In particular, I address the community of the Nigerian Left and say that the last thing that we should allow to mark our post-election mood and discourse is/are confusion, panic, despair, or collective and mutual self-recrimination concerning what we did or did not do during the elections and what we ought to do now. This is the purpose to which my counterintuitive premises are addressed in this analysis: a plea for sober, robust and hopeful thought and action.
The Marxist historical-materialist method of analysis is not normally or usually based on counterintuitive premises; but sometimes in exceptional historical and social circumstances like the present time, it makes use of counterintuitive reasoning and tropes, not to displace standard Marxist methods but to enrich them. This is what I hope to achieve in this analysis. However, as readers will soon find out, being counterintuitive is not the only or even the main aspect of this analysis.
I confess that I have “strayed” deliberately into the delicate territory of these mythologies and tropes of identity and belonging that were so prominent in these last elections and yet are so difficult to talk about rationally and productively, that in the end bursted negatively and destructively into open discourse at the end of the elections. In plain language, this is what I am saying here: In the first round of the elections, Nigerians from everywhere rallied to Obi and the Obidients.
In the second case, the dictator put it before the country to decide whether or not Nigeria should take loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on the condition that if we refused to go a-borrowing from those citadels of global neoliberalism, we would be forced to contend with sacrifices that come with national economic independence and self-reliance. The country overwhelmingly rejected neoliberal capitalism by choosing not to take the loans.
At any rate, this much I wish to suggest now for our long term, long range, investigation: Nigerian capitalism is so wasteful and anti-human now that to large segments of the youth, the unemployed and the poor, any project or mission of reform of Nigerian capitalism as it is lived and experienced now, will seem like liberation, if not indeed “revolutionary”.
I suspect that among the many spectacular successes of Obi and the Obidients in the 2023 elections, what stands out the most, what will or should occupy us the most is their implicit “referendum” on capitalism. The essence of their message was/is that because “production” has been taken out of it, Nigerian capitalism is causing untold harm, untold pain and suffering to all our peoples without exception. We are all in the struggle together, they are telling us all.
Not only, there was a movement. A movement that's just booting. They just tested the mic on the elections
He wasn't present in Lagos during election but he concluded and believed the hearsay that one ethnic group was harassed. Too bad.. he should not only tell us the extent, where, who,and he should let us know what also happened to voters of other parties in SE
I got bored half way!