Editors note: It was learned on yesterday, April 1, 2015 that General Buhari has been declared winner of the Nigerian presidential election.
The contest for Nigeria’s presidency between Muhammadu Buhari, 71 and incumbent Goodluck Jonathan is a choice between two candidates of the African petty bourgeoisie.
The mainstream media may falsely claim it is split between Muslim and Christian, North and South and even ethnic differences. These may all play some role on how people will vote. The bottom line, though, is that the two candidates are enemies of the African workers and peasants.
General Buhari, who briefly became a president in a coup in 1983, is the main challenger. He will lead like he did in the last electoral contest of the All Progressive Congress (APC).
Goodluck Jonathan, the incumbent, represents the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
Nigeria has been in international news since the emergence of Boko Haram’s bombing and kidnapping campaigns.
Over 1.5 million people have been displaced and 13,000 people have lost their livesas a result of political violence in the recent period.
The Nigerian government of Goodluck Jonathan, the man who wears a winter cowboy hat in the heat of the African sun has shown without a doubt that the thousands of Africans dying in the North East of Nigeria—the stronghold of Boko Haram—is not his priority.
This conflict has quickly demonstrated the irrelevancy of the artificial borders imposed on us by the Berlin Conference, as the armies of Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Nigeria are forced to cooperate to contain Boko Haram’s assaults of their respective territories.
This circumstantial alliance between the four countries is opportunistic as it does not raise the question of African self-determination and its defence by a single African state force. Boko Haram is not the only illegitimate force in the region, the neo-colonial armies are themselves illegitimate forces as they are representatives of illegitimate African petty bourgeoisie social forces that have the mission of maintaining a foreign international socio-economic order in Africa.
Retaining power is Goodluck’s priority
The neocolonial mandate of Goodluck Jonathan that he acquired in 2011 is about to expire, precipitating the electoral fever that has engulfed Nigeria every four years since 1999.
The combination of the war with Boko Haram and the collapse of the price of oil makes the stakes even higher this year since Nigeria’s economy hugely depends on the export of this single fossil fuel, indispensable to colonialism.
The crisis in Nigeria is a neo-colonialism crisis, which Nkrumah defined a while ago, as the last stage of imperialism. The indirect control of Africa is in crisis. Today, the African petty bourgeoisie can choose between Western imperialism and China.
The crisis of Nigeria is above all a crisis of a lack of African self-determination—a lack of an African national economy. The biggest consumers of Nigerian oil are not in Africa. They are in Europe, North America and Asia.
Fifty-four years of subservience has accelerated the decimation of Nigerian society. Nigerian society now is such where individual success comes first and at the expense of the collective.
Colonial economy requires disposable black lives and bodies
The struggle for social and economic emancipation of the vast majority of the disenfranchised poor workers and peasants, although shaky, is blocked by the continual domination of African petty bourgeoisie leadership , including the self-declared forces who are opposed to the government.
Boko Haram is the most known for this because of its armed struggle, in recent years, against the government and the people of Nigeria.
Boko Haram has just pledged its allegiance to the ISIL caliphate, which makes it a de facto part of the Middle East based theocratic petty bourgeois armed struggle group.
The African petty bourgeoisie, just like the opportunistic rulers in precolonial Africa who collaborated with European marauders and initiated the slave trade of African bodies, do not need or not want Africans to collectively and systematically grieve about our deaths.
Such an emotional process requires a coherent narrative that asks for justice for the victims and a call to action for it to stop happening over and over again.
Think of the thousands of black bodies dying in the Sahara desert, Somali, Congo, CAR, Nigeria and Darfur battle grounds or in concentration camps known as camps for displaced people.
It is convenient for the petty bourgeoisie to keep things as they are. The bodies of the masses of dissatisfied African people which are not saleable or usable by parasitic capitalists are disposable without ceremony, just like in slave ships or in Leopold II’s rubber plantations in Congo.
Our lives have become disposable and un-grievable since the colonial assault on Africa in 1415. African women and girls are kidnap-able, mutilate-able and rape-able, in the most violent ways and the perpetrators face no consequences.
Boko Haram and Goodluck Jonathan are united in a war which does not seek Africa’s independence. They, however, want Africa to be an appendix of foreign forces aiming to acquire or maintain power for themselves at the expense of Africa.
That explains why Jonathan took about three weeks before addressing the kidnapping and disappearance of the over 200 Chibok girls in 2014. It also explains why Boni Yayi, the farcical president of Benin, would declare national days of mourning for victims of Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, when France is involved in looting and murdering in Central Africa Republic, Mali, Libya and Ivory Coast and numerous other places.
All of the problems that besiege Nigeria and the hundred million Africans who live there have their origin in the colonial relationship between the African Nation and imperialist European nations.
We cannot deal with war, ethnic violence, corruption, poor education, lack of healthcare, Ebola, Malaria etc. without recognizing that Nigeria’s economy and its products and the Nigerian political super structures are antagonists to African peoples’ right to life, liberty, environment and dignity.
Democracy requires the African working class defeat the African petty bourgeoisie’s state apparatus
Democracy means defeat of the African petty bourgeoisie’s state apparatus, end of foreign domination and ability to defend our freedom against any such foreign power.
Democracy is the power of the African worker to repress its enemies as necessary and as required. Democracy is power in the hands of the African workers.
Many African people still listen to imperialist mass media news such BBC, CNN, French International radio, etc. As a result it is a common and wrong belief that democracy means voting every four or five years, by maintaining or replacing individuals from within the same political parties.
The reality is while individuals may be replaced by new ones, the neo-colonial parties, however, do not change their agenda of betrayal, oppression and exploitation of African workers and toiling masses. The APC of Buhari and the PDFR of Goodluck Jonathan are neo-colonial parties.
We need a revolutionary African working class party for genuine change. That party is the African Socialist International, whose mission is to break the influence and leadership of African petty bourgeoisie upon the vast masses of workers and peasants and provide a vision of the future based on a united single State of Africa—as the matrix of the African nation dispersed around the world.
Electoral contests must be preparation by workers to seize state power. The African petty bourgeoisie and its imperialist allies will never peacefully concede defeat to the African workers by ballot boxes.
The only war that is legitimate in Africa is the war for the unification of the African nation with a liberated Africa as home for all Africans, “those at home and those abroad,” like Marcus Garvey said.
Destroy the Nigerian neo colonial State!
Power to the workers and poor peasants!
