After the four-day warning general strike, the Nigerian unions are calling on workers to resume strike action on November 16. This time it will no longer be limited to the issue of the price of fuel. The situation is becoming very tense. The workers have reached the limit of what they can take. They are putting immense pressure on the leadership of the NLC to act decisively.
The planned November 16 general strike in Nigeria was called off at the
last minute after the government accepted a small reduction in the
price of fuel. We have seen this scenario before. The government has
been let off the hook yet again, but for how long?
The impasse of the Obasanjo regime has provoked one general strike
after another. The situation is very explosive. To try and divert
attention from the real issues the regime has now come up with the idea
of a delegate conference known as “National Dialogue”, which opened on
February 21. The petit-bourgeois opposition is calling for an
alternative conference. Both are clearly diversions aimed at holding
back the movement of the masses. The only way out is for the NLC
leaders to break with all these manoeuvres and build a party of labour.
With some delay we received this report on the May Day rallies in
Lagos, Nigeria. We are publishing it because it gives a taste of the
militant mood that is developing among Nigerian workers.
In Part Two of his article, Didi Cheeka shows how Soyinka's works express
the struggle for " the liberation of the individual, for the individual, by
the individual and the removal of general liberation for the mass of the people".
It arises from the petit-bourgeois intellectual's conception of human nature in completely individualistic terms, divorced from
all social being. It is, nevertheless, a tribute to Soyinka that at the height
of the ethnic cleansing that presaged the Nigeria/Biafra civil war he was shrill
in his condemnation of the perpetrators. He paid for this with 27 months in
detention. Again he protested against the brutal repression of students in 1978.
But his individual and petit-bourgeois approach has now led him to have
illusions in the present party of government, the PDP.