April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

egion and the oil-bearing Niger region. If, however, the April elections
turn out wrong, then these seemingly ‘small’ fires could quickly become
part of the inferno that will ensue.
Nigeria’s stability and prosperity is vital to Africa and her trading partners.
Given the sorry record of the conservative segment of the political class
that has been in power since 1960, it has become obvious that a new brand
of politics, grounded in a progressive intellectual platform, perhaps holds
the key to the country’s regeneration. But progressive politicians are
missing in action now that the conservative camp is in disarray and the
April 2011 elections is for them take.
‘SEND DOWN THE RAIN’
So when did the rain really begin to beat Nigeria’s progressives? I mean,
seriously, the kind of rain that drenches the clothes and then seeps into
the bones threatening to cause fatal pneumonia? We must locate the
source of this rain in the first few years of Babangida’s rule. It is now
widely accepted that Babangida’s rule was an ill-wind that forced a once
proud and self-confident nation to her knees. But yet unanalysed is the
specific way in which the Babangida moment, with the IMF-promoted
Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) as its principal assault weapon,
sapped the self-confidence of Nigeria’s intellectual class and the
progressive politics that has historically used this group as a bulwark.
There can be no meaningful progressive politics without virile and active
intellectuals, in academia and embedded in the people themselves. This is
not the time to analyse Babangida’s methods and tactics. In any case the
Lagos-based ‘The News’ magazine did this in sufficient detail in 1993, in
the evening of the dictator’s rule. SAP not only killed off the middle class
that supplied the bulk of the country’s army of questing intellectuals, it
also made research and teaching in the universities a difficult, even
dangerous proposition.
For it is not only that the suddenly worthless Naira, devalued and devalued
again by the IMF battering ram, put books and academic journals out of
reach, the whole idea of SAP, and the politics of its implementation, was
hostile to the very notion of the university. The university is a site for free
and disinterested inquiry; a place where knowledge forever goes boldly
forward to challenge cant, sophistry, and entrenched power married to
illicit booty. The university and its moral equivalent anywhere in the land
(and this includes primary and secondary schools) is the only true shining
city on a hill; radiating light and combating darkness. When you kill the
university, you let slip the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
Nigeria’s progressive intellectuals had made it clear right from the onset in
1985 that they were opposed to SAP, and had strenuously mobilised
workers, students, women’s groups and even peasants all over the country
to join hands and reject Babangida’s proposed elixir. Babangida, as the
IMF, was determined to force this elixir on the patient whether it wanted
it or not.
The universities and other higher institutions in the country were the
centre of this formidable intellectual opposition, now about to balloon into
a political one too. So, even as the pitiless economics of SAP was emptying
university libraries and laboratories and transforming hitherto comfortable
middle-class university teachers into mendicants scrambling for garri and
groundnuts, the general’s storm troopers, in the shape of student-led
secret cults financed by the junta, spread out into the campuses harassing
and beating up teachers who, in Babangida’s own immortal words, were
‘teaching what they are not paid to teach’.