The 2017 Workers’ Day has come and gone, with enough reverberations here at home and globally to once again reassert not only the primacy of Class exploitation and class struggle, but also the currency of Class struggle in popular consciousness as the pivot of human history.
From South Africa, through Turkey, to Greece and right home here in Nigeria, across at least three continents, the working class and their allies once again shook the citadels of power, and sent the high representatives of bourgeois political and economic power scurrying for safety, and pondering their grasp on power!
Such was the scale of the powerful trembling of the oppressed that in South Africa, the sitting President had to be spirited by security details out of the path of popular wrath!
In Nigeria, for more than one hour, representatives of the organised working class gathered at Eagle Square held hostage the high representatives of the state, including the Senate President, The Speaker of the HOR, and the Minister Of Labour who also doubled as the official representative of the President and the Presidency at the event!
First workers refused to listen to the representative of the Labour Ministry, a Ministry that has directly oversighted the steep rise in unemployment from roughly about 24% at the inception of this administration to just about 30% as of today!
Next they refused to allow to speak, the Minister that has presided over this manifest disemployment of the working masses, and who was to represent the President, the Oracle at Aso Rock, the Leviathan projected and elevated above the state and society by the self-proclaimed ‘Governing Party’[some will say Mis-governing Party], and the discordant regime that is ruling in its behalf.
All the entreaties to the workers to literally cease fire fell over deaf ears, made profoundly deaf by the accumulated anger over the precipitous decline in their conditions and standard of living.
Then came the Big Masquerade, a former President of the NLC and once revered labour leader, who has only recently completed a tour of duty as the Governor of Edo state. Striding confidently, he strode to the podium, attempting to douse the anger of the working mass with sweet phrases. Initially he was hailed, but as soon as workers realised that he was there to do the bidding of his new friends and masters, not theirs, they promptly treated him to the same rancorous booing with which they had met the earlier messengers of power.
Like the others before him, he was not allowed to speak, he was booed, they escorted him back to his seat like the others before him with popular protests songs, the most vociferous of which goes thus – Oole, Oole Oole, Oole, Oole, Ooelee – [literally thief, theif, theif, thief]!
Within minutes after the more than one hour siege, they began shamefacedly to sneak out of Eagle Square, protected by their security details, their tails between their legs!
The leaders of the workers kept struggling to bring some calm. They tried to clear the area around the podium, imploring workers to go back to the stands. Once again, workers, by this time emboldened by their victory, were in no mood to relent.
Not even the bravado of a loan Police Officer to clear the podium, which earned him not only the opprobrium of the people, but also the material reality of their anger, nor the introduction of Police Riot Control, Hot Water Canon Truck could get the workers to retreat.
And what was the outcome of these acts of desperation? The workers actually took over and occupied the podium. Shikenah!
Eventually after the Square had been cleared of all officialdom, the workers listened to their leaders, and a semblance of calm was restored.
What is the significance of this truly Historic Workers’ Day Rebellion? First, the massive outpouring of anger, spontaneous in its outbreak is quite significant in several ways.
It caught the state and the rulers unawares, and momentarily dented their super confident egoistic self-esteem, and self-adulation in their popular mandate!
Second, although they had sensed and known that the anger of their members was getting to boiling point, the leaders of the labour unions were also unprepared for the anger to boil over in the manner that it did.
They were as surprised as the representatives of the ruling class and the ruling administration. So what does this mean in practical terms? It is a wakeup call, not only to this government that has so far demonstrated its inability to govern; but also a wakeup call for the leaders of the workers and their allies – yes a wakeup call to all of us, period!
And although neither the ruling class as a whole, and the faction currently controlling state power; nor the leaders of the workers may realise it yet; nevertheless, the events of the workers’ day rebellion represents a distinct turning point in the relationship of the working and oppressed peoples with the ruling class under the current dispensation. A turning point that later on in future, with retrospect may be as significant as the January Uprising of 2012 was for the previous regime.
On May 1st 2017, working people of Nigeria began to take the first tentative steps to break themselves out of the suffocating cocoon of submission woven around them as a result of the message of hope and change and the historic defeat of a ruling party in the 2015 general election.
From this moment on, let no mistakes be made, things cannot be the same again. The scales are falling off the eyes of the workers. And in their rude awakening they have sent a message to their oppressors and to their leaders, that things cannot go on the same way, that things have got to really change, and that they will no longer accept and bemoan in silence the fate of excruciating poverty and hardship that they are being subjected to.
There is another significance, of a secondary but very important nature in what happened as well. And this is that each of these high representatives of officialdom, who were not allowed to speak, booed and shouted off the podium, each played very disgraceful anti-people and manifestly anti-workers role in the 2016 mobilisations towards and conduct of a general strike and mass protests against rising hardship, exemplified then by the unconscionable hike in electricity tariff and pump price of fuel, both of which actions sent inflation rate skyrocketing and workers living conditions nose diving.
It is worth putting all this rebellion in context. Historically the Workers’ Day is a day set aside, and won in bloody class battles, to celebrate the achievements and victories of the working class, and to make new demands on the state and their employers.
Since the inauguration of Nigeria’s 4th Republic on May 29th 1999 however, this important and significant working peoples’ day has been co-opted and bastardised by the state and officialdom. From a day to be marked as the Festival of the Oppressed it became a day to commemorate their servitude, and further ensnare them within the exploitative bounds of their oppressors.
On May 1st 2017 however, the workers spontaneously took action to take back their day, and return it to the edifying tradition of a Festival Of The Oppressed!
A few weeks ago, a few of us in our individual and collective capacity had issued and circulated An Open Call To Action. In this call we had anticipated that the current hardships, and the seeming inability of the regime to act to make things better will only lead to situations where mass anger will continue to build up, and will quite oftentimes burst into the open in spontaneous and more or less organised mass actions.
We had posited that where there is excruciating hardship, there will be mass anger, and that where there is suppressed mass anger, there will be outbreak of resistance and rebellion. But without organisation and platform to provide strategic leadership, what we risk is self-destructive chaos.
The Workers’ Day Rebellion has provided irrefutable proof of this analysis. It is our duty to rise up to the challenge, pick up the gauntlet, and organise to provide the needed strategic leadership to channel this anger in the right direction, towards achieving our collective social emancipation.
For better or for worse, there can be no turning back now.
JAYE GASKIA IS A CO-CONVENER OF SAY NO CAMPAIGN [SNC], NATIONAL COORDINATOR OF PROTEST TO POWER MOVEMENT [P2PM], AND A SIGNATORY TO THE OPEN CALL TO ACTION. [FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @jayegaskia; Interact with me on FaceBook: Jaye Gaskia]
