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Creative Production is the Key.
In this post I wish to explain why no Nigerian petty bourgeois politician can, or should be expected to, rescue the country from the looming socioeconomic and political disaster. The popular Nigerian belief is that leadership is the trouble/problem with the country. On the surface this assertion makes sense. Leaders direct the affairs of the country. So what they do or not do can make or mar the society. In fact, this is the rationale for elections, to replace those who are not doing well.
A little more thought would show that the very high turnover of both civilian and military leaders in Nigerian history shows the failure to produce one good leader, a statistical aberration. Once in a while a politician or military officer popularly deemed a messiah emerges. A messianic clamor builds up for him to rule the country. He assumes power but less than half-way into his tenure a corresponding clamor emerges for his head. In 1984, I referred to this development in a speech titled “ Musical Chairs and Cheers for the Music”. The contemporary examples are Buhari and Tinubu.
How is this to be explained? A curse?
Divine intervention? Or what? No explanation is offered. Instead , the same argument is recycled and recycled amid suffocating complaints, whining and stereotyping. There is no creative attempt, for example, to consider the context of political rule, especially the inherited economic structure. When context is considered it is limited to technicistic-legal framework of federalism and the form of government.
Blaming the leaders is also promoted by the pervasive bourgeois analytical focus on the individual, the strong man or the Platonian philosopher king. However, the fact that no individual can be in more than one place at a time should suggest a focus on group rather than individual, class for example.
I suggest that the best context to focus on is the power-defined relationship between Nigeria and private capital. The first major contact between the two was through the imperialism of finance capital, or monopoly capital, that founded the Nigerian nation. Its specific dynamic is the seizure of the production process of the colony and propelling it willy nilly into the international market, in the interest of the colonialist.
Colonialism transformed Nigeria fundamentally. It caused local creative production to cease. However, its most pernicious effect was that the country became dependent on the import of high value commodities and the export of low value exports.
A new set of relations of production emerged: workers involved in non-creative production, farmers, fisherfolk and herders who produced for subsistence, farmers who produced for export, foreign capitalists engaged in external production for export to Nigeria, and the petty bourgeois who serviced these other groups in one form or another.
At independence, polical power was handed to the petty bourgeois after a long nationalist struggle. Unfortunately, this struggle excluded changing the colonial system of production, in obedience to the mistaken call by Nkrumah to seek first the political kingdom.
Thus, over the years, the petty bourgeois became the major beneficiaries, defenders and promoters of the new system of production. That system has since made them wealthy, politically powerful and socially influential. Obviously, as rulers, they cannot jettison the system that made them famous. It would be tantamount to biting the fingers that fed them. This commitment to colonial economic structures is why it is trite, uninformed, flippant and seriously mistaken to complain about references to colonialism as a source of our current economic difficulties.
Furthermore, this “siamese” embrace between Nigerian rulers and the international market economy is reinforced by a corresponding national mindset, that of imitation, copyism, inferiority complex, ostantation, conspicuous consumption, rising expectation, and living above our means; 16th century posing as 21st century.
The colonialists successfully indoctrinated us into believing that in order to be civilized we must imbibe their culture and way of life, especially their religion, language and consumption habits. We acquiesced to the point that our concept of develọpment is now that of copying almost everything done in the Western nations. This attitude reinforces the acceptance of the colonially imposed structures of production which threaten our economic survival.
Now enter globalization with its more pernicious form of private capital, transnational/ multinational capital. Apart from the information revolution we associate with globalization there is much more to the phenomenon than
meets the eye. Its head, heart and soul lie in production.
It is a phenomenon of the expansion and accumulation of private capital. Its agent is not colonial imperialism but the transnational corporation. It organizes increasingly integrated economic and financial activities across borders, and produces, sources and markets its raw materials and manufactured products worldwide. Above all, its activities are organized and supervised from Japan Europe and North America by heads of multinational corporations, their respective states, the other major industrialized countries of the world, and the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They decide what is produced, how, when; how the products are distributed, in which currency, and the significance to be attached to what is produced. Most importantly, they ensure that nothing in the world hampers the the profits of the transnational production units. Hence, the structural adjustment programs.
In the so-called global village created by globalization, Nigerian-type societies are not expected to engage in creative production that is propelled by Research and Development (R&D). Hence all transnational corporations have R&D divisions but no company in Nigeria has an R&D division.
Thus, Nigerian businesses cannot innovate local products using resources in their physical, biological, climatic and social environments. But without this we cannot produce enough locally to seriously reduce import bills. This is the genesis of our foreign exchange crisis. Besides, it stultifies the creation of a scientific mind among the masses in Nigeria. The level of civilization of a country is determined by the degree of innovation of its most basic instrument of production, the hoe in Nigeria which was innovated in the 16th century or before. In other words we are still at the 16th century level of civilization in spite of the boasting, posturing and grandstanding of the petty bourgeois.
Thus, the first step in the rescue of Nigeria from imploding is to renegotiate the terms of our enforced participation in this globalized production system in such a way as to enable creative production to take place in Nigeria. The petty bourgeois are too structurally integrated into this pervasive globalized system of production to be able to help out. This is why Obasanjo is clearly the worst President since 1999. He tried to make Nigeria a mini USA , and in the process integrated the country into the global market much more than his successors.
It is left to the farmers, fisherfolk, herders and the lumpen proliteriat who are structurally better situated to tackle the problem. Hence their organisation into formidable forces capable of forming a closely knit alliance for this purpose is the historical mission of this generation. All else is simply and wastefully beating about the bush.
It is all about creative production.
And the petty bourgeois do not have the knowledge, capability, independence or will to do the needful. The masses have the will and independence. Knowledge and capability will come from their organizational activities.
