By Charles Onunaiju

Barely a year into office, President Buhari’s government seems set on a collision course with the popular forces and organizations that lent their weight and support to his historic electoral victory. The Nigeria Labour Congress, (NLC), Trade Union Congress (TUC) and civil society groups have declared national industrial and popular action over government’s insensitive action to raise the pump price of petrol by over 50%.
The ripple effects of the increase will affect other basic and essential commodities and would undoubtedly squeeze further the harsh and hard life of the majority of Nigerians. After promising to break with the ineptitude and insider abuse that characterized the previous administration in the handling of the oil industry, the present government is now paradoxically citing the activities of smugglers across the borders as one of the reasons for the increase of the pump price of petrol.
However, in spite of what are officially cited as reasons, the fundamental reason is certainly ideological and the unimaginative assumption that whatever works in Washington and the West must also work here. This trend of ideological thought and political cum economic practice that has taken root in the world-view of Nigerian successive governing elite since the military era of the middle 1980s has remained the bane of the country’s socio-economic development.
President Buhari represents to many Nigerians a refreshing alternative to the endemic ideological strap of his predecessors. In spite of his moral probity and integrity in public office, President Buhari was generally thought to be a bulwark to the ideological offensives of neo-liberalism and the national parasitic elite that promotes it, in conjunction with the metropolitan establishment in the West. Of course, on assumption of office, on the mantra of ‘Change’ broadly articulated by his political party and other popular social forces, including organized labour, activist artisans and peasants, President Buhari faced the same historic dilemma of the immediate post-independence elites, most graphically illustrated by Africa’s most robust theoretician and the late founder of the party of independence for Guinea and Cape Verde, Amilcar Cabral. Cabral reportedly posited that Africa’s independence elites have a historic choice either to commit suicide as a class and be reborn again as revolutionary workers and peasants in full representation of their people’s aspirations or remain pseudo imperialist surrogates through which their aspirations could be asphyxiated. There is no gainsaying that the cozy choice made by the post-independence elites account largely for the condition of the continent.
President Buhari, whose historic victory is certainly beyond electoral victory and reaches to the fundamental question of the direction of the country’s destiny and future construction, seems to have settled for the historic betrayal of the popular masses, in demonstration of the characteristic petty-bourgeois nationalism and their empty pseudo-patriotic sloganeering.
The struggle to bring president Buhari to office is not so much about his vaunted integrity but largely on the popular perception that he has the political will to find a suitable graveyard for the neo-liberal agenda, whose insidious ploy has been to orchestrate the under-development of Nigeria in particular and Africa in general. There is no doubt that Nigeria is in dire need of reform but reforms, whether economic or political or both, are not the prerogative of neo-liberalism.
The perverse neo-liberal order of the 16 years rule of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), some say, led to the widespread criminalization of the state as a looting machine in which a fraction of the elite mindlessly plundered the commonwealth. The basic assumption of a neo-liberal order are either historically untenable here or are conspicuous by their glaring absence.
The political and economic variables conducive to neo-liberalism are exceptionally marginal and the crop of its pretenders here are economically unviable and socially parasitic. Against the background of under-developed productive forces, the economic root of independent national bourgeoisie that could exercise autonomous social action in a composite and functional neo-liberal order is patently absent here. To grasp the social and political context of neo-liberalism or other alternate social system requires a huge theoretical acumen and deep political insight. The first sign that President Buhari’s government would wobble and fumble was the choice of his cabinet.
The petroleum minister, Dr Ibe Kackukwu, a former employee of Exxon Mobil, was primed to hit at one of President Buhari’s long held view of subsidized petrol for the people. Now,  President Buhari has fired his first and most unkind salvo at the people who braced intimidation to elect him as a democratically elected leader. The labour movement and its civil society allies must articulate their position beyond the rejection of neo-liberal offensives, now putatively represented by the deadly injury of excessively priced petroleum products in appeasement of international finance capital and its local surrogates.
The labour movement in recent times has focused mainly on rejecting what it does not want, but has been unable to articulate what it actually wants. The problem largely arose from the de-ideologization of labour movement.
Historically, the labour movement boldly and energetically articulates the socialist world view as the critical base to surmount the inherent unsuitable condition for capitalist formation.

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•Onunaiju writes from Abuja.