Suleja and Kano in the first week of February.

Within a week, it had spread across the country, making this the first of the three waves of protests against hardship and bad governance last year. As it spread further Southwards, TIB/CORE activists provided leadership for a broad spectrum of community and local youth organisations where they took to the streets in their numbers, in states like Oyo, Osun, Ondo and Ogun in the Southwest.

NLC and TUC keyed into this wave of resistance, and declared a 2-day nationwide protest in the last days of February. After a successful first day of the protests, which a broad array of radical and reformist civil society organisations joined, the trade unions called off action on the streets for the second day. It appeared they had been threatened by the state.

Then, on 31 May, NLC and TUC issued a joint call for an indefinite strike action. Their demand was for workers to be paid a minimum wage that would be a living wage considering the continued hard biting suffering that workers were facing, with sharp rises in cost of living. This would entail an upward review of the national minimum wage from N30,000 to N494,000

The strike which kicked off on 3 June with great momentum was suspended the following day, following the federal government’s verbal commitment to go beyond the N60,000 it was offering as the new national minimum wage. Eventually, the trade unions settled for a mere N70,000; a take home pay that cannot take any Nigerian worker home with the current economic climate of the country.

The civil society left organised protests on 12 June to press home the fightback against hardship that the masses had started at the beginning of the year and which it seemed the NLC was not taking far enough. This protest was tagged #WeArHungry. To derail the mass action, Juwon Sanyaolu, the TIB National Coordinator, was arrested on its eve. But this was to no avail. It was the dress rehearsal for the second wave of this milestone moment: the 1-10 August #EndBadGovernance #DaysOfRage, which we reported in the last edition of Socialist Worker.

The state ruthlessly cracked down on the protest movement. At least ten activists were arrested and charged with treason. They were not even on the ground during the protests. Their crimes were for advocating on WhatsApp platforms or speaking at press conferences. Several people were also arrested during the protests in several states of the federation. These included members of the TIB SWL.

The most nauseating aspect of this heavy-handed repression showed itself when seventy-six persons were arraigned on charges of treasonable felony on 31 October for participating in the protests. Thirty-two of these were children! And for almost three months of illegal detention, they suffered from malnourishment.

Conclusion

The cycles of resistance and mass protest are getting tighter. It took eight years from #OccupyNigeria to #EndSARS but barely four years from then to #EndBadGovernance. This is not simply the case with Nigeria. Capitalism is an international system. We can see a correlation between the cycles of mass struggles in Nigeria and the global situation.

We are also seeing the left play a more active role in laying the basis for and coordinating protest movements as a component of the labour movement, especially with the national spread and critical mass of the TIB. However, there are still sections of the left that continue to itch for patent rights relationship with the trade union bureaucracy or to use them as crutches.

There is also no sense of historical accountability. For example, the so-called “The People’s Alternative Political Movement” (T-PAPM) which these sections of the left gathered around in 2021 was clearly doomed to fail from the beginning as we pointed out. It fizzled out in no time. Instead of waking up to smell the coffee, some from its ranks queued up behind the neoliberal Labour Party or became a rump of a laughably quixotic “campaign” and later “movement” for socialist transformation.

Drawing lessons from the struggles, the recent milestones of mass struggles, the central place of the working-class for generalising the revolutionary potentials of protest cannot be overemphasised. But there are a few things that serious revolutionaries and left organisations must take into consideration.

First is a clear understanding of the conjuncture. Our point of departure must be dispassionate analyses of the current situation, for us to change it and move closer to system change. This would entail putting in perspective the dynamics of all the classes and the broad array of other social forces on the side of the oppressor class, on our popular side and in-between at the global and national levels, in the fullness of their complexities and developments.

Any serious conjunctural analysis will lead to the centrality of the Take It Back movement for any revolutionary project of the left in today’s Nigeria. Never before in Nigeria’s history has there been a body with such an extent of a critical mass of radically minded women and men who have organised electorally and on the streets for so long, and yet still, with so much potential. 

Second, we need to stop reducing the working-class, and even the trade union movement to the union bureaucracy. We have seen rank-and-file workers power time and again, particularly amongst nurses. During the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses walked out of their workplaces in defiance of both management and the union bureaucracy to protest lack of personal protective equipment and other occupational safety and health measures. And even more recently, we saw the power brought to bear against draconian review of the nurses professional verification process by the Nurses and Midwives Council of Nigeria (NMCN), organised as the Naija Nurses Forum.

So, the left needs to be able to work with, and as well challenge, the bureaucracy where necessary. We must be comradely, but honest about what has to be done in engaging with the trade union bureaucracy. This is not the same thing as simply raining abuses as most comrades do.

Most importantly, we must carry out political work of radical education, mobilisation and organising of working-class people at the workplace and in the communities, as revolutionaries. This will help lay the basis for a synergy of mass strikes and mass protests that can together confront the ruling class with the popular power we need to defeat them and win a better world.