On Saturday, October 16, more than 3 million people took the streets of France in hundreds of demonstrations in cities and towns throughout the country in the latest national day of action against the proposed counter-reform of the pensions system. The number was on a similar scale as October 2, the last time the trade unions called a day of action on a Saturday but the movement has certainly developed further. The demonstrations were another show of strength of this movement which has lasted for months and seen 5 national days of action since the end of the summer holidays.
For the last 10 weeks the capitalist media has been whipped into a frenzy by the story of 33 trapped miners in the San Jose Copiapó copper and gold mine in Chile. Though the event has been widely covered, it has not been much reported on, but rather, it has been turned into a narrative that leaves an increasingly unoriginal Hollywood salivating with eyeball dollar signs. The television reporting, as the miners were being rescued, was nothing less than abysmal.
The Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) recently set up a Commission to investigate the extent of workers’ participation in and desire for the Labour Party. In spite of the Labour leadership’s claims that Nigerian workers do not desire a party of their own, the report of the investigation revealed the contrary.
The result of the elections to Venezuela’s National Assembly elections on Sunday was greeted by jubilation in the bourgeois media internationally. It is too early to make a definitive judgment about the results, and it has not been confirmed the right wing has overtaken the PSUV in votes. However, the deafening chorus of triumph in the international media is premature.
Trotsky once wrote, the capitalist regimes toboggan to disaster with their eyes closed. This statement perfectly describes the political situation in Nigeria. As we have stated several times before, the objective conditions require to maintain ongoing bourgeois democracy has completely eroded few years ago; it has become a mere empty shell, a corpse waiting to be buried. It is an apparatus that is incapable of living and yet unwilling to die. So as to artificially extend its lifespan beyond its limit, the present regime has been clinging on anything on its way. The recent casualty of this clinging game is electoral reforms.
This article first appear on the December 2009 Edition of the Workers' Alternative.
No doubt, the Nigerian working class is the largest and most powerful singular force in the land. This undisputable fact is confirmed further by the fact that nothing can work without workers; this reality does not just apply to Nigeria but it is also an international reality. Over 10 million workers are in organized labour in Nigeria, NLC and TUC. Millions of Nigerian workers who are yet to be unionized and millions other poor strata of the society are natural allies of workers and look towards the organized labour for support at most times. The massive support all the general strikes called by labour against fuel price increases and deregulation confirms this fact.
Nine years ago the whole was shocked by the dramatic suicide attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. That event was subsequently used as an excuse to increase massively spending on arms, to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and step up military operations in other parts of the world, all encapsulated in the idea of the “war on terror”. Today the world, far from being a safer place, has become more unstable, more dangerous. This is a clear symptom of the sickness that afflicts capitalism in its senile phase.
On September 26 the people of Venezuela will be electing a new National Assembly. The reactionary Oligarchy, backed by imperialism, is taking advantage of the shortcomings of the revolution to strengthen its position and prepare for the counter-revolution. The Venezuelan revolution has gone a long way, but key economic levers are still in the hands of the Oligarchy. What is required is to fully carry out the socialist revolution and expropriate the capitalists and landlords. That is the only way of making the revolution irreversible.
TOTAL OPPOSITION TO DEREGULATION!
Martins Onovo (leader of Strategic Union of Professionals for the Advancement of Nigeria, SUPA) could end up been another hero in the eyes of millions of toiling masses in Nigeria. What did he do? He came out with more facts, figures and arguments that further confirm that fuel prices increases can never work and has never worked in Nigeria since the first increase on Oct 1 1978 by the then Obasanjo military regime. And that the current plan to totally deregulated would not only fail but would lead to more terrible conditions for the economy and masses as a whole.
The work of the Pakistani Marxists of The Struggle has been noted, both by our friends in the labour movement and also our enemies. The work has been extremely successful. Unfortunately, in the course of building a principled Marxist tendency, some comrades can fall victims of opportunist adaptation. This is the case of former IMT member and ex-member of the National Assembly, Manzoor Ahmed. In this Statement of the EC of The Struggle we set the record straight on what happened.
On the night of March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was shot through the heart by killers, carrying out orders that came straight from the reactionary oligarchy that rules over the country. He was killed because he was giving voice to the needs of the oppressed. To this day justice has not been done and the masses are still waiting.
Over the weekend of March 6-7, hundreds of people, including many women and children, were butchered like animals in ethnic conflicts near the city of Jos in Nigeria. This is not the first time such ethnic strife has erupted. It is a symptom of the decay of Nigerian society under the rule of a parasitic local bourgeoisie at the service of imperialism.
The physical ill-health of the present President of Nigeria is compounding the crisis of the regime. But whoever the ruling class replace him with, the anti-worker policies will stay the same. What is required is for the Nigerian Labour Party to break with the bourgeois elements and pose as a completely independent party of the working class.
After the blow to the Nigerian economy by the sharp fall in the price of oil, due to falling demand on a global scale, now that there are signs of recovery in the advanced capitalist economies, the price of oil has been rising for some time, although not reaching anywhere near the peak of over US$140 per barrel. Thus, Nigeria is also set to grow, but all this hides the real underlying weaknesses of the Nigerian economy.
The 3rd National Convention of Labour Party took place in Abuja on Saturday 12th December, 2009. The convention was divided into two sessions. The first session was the presentation of paper on the electoral reform by formal senator, Jonathan Zwingina, Justice Mustapha Akanbi ICPC Chairman, and lastly, a solidarity message by the General Secretary of Nigerian Labour Congress, John Odah. The second session was dedicated to constitutional review, dissolution of National Executive Council and election of new National Executive Council of the Party.
As the financial crisis continues to bite harder, Nigerian ruling class through their executioner; Central Bank of Nigeria keeps transferring the burden on the mass of bank workers. The bank executives who in the first instance, immensely benefited from the cause of this crisis are only barked at and slapped, but the real hangman dagger of the ruling class has been consistently directed against the workers who have always been at the receiving ends both before and during the crisis.
The coup in Honduras and the stepping up of a US military presence in Colombia are serious warnings to the masses of Latin America. On top of this the present world economic crisis is having an impact on the Venezuelan economy. All this is posing very sharply the need for a turn to a genuine revolutionary programme on the part of the Bolivarian movement.
In the last couple of months events in Venezuela and other Latin American countries have enormously sharpened the contradictions between revolution and counter-revolution. First there was the coup in Honduras at the end of June, which acted as a warning for the masses in El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Then there was the announcement of the plans to upgrade the US military presence in Colombia, which has provoked a severe diplomatic crisis between Venezuela and Colombia and a state of alert among the Bolivarian masses. Most importantly, however, the world economic recession has had profound effects on the situation in Venezuela, where workers are now facing ferocious attacks from the bosses.
“Poor Mexico! So far from God, so near to the United States.” The famous words of Porfirio Díaz are truer today than at any time in the tempestuous history of this country. The crisis of world capitalism has hit Mexico hard. And its extreme dependence on the USA, which previously was presented as something beneficial to the Mexican economy, has turned out to be a colossal problem.
The recent commemoration on October 19 2009 of the death of Dele Giwa , the late editor-in-chief/co-founder of Newswatch Magazine, who was killed by a parcel bomb 23 years ago while at the heart of investigating one of the deeds of the then military regime of Ibrahim Babaginda, again brought back to life one of the many uncommon roles played by Gani Fawehinmi in the life of a nation before he was carted away after a protracted struggle with lung cancer on the 4th of September, 2009. The ceremony held at the auditorium of the Lagos Television (LTV8) was organised by a collection of individuals tagged the Friends of Fawehinmi (FoF). Gani was the late journalist’s lawyer and he was in the fore-front of the crusade to unravel who killed Dele Giwa; he had raised accusing fingers toward the direction of Gen Babaginda and those of his military intelligence aides: Cols. Akilu and Togun.
Introduction
Like a thief in the night, crisis in Nigerian financial sector entered when Nigerian bourgeois think-thanks least expected it. When the crisis first showed its naked faces, it was fiercely denied, being extremely superstitious set of people, the bourgeois economists refused to acknowledge and talked about it. They simply rejected it in Jesus name!
Unfortunately, truth is a stubborn thing; whether you acknowledge it or not, the truth will always catch up with you. Suddenly, Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, (Lamido Sanusi) publicly lamented the imminent collapse of the entire Financial Sector, immediately 420 Billion Naira was coughed out within seconds to bail-out five of the threatened banks, not long after, another 220 Billion Naira dolled out for another three banks. Recently, another $2 Billion (Over 300 Billion Naira) was injected to re-inflate the economy. Close to a trillion Naira already dropped, but instead of the situation improving, it is rather deteriorating. All the Bank directors and executives of the affected banks have been severally harassed and legally challenged, all the debtors prosecuted, but is this crisis caused by the misdeed of some individuals as its been advertised or it is a crisis of Capitalism? Is this crisis avoidable under capitalism or it is inevitable outcome of this barbaric, blood sucking, all for profit systems called Capitalism? These are few of the issues look into by this article.
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