In the 21st century, the police have become the law enforcer, jury, and executioner of the people. For the rich, the police are the protector of their assets and wealth, whereas, for the poor, they are criminals in uniforms sanctioned by the state against them. It appears as though the police were created by the rich to police the poor. Police misconduct and abuse of power have been an ongoing debate for a long time due to the series of cases reported worldwide ranging from arbitrary arrests, harassment, torture, enforced disappearances (EDs) and extrajudicial executions (EJE), among other criminal activities. The police have long been used to oppress the masses rather than maintain peace and order. These traits of police abuse of power have manifested themselves in developed and developing countries, from the US, where the issue is intertwined with racism, to China, Nigeria and Kenya.

A brief history of the Kenyan police state

In Kenya, the first formal police unit was created by the British Government in 1907 as the British Colonial Police Force. This unit was created to protect The Crown’s commercial interests in the vast region covering Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and some parts of Tanzania. Kenya Railways introduced its police units in 1902 to protect its main infrastructural project – Kenya-Uganda Railway.

This police unit evolved over the years as the British Government continued with their rule in the region. To effectively subdue the population, they used divide and rule whereby they recruited one community to serve under their units as home guards and set them against other communities. The successive independence regimes that followed maintained these units without reforming them. They used the police to protect their newly acquired wealth and also to repress any dissident voices that questioned their authority. Through them, several arrests were made, and some enforced disappearances and deaths.

Kenya’s first post-independence assassination was the killing of General Baimunge who was a general in Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KFLA) and one of Dedan Kimathi’s confidants who led the KFLA battalions on the East side of Mount Kenya Forest covering Meru and Embu. His death was carried out by the police who were under the instructions of the first Kenyan Prime Minister, Jomo Kenyatta. This was the first betrayal committed by the first government on its war heroes. Under Moi’s rule, they were empowered even more with the creation of special units for the torture of political detainees during his authoritarian rule that went for 24 years. Prisoners of consciousness such as Maina Wa Kinyatti, Koigi Wamwere, Karimi Nduthu, GPO Oulu and Oscar Kamau King’ara among many others.

Assassinations of activists during Arab Moi’s era 

Karimi Nduthu was a renowned activist during Moi’s regime. He was the Secretary General of the Release Political Prisoners (RPP) pressure group and also served as the Mwakenya National Coordinator. Karimi was initiated into radical politics by the December 12 Movement (DTM) literature which included Pambana, Cheche and later Mwakenya materials. Karimi was from Molo and he investigated the Molo massacre and ethnic clashes during the Moi regime. Moi was a ruthless dictator who never hesitated to silence any dissident voices that seemed to oppose his iron fist rule. He made organizing a challenge for political activists and university students. This forced many of them to organize in hiding. Karimi was expelled from the University of Nairobi for his activism as a student leader in February 1985 before he could complete his degree in engineering. He was arrested in 1986 for being a member of Mwakenya and was jailed for six years at the dreaded Naivasha Maximum Prison.

He was later released in 1992 after Mothers of Political Prisoners piled pressure on the Moi regime to release political prisoners. Immediately after his release from prison, he went straight to All Saints Cathedral where mothers of political prisoners and members of Release Political Prisoners had camped. They continued to pile pressure by camping at the cathedral until all the prisoners were released. On the night of March 23 1996, Karimi was brutally murdered at his Riruta home by the infamous Jeshi la Mzee murder squad – a vicious youth militia run by the Moi government and the then ruling party, KANU. Neighbours recounted how the police, who appeared immediately at the murder scene seemed to have been there to confirm the activist’s death. To make it look like a burglary and or a theft scene, they took his possessions including books and cassettes and manuscripts. His murder is among many questionable murders and assassinations carried out by Moi’s regime through the help of his secret police squads.

The subsequent murders of human rights activists, George Paul Oulu and Oscar Kingara, in 2019 show how Extra Judicial Executions are deep-rooted and systemic in Kenya. The denial of justice to the victims to date shows how the justice system has been rigged against a section of Kenyans.

The police force has been maintained to this date to serve the ruling class and their interests in the country without any regard for the poor majority in Kenya. The fundamental structures of the police force haven’t changed since the colonial era despite the many calls for reforms in training, service delivery, maintenance of law and order, impartiality in carrying out their duties, professionalism, attitude and relationship with the public. The Kenyan set-up shows a force that has been trained to protect the elite in a country with glaring economic disparity between the ultra-rich that have controlled the country since independence and the malnourished poor populations who survive on meagre daily wages. To control these hungry and angry masses, the police force has been concentrated in the poor urban informal settlements and slums such as Mathare, Kibera, Kayole, Dandora, Kayole, Mukuru and Kariobangi. These areas that harbour the majority of the poor in Nairobi are highly policed not to offer protection but to pacify and repress them into submission. It is from these areas that many cases of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and extortions are reported every week.

Police violations and abuses disguised as special operations and crackdowns

Special operations and crackdowns in Kenya have provided ample justification for use of force, coercion, mass arbitrary arrests with subsequent disregard for the rights of arrested persons, extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances. From the crackdown on multi-party democracy crusaders, Marxist-Leninist ideologues, Mungiki, the 2007/08 Post-Election Violence, Mombasa Republican Council, the anti-terrorism fight, crime in informal settlements to the Covid-19 lockdown, the state has always flexed its muscles on unarmed civilians and created fear in communities through the police force.

In 2006 and 2007, the state launched an operation to crack down on the outlawed Mungiki Sect which had taken hold of Nairobi, Central and some parts of the Rift Valley region. This group incorporated aspects of religious, cultural and political issues. They kept dreadlocks just as the Mau Mau rebels did to show their ties to the country’s freedom fighters. Their oath-takings which were rumoured to involve the use of human blood and subsequent killings that were linked to the group invited the government to start a crackdown. Mathare and other slums in Nairobi and other regions in Central Kenya suffered a huge blow as hundreds of youths were killed by police and many others disappeared during the same time. According to a report released by a group of lawyers, more than 8040 young Kenyans were executed or tortured to death since 2002, during the five-year police crackdown on the outlawed Mungiki Sect under President Mwai Kibaki’s reign.

During the 2007-2008 post-election violence, around 1,200 Kenyans lost their lives and the police were used to kill people from the zones termed as opposition. The majority of these killings happened in informal urban settlements in Mombasa, Nairobi and Kisumu with most of the deaths being as a result of police brutality. To date, the National Police Service has never been held accountable for the atrocities committed against its own people. In Kenya, the police force has also been bashed for being impartial in their work more so during election periods.

Mombasa Republican Council was an organization formed in 1990 by separatists who wanted secession of the coastal part of Kenya. They claimed that it was time to form their own republic. The movement subsided over the years only to be revitalized in 2008 with their vocal leaders pointing to the thorny issue of land in Kenya, marginalization and skewed development. Under the Pwani Si Kenya (Coast region is not part of Kenya) slogan, they rallied residents to join them with instances of oath-taking in coastal forests being reported. The government responded by deploying contingents of police officers who used excessive force on citizens including women and children. Most of the leaders were detained and some were forced to denounce their stand. With the creation of a decentralized government in 2013 after the first election under the 2010 Constitution of Kenya, the movement waned as the creation of county governments gave the coastal people a sense of control of their issues through local governments.

When the Kenyan army entered Somalia to help the Somali Government fight the Al-Shabaab terrorist outfit, there were increased cases of terrorist activities in the country as a retaliatory response from the outfit. This led to a crackdown on citizens of Somali origin and the Muslim populations at large in Kenya. Mombasa and Nairobi became hotbeds of police crackdown by the dreaded Anti-Terrorist Police Unit (ATPU) which rounded up and arrested hundreds of suspects, some of whom were innocent, and held them in different stations for more than 24 hours. Many Muslim male residents of Eastleigh and Majengo in Nairobi fled as searches were being carried out in mosques and homes. In Mombasa and other coastal areas, young Muslims and clerics were reported murdered during this operation with some being abducted by plain-clothed police officers, never to be seen again. Some of these abductions and arrests have been carried out in front of families and friends.

The fight against crime in the informal settlements seems to be a war against the poor young black males in the Kenyan ghettos. Their poverty has criminalized them with their dreadlocks and sense of fashion used to profile them while labelling them as criminals. This has led to the execution and disappearance of many at the hands of the police. Each informal settlement has a renowned killer police officer who seems to be backed by the state to help with its covert operations of cleansing alleged crime suspects. Kayole, Mathare and Dandora all have these serial killers in police uniforms who have taken the role of the judiciary to issue instant ‘justice’ to alleged lawbreakers. Despite the overwhelming evidence against these officers, the state seems unwilling to act on them and the only action taken is the transfer and re-shuffling of officers from one area to another.

The realization that what the government was doing was cleansing young people in the informal settlements led to the mushrooming of community-based organizations to fight this injustice and bring to light and call out the massacre of the ghetto people by their government.

Social movements and the fight against extrajudicial executions (EJE)  

The Social Justice Centres Working Group (SJCWG) is the decision-making body of the Social Justice Centres Movement which is the umbrella body that brings together all the social justice Centres in Kenya. These social justice centres act as human rights defenders’ centres based in the communities. They are formed by the members of the community to find solutions to the pertinent challenges in the communities. SJCWG has over 60 centres spread across the country organizing on different political, socio-economic and cultural issues.

The social justice centres movement continues to organize against extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. To document these cases, different partners came up with The Missing Voices website and so far, 1226 Extra Judicial Execution cases and 275 Enforced Disappearance cases have been documented since 2007. The Missing Voices website is supported by Amnesty International-Kenya, Peace Brigades International-Kenya, International Justice Mission, HAKI Africa, MUHURI, Defenders Coalition, ICTJ, International Commission of Jurists, Kituo Cha Sheria, Kenya Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch, CODE for AFRICA, Heinrich Bӧll Stiftung, ODIPODEEV, Protection International-Kenya and SJCWG. These partners help to document, provide legal aid to victims and their kin, and offer psycho-social support among other services. Documenting helps to fill the gaps in evidence by layering victims’ testimony with quantitative data. It also creates a platform where one can report, sign petitions and follow trials of such cases as well as offer support.

The social justice centres working group operates under committees and the Mothers of Victims and Survivors Network (MVSN) is one of the pillar committees. The MVSN brings together mothers of victims and survivors of police brutality to provide a platform where they can share their experiences. This also acts as a social circle to enable the survivors to start the healing process as they offer each other a shoulder to lean on. They actively engage in the documentation and follow-up of EJE’s and ED’s cases in the community and then offer referrals to the right organizations. They have also been involved in publicizing their work and creating awareness about the government’s role in the protection of the dignity of human life as enshrined in Article 26 of our constitution.

Licensed to Kill

The Kenya Police seems to have been licenced by the state to do a mass cleansing of youths in the slums. In Nairobi Eastlands, “innocent till proven guilty” seems to be a preserve for the rich as the police kill without any regard for the law. More than fifty years after independence, our police force still borrows heavily from the colonial police service in its mode of operation.

During our struggle for independence, the colonial police used the media as a propaganda tool to create fear and panic among the natives. Whenever a fighter was captured or killed, the images of their mutilated bodies would be published on the front pages of the local papers to demoralize fighters. One of the images that were highly circulated was that of Dedan Kimathi lying on a stretcher handcuffed. This was to bring the Mau Mau to its knees as they believed that he was the main leader of Mau Mau. Today, social media has taken the role of the local papers. The killer police use Facebook pages to spread their propaganda leading to the self-exiling of youths due to fear. The police have become bold in their nefarious activities as they issue warnings on their targets on Facebook with the photos of the target which they then go ahead to actualize without any fear of repercussion. Just like the colonial police, they post the badly mutilated bodies with warnings to other youths involved in crime.

The government has invested heavily in arming the police force while still spending very little on social security programs, job creation and provision of social services which would drastically reduce the crime rate. The state has also neglected the well-being of its police officers as mental health issues and low wages demoralize the force from within amongst other challenges such as poor working conditions. These problems compounded have in a way contributed to the many suicide cases in the force, the increased cases of homicides among police officers, misuse of firearms and involvement in illegal activities such as robbery with violence and collaboration with criminal networks.

The threat the police pose to the public is immense and Kenyans seem to be sitting on a time bomb ready to explode when you imagine a fully armed police officer, underpaid by the government, working in poor and harsh conditions, traumatised by work, being oppressed by the seniors with no psycho-social support systems in the force and trying to survive the harsh economic conditions. These conditions create an environment for mental instability among the junior officers.

The role of women in the fight against extrajudicial killings 

Movements have always arisen up to deal with human rights abuse by the state. Women have been part and parcel of organizing and confronting the ills in the community as well as upsetting the status quo. Women in Kenya have participated in all aspects of the struggle, and they continue to do so to this day.

During the Moi regime when the government arrested young people and put them in prisons, mothers of those political prisoners and other women camped at Uhuru Park and piled pressure on the government to release the political prisoners. The government was adamant and this led to the women stripping and going on silent strike until Moi’s government started releasing the prisoners. The women fought for their sons until they were all released.

From the defiance of Mekatili wa Menza and Muthoni Nyanjiru against the colonial police during the invasion of our territories to Field Marshal Muthoni Kirima who fought alongside men during the Mau Mau years, to second liberation heroes such as Wangari Maathai, women led by showing bravery and defiance against the skewed system being enforced through the police. This baton has been passed to MVSN which continues to organize against atrocities being committed by the police in poor neighbourhoods. Being victims, survivors and witnesses of police injustices, these women chose to rise above their pain and setbacks and channel their energy and efforts by creating awareness in the community and supporting others who have been or who would have been victims. Instead of giving up, these women have transformed themselves from being victims to community human rights defenders in the different settlements they come from. They now stand as the vanguard of the communities against rogue police officers and the system that creates and supports them.

The Social Justice Movement has organized the communities against these injustices to try and force the state into accountability. Instead of initiating the investigations, the state has in recent times responded by intimidation, surveillance and a crackdown on human rights defenders. This use of excessive force was witnessed during the annual Saba Saba (July 7 2020) March For Our Lives by the Social Justice Movement when more than sixty activists, human rights defenders and members of the community were arrested for participating in this peaceful protest commemorating the activities of the second liberation struggle in Kenya.

The Kenyan police and stalled reforms

The National Police Service is not a service but a violent squad. The change in name from ‘force’ to ‘service’ did not solve its underlying issues. The police force that was inherited at independence in 1963 has largely remained the same in function, operation, and culture among other aspects. The police service was supposed to be citizen-centric in the way it handles complaints from the public. This is far from what Kenyans are used to in our local police stations. The reforms on uniforms and change of names haven’t brought about any transformation to the police culture in Kenya.

The Kenya Police Force needs radical surgery or a total overhaul and the system that created it. The many years of reform seem to have hit a brick-wall and the changes are no longer effective. The curriculum used by the Kenya Police College needs to focus more on instilling patriotism, dignity for human life and professionalism while the recruiters should focus on passion to serve rather than the physical prowess that are long outdated.

As Human Rights Defenders from Kenya, it is our prerogative to join hands with the rest of the international movements and apply pressure on our governments to defund our police forces and redirect the resources to the reduction of unemployment, provision of social services and creation of a social safety-net for vulnerable families. These efforts would go a long way in solving crime and insecurity since reforms is not a viable solution anymore.

Until we uproot the system that created this police force, it shall continue to be a ‘force’ rather than a ‘service’, the issue of mental health among the police shall continue to be a thorn in the side and cases of suicide among the force shall continue to rise. Until a radical surgery is applied, professionalism will be an alien vocabulary to our police officers; until we cut the stem that supports the moribund system that is the Kenyan Police, Kenyans and the citizens of the world shall continue to suffer in the hands of these police forces.

–

This article was first published by ROAPE.

Nigeria’s presidential election, due to be held on February 25, appears set for a surprising outcome. Several opinion polls rank Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of Nigeria’s previously marginal Labour Party, ahead of politicians from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the main opposition force, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

Obi’s popularity rests at least in part on the young voters who have rallied behind him. These supporters, known as “Obidients,” are an important and social-media savvy segment of the layer aged between 18 and 35 that constitute 42 percent of registered voters, with a strong base in the urban middle classes.

At 61 years of age, Obi himself may not be young, but he appears youthful in contrast to the other leading candidates who slur and stagger. Bola Tinubu of the APC is 70, the PDP’s Atiku Abubakar is 76, while the outgoing president Muhammadu Buhari is 80.

Obi is no novice on the Nigerian political scene, having stood as Atiku’s vice-presidential running-mate in 2019 and served as governor of Anambra state from 2007 to 2014. Yet many of his supporters still perceive him as an alternative to the establishment. The other two candidates are Establishment figures with a capital E.

While Obi is neither a savior or a socialist, the Labour candidate and his Obidents have enlivened the election campaign. They have rekindled optimism about the possibility of change and opened a discussion about the revival of a working-class political alternative. Such optimism has been in short supply over the past decade as social conditions have worsened in Nigeria.

Nigeria’s social crisis

Nigeria is by far the most populous country in Africa today. Its 220 million people face multiple crises with which the new president will have to grapple. Insecurity and violence pose a threat across the country in various forms, from the undefeated Boko Haram insurgent movement to everyday crimes and much in between. Inequality and poverty are rising.

Inflation has reached 21 percent, with unemployment at over 33.3 percent, while the minimum salary of 30,000 naira (about US$65) per month has not increased since 2018, fueling a cost-of-living crisis. 4 out of 10 people live below the poverty line, while the Nigerian elites continue to enrich themselves from the country’s vast natural resources, unable or unwilling to translate those resources into popular welfare.

Today, a country that is both petroleum-rich and petroleum-dependent is not even able to meet its OPEC production quota, and there is a local fuel shortage. For a long time, Nigeria has been a net importer of refined petroleum, with the refineries neglected and working below capacity. These problems are closely related to the extreme corruption in the country.

While the Nigerian economy grew steadily during a period of high global oil prices between 2002 and 2014, inequality and poverty also spiraled at the same time. These conditions have only worsened during the period of stagnation and serial recessions that has characterized the past decade.

Among Nigeria’s citizens, there is strong support for democracy  but deep distrust of politicians, political parties, and state institutions. The increasing prevalence of networks circulating fake news adds to popular frustration about the genuine failures of Nigerian institutions.

Breaking the mold

The 2023 election constitutes a departure from the established pattern in Nigeria’s presidential elections over the last decade in two key respects. We are seeing a break with the hegemony of the two main parties, and what seems like a surge in youth engagement.
Between 1999 and 2015, the PDP dominated national politics, winning four consecutive presidential elections, and consistently holding a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, Nigeria’s lower house. The party was a coalition of civilian elites and retired military generals that took power following Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999.

From 2003 onwards, the main challenge to PDP presidential candidates came from Muhammadu Buhari, a retired army general who served as head of state in a military government from 1983 to 1985. Buhari ran as the candidate for several different parties: he finally succeeded in 2015 with the endorsement of the recently formed APC.

It was the first time an opposition party had won the election in Nigerian history. The APC also secured a majority in the House of Representatives that year. Buhari won re-election in 2019, but was not eligible to run this time, having served two terms in office. In his stead, the APC selected Bola Tinubu, a Muslim former governor of Lagos state in the Christian-dominated south and an extremely rich political kingmaker.
For its part, the PDP has undergone an internal crisis threatening its position as the main opposition party. It chose the former vice-president Atiku Abubakar as its standard-bearer. Like Tinubu, Abubukar is a veteran Muslim politician and a very wealthy man, although he hails from the country’s north.

PDP dissenters saw his selection as a violation of “zoning”—the power-sharing arrangement whereby the party is meant to pick a southern Christian candidate following two terms served by a northern Muslim, and vice versa. The disagreement over zoning was partly what inspired Atiku’s 2019 running mate Peter Obi, a Christian from the South, to walk out of the PDP with a group of supporters and join the Labour Party (LP).

Obi quickly attracted an unlikely coalition, garnering support and praise from the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and activists in the #EndSARS campaign against police violence as well as international business publications such as the Financial Times and the Economist. The latter have complimented Obi for his business acumen and commitment to neoliberal orthodoxy.

The apparent upswing of youth interest in the election comes after a steady decline in levels of participation. Voter turnouts in presidential elections fell from 53.6 percent in 2011 to 43.7 percent in 2015 and less than 35 percent four years later. And young people have been even less likely to vote than their older counterparts.

Obi’s electoral surge has changed the stakes of the campaign. But in order to understand the rise of Obi and evaluate the wider prospects for a pro-worker political alternative, we need to take a step back and look at the recent history of protest and social movements in Nigeria.

In parallel to the increase in voter apathy over the past decade, there have been significant episodes of social mobilization in Nigeria. Two notable examples were the January 2012 Occupy Nigeria protests and the 2020 #EndSARS movement. Both had a tangible impact on the election campaigns that followed, in 2015 and 2023 respectively.

Occupy Nigeria and Buhari’s victory

Occupy Nigeria was a nationwide protest movement and general strike in January 2012 against the removal of fuel subsidies by the government of the PDP’s Goodluck Jonathan. The so-called January uprising was the biggest wave of protests since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999. The trigger came from increased fuel prices, which had an immediate impact on the cost of transport, medicine, and food. But the protest also expressed wider feelings of disappointment and mistrust in Nigeria’s experience of liberal democracy.

Trade unions had led an earlier series of fuel subsidy protests. Five took place between 2000 and 2007, and there had also been several such movements during the 1980s and ’90s. In 2012, on the other hand, a new generation of Nigerian youth using social media filled the country’s streets.

This episode did not lead to renewed ties of solidarity between the traditional labor movement and new currents in civil society. In the wake of Occupy Nigeria, civil society groups appeared to be fragmented and mutually distrustful. Unions described the activists as unorganized, disconnected, and lacking formal leadership or representation.

For their part, supporters of Occupy Nigeria accused the unions of capturing the protests and unilaterally striking a compromise deal with the government for partial reinstatement of the subsidy. They saw the unions as being more and more associated with the Nigerian elites in the capital Abuja.

Yet opposition politicians were still able to capitalize on the frustrations, energies, and demands for change that emerged from the street. Three opposition parties came together to form the APC in 2013. In addition to its “progressive” self-designation, the APC ran its 2015 campaign on the slogan “change,” with support from some key union leaders, established civil society groups, and Occupy Nigeria activists alike. The 2012 protests alone cannot explain the APC victory, but they certainly contributed to its legitimacy and success.

Tech-savvy young people, inspired by the sense of agency they had drawn from 2012, also contributed to the work of campaigning and election monitoring. Many threw their weight behind Buhari, the former dictator and “born again” democrat, in a way that resembles the current phenomenon of “Obidience.” Much like Obi today, Buhari was portrayed as a pious anti-establishment figure whose rise was based on merit and who could be trusted to take action against corruption.

In addition, Buhari was more willing to use the state in some domains of economic policy—some even called him a social democrat, albeit mistakenly—and supporters considered him more likely to improve the security situation. As a Muslim with a military background, he was expected to combat Boko Haram effectively.

This sense of hope at Buhari’s election soon gave way to anguish. His terms in office have been a massive disappointment in most areas, although some of the APC’s youth and labor supporters are still backing the incumbent party in this year’s election.

From #EndSARS to Obi

The #EndSARS protests of 2020 came just after the NLC union federation accepted the removal of fuel subsidies by the government in return for promises to revive the refineries and repeal taxes on the minimum wage. The NLC called off a planned strike against the removal of subsidies in September of that year.

The NLC later reverted to its previous position on fuel subsidies. In the short term, however, the move was widely considered a betrayal. The absence of labor mobilization left a vacuum that was soon filled by other forms of action.

A week later, there was a large-scale mobilization of urban youth who were protesting against police violence under the hashtag #EndSARS. “SARS” was the acronym for the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, which had become notorious for its violence against young people. The protest movement also took up the demand for fuel prices to be kept low and articulated a wider desire for political change.

The NLC leadership only supported the protests after coming under outside pressure, although they did not call for a strike. Whereas the 2012 strike had ended after a negotiated settlement with the government, the #EndSARS activists refused to meet public representatives. They defined themselves as a leaderless movement. With a distrustful view of institutions and politicians—and recalling what they saw as the compromised and co-opted role the unions had played in 2012—they insisted that their demands were non-negotiable.

The SARS unit was dissolved, but the protests continued and escalated. On October 20, in what Amnesty called a “brutal crackdown by security forces on peaceful #EndSARS protesters,” at least 12 people were killed in what became known as the Lekki Toll Gate massacre, further damaging the legitimacy of the APC regime.

Coming from a movement that declared itself leaderless, anti-institutional, and anti-establishment in 2020, some key #EndSARS activists have now embraced Peter Obi. There is a striking resemblance between the informal coalition of “Obidients” and the bloc of APC supporters that emerged in the wake of the 2012 fuel subsidy protest.

This should remind us that these mobilizations absorbed and articulated a range of disenchantments from across the ideological spectrum. Those sentiments could be revolutionary and opposed to neoliberalism, or based on a liberal, anti-corruption, “good governance” framework.

While some Obi supporters are avowed socialists, they come across as a fragmented group of individuals, more or less coordinated, but primarily rallying behind an individual candidate rather than representing a form of cross-societal solidarity. Obi may be credited with improving health and education in Anambra during his time as governor, but he is not a social democrat with a positive view of state intervention in the economy. His neoliberal politics and desire to extend privatizations and cut state spending conflict with the Labour Party’s own program.

Trade unions and the Labour Party

The NLC established the Labour Party in 2002. It was originally known as the Party for Social Democracy, adopting its current name the year after its foundations. It built upon a series of attempts by Nigerian labor to establish a party and translate the historical popularity of the country’s trade unions into electoral power, dating back to the days of British colonial rule.

However, a divide quickly opened between the NLC and LP leadership teams. While there have been irregular debates within the NLC about reviving the Labour Party as a working-class party, in practice it has served as an occasional platform for politicians who did not secure a place on the tickets of the larger parties.

The most successful of these politicians was Olusegun Mimiko. Mimiko left the PDP and served two terms as the LP governor of Ondo state between 2009 and 2017, only to return later to the PDP. In practice, the LP has been a marginal party: in the 2019 presidential election, its candidate received just 5,074 out of 28 million votes cast.

When the former NLC president Adams Oshiomhole ran successfully to become governor of Edo State, it was as the candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) party rather than his own Labour Party. The ACN later joined Buhari’s All Progressives Congress, and Oshiomhole was the APC’s national chairman between 2018 and 2020.

Neither the NLC nor the other main union federation, the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria, has previously given overt support to the LP (or any other party for that matter). This year’s election is an exception, although the support for Obi’s campaign has been somewhat half-hearted, with several local NLC chapters and individual union activists continuing to support the APC. Unions affiliated to the NLC had an estimated membership of seven million in 2018.

There have been factional struggles within the LP as well as between the party and the NLC. The union federation has developed its own platform of demands on behalf of Nigerian workers. The demands include a reasonable and annually negotiated minimum wage, free education from primary to tertiary level and free public health care services, an end to the privatization of public enterprises and assets, the construction of “world-class public infrastructure” such as roads and railways, and the revival of the refineries.

While the LP leadership celebrated the demands, Obi has avoided publicly endorsing them. His own program promises to transform Nigeria from a “consuming nation” to a “producing” one.

His chosen means for doing so include support for private-sector investment, “vigorously” pursuing policies of economic liberalization, and further privatizations, especially of the energy sector and the refineries. Obi’s plan to drastically reduce government spending entails public-sector job losses.

After the election

Nigeria’s left and labor movement are divided in their attitude to Obi and the LP. The smaller eco-socialist African Action Congress (AAC) party, for instance, argues that the Obi campaign is a trojan horse. So far in its history, the LP has not been capable of mobilizing union members into the party and building organizational structures beyond a narrow focus on election campaigns.

While the LP may lack those structures, the NLC does possess real organizational weight. However, its unions have been severely weakened by decades of neoliberalism and attacks on labor rights, and the congress does not have a strong network of social alliances.

Will the NLC be able to build on the historic base and structures of Nigerian trade unionism and turn the LP into an effective working-class party? And will the federation be willing and able to hold Obi accountable if he becomes Nigeria’s president?

The NLC held its national delegates’ conference on February 7 and 8 this year. Obi was present, along with the other presidential candidates, and the delegates elected a new leadership team.

While the outgoing NLC leaders had been associated with the APC, the new president Joe Ajero has a more left-wing background, and he affirmed the federation’s commitment to build a worker-centred LP. Ajero has also threatened strike action by the unions if the federal government does not immediately deliver relief to Nigeria’s citizens on price increases and the limited availability of fuel and banknotes.

As with the previous campaign of Buhari in 2015, the optimism that surrounds Obi rests more on faith in his image as a seemingly honest “outsider” than on the emergence of coherent and democratic institutions that could hold leaders accountable to the popular movements that give them strength. A victorious Obi would likely seek to reinvigorate the fight against corruption and embrace a more liberal economic direction in a departure from the unsuccessful statist experiments pursued by the Buhari administration.

However, even if Obi wins the election, he will face opposition from a parliament that will probably still be dominated by the established parties and politicians. And should he nonetheless succeed in pushing through his desired return to a more market-oriented path, this would only deepen Nigeria’s lingering crisis driven by poverty and inequality.

In this respect, an Obi administration would not differ much from one run by  Tinubu or Atiku. Indeed, the three leading candidates have all declared their intentions to again attempt to remove the fuel subsidies. The NLC has attacked these proposals and demanded concrete plans to revive the country’s refineries and provide Nigerian workers with decent jobs. If fuel subsidies are removed amid the wider economic crisis, we could see another dramatic upsurge of popular protests. The outcome, though, will depend on whether Nigerian youth and trade unions are ready to finally take charge of their own political future—within or outside of the LP—rather than continually serve to elevate the next ruling-class messiah.

Camilla Houeland is a researcher at the Fafo, Norway, and associate professor II in Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo.

–

This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

Europeans love to start the day with a little piece of Africa. Coffee for mum, tea for dad, chocolate for the little one and a banana pocketed on the fly by the teenager for the bus ride to school. Europeans know that their prosperity is built on the work of others. They know that without the oil extracted by workers in Nigeria, the coltan supplied by traders in Congo, and the uranium produced by miners in Chad, their cars wouldn’t run, their phones wouldn’t work and their homes would soon go dark. Yet, how many Europeans are able to locate the capital of Nigeria, Chad or Congo on a map? A kindergarten child can easily name several African mammals, but few would ever suggest the child memorize the name of an African language, society or personality. How can a civilization that thrives on labor in the Global South be so indifferent to these societies?

The literature provides three answers to that question. The first says roughly: It’s capitalism. Capitalism masks social relations. In order to live, workers must produce goods or provide services. But the market-based exchange of commodities transforms relations between workers. Social relations are primarily experienced as “relations between things.” This is what Karl Marx calls “commodity fetishism.” Relationships of production disappear from the field of vision. We end up treating commodities as if they had an intrinsic value, independent of the labor that produces them. Hungarian philosopher György Lukács adds that capitalism reifies social relations. Social relations are objectified, while individuals are plunged into a contemplative stance. Passive, apathetic, depoliticized: the consumer is a spectator.

While Marx and Lukács explain very well how one can use a product every day without knowing anything about the worker who produced it, they don’t tell us why certain workers, certain societies or certain groups are particularly obscured in the culture of capitalism. The economist Samir Amin would answer that capitalism only extends globally through “unequal exchange.” Colonial domination cut the world into two types of capitalist development: the self-centered capitalism of the center, with market growth, rising wages, and consumption. And the extroverted capitalism of the periphery, export-oriented and therefore without significant wage growth. This unequal division of labor logically leads to unequal awareness. While workers in the Global North may be indifferent to the fate of workers in the Global South, the reverse is not true. You can bet that a random Senegalese can name far more French cities than a random French person can name Senegalese cities.

Another form of response however would point less to capitalism and more to the state. In “The Social Production of Indifference,” the British anthropologist Michael Herzfeld shows that bureaucracy treats individuals not as persons but as “cases.” Following Max Weber, Herzfeld shows that the centralization of state power drives a rationalization of practices and a division of bureaucratic labor. The accumulation of knowledge, the creation of specialized services and the professionalization of expertise follow suit. But bureaucratization also increases social distancing. Individuals are no longer linked to each other by face-to-face relations, but by all sorts of “invisible threads:” legal categories, statistics, formalities. French sociologist Béatrice Hibou adds that, contrary to what is often thought, neoliberalism does not debureaucratize. On the contrary, it adds new forms of distancing: numerical indicators, benchmarking, and management techniques. Here again, the problem is more general than the relationship between Europeans and Africans. But colonization has also left its mark on the bureaucratic trajectory. Post-colonial bureaucracy is indifferent to the fate of peripheral populations. Cameroonian political scientist Achille Mbembé calls this “government by neglect.” It’s the exercise of power through abandonment, relegation, and invisibilization. We end up relying on experts and specialists, rather than considering problems for ourselves. Eventually, we hope, someone in charge will take care of the looming problem for us.

A third type of response of course is racism. Racial theory and the dissemination of technologies of division (apartheid, segregation, border closures, encampment) have separated emotional communities. White people do not feel concerned with Black issues; they live in the comfortable quietness of what the philosopher Charles W. Mills calls “White Ignorance.” But indifference also comes from a denial of race. For US-American sociologists Tyrone A. Forman and Amanda E. Lewis, indifference is a new form of racism. While earlier racism was explicit, contemporary racism is less so. When asked about the plight of non-white people, white Americans used to justify their misfortunes on the grounds of biological or cultural inferiority. Today, Forman and Lewis explain, they are content to just ignore it. Pretend to see nothing of the differences so as not to have to worry about them: “Racial apathy and White ignorance (i.e., not caring and not knowing) are extensions of hegemonic color-blind discourses (i.e., not seeing race)”.

Of course, the question of Europe’s indifference to the fate of the rest of the world is an old one. But this question is particularly acute today. The gap between the rapid flow of information and the indifference shown to certain population groups has never been wider. The number of drowning deaths in the Mediterranean (several thousand), the number of people suffering from hunger in Somalia (several hundred thousand), or the number of direct victims of the war in Ethiopia (more than half a million) are all widely ignored. When Europeans read in the newspapers that the war waged by the government of Ethiopia has killed more people than the war in Ukraine, their reflex is to compartmentalize by relegating it a war far away in an exotic place. Chances are they will close the journal before ever realizing that the coffee they are drinking is from there.

–

This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.