Lagos — In any case why is Nigeria's ruling class, the various segments of which in the ruling-class political parties has turned the ideology of "less government" into a religion, belly-aching about the absence of government occasioned by President Yar'Adua vacation. Because, for the toiling people of Nigeria, for public educational institutions, for basic infrastructures, for public security and other elements of public welfare, government disappeared more than ten years ago.

Clearly the ruling class needs government not for the same purposes as the masses of our people, but for the supervision of the processes of dispossessing the Nigerian people by turning all public property into private property. For, the alleged power vacuum did not impede the frenzied programme of "concessioning" [selling] public roads, selling oil blocks, selling NITEL, etc. The best that even an "NLC Chief" can say (Daily Trust, January 13, 2010: p. 64) for why Yar'Adua should be in town was that, " Nigerians need somebody to talk to them [my emphasis] on minimum wage, factory closures, energy crisis and other critical issues of governance "; what happened after Yar'Adua's government talked to ASUU for three full years! Neither did the alleged vacuum prevent CBN's Sanusi from continually assuring foreign moneyed people that Nigeria's banks are on sale! I was even reliably informed that the post-amnesty crisis in the Niger Delta has, in truth, nothing to do with the President's vacation.

The other way in which the ruling class agenda had been enhanced and entrenched is the very divisive way in which the power struggle of the Nigerian ruling circles on the President's health had been conducted. It is particularly sad that segments of the print media led the said struggle and directed its dynamics through massively hallucinatory and speculative reportage. The biggest problem with a lot of the reportage was how to identify the culprit of the handover crisis or what come to be called the anti-Jonathan forces. Some of the time, the press insists that it is the North, the northerners or some cabal or mafia (from the north) that want Yar'Adua to hold on to power. Some of the time almost supernatural powers were ascribed to Turai in the power context! When the "coup scare" surfaced, newspapers opinions were suffused with insinuations that it was northerners that were plotting. Yet nobody told us the regional configuration of pro-Jonathan and anti-Jonathan forces in FEC or NASS. Indeed, nobody told us what side Jonathan himself was on! We were not told either where this north begins or ends. Beyond all these attempts to regionalise the debate on the handover crisis, it is clear that the contours of disagreement did not strictly follow a north-south divide. The politicians were hedging their bets until the Americans came to coach them! Indeed ample newspaper reports had it that alleged anti-Jonathan forces were (are) as active in the north as, especially, in the South-South (for example see The Punch January 26, 2010:p.2; Leadership February 5, 2010: p.16).

Two important outcomes, and therefore potential consequences, of the handover crisis are the very sharp deepening of geo-political and ethno-nationalist fissures it had created on one hand, and the massive realignments that the crises is bound to engender in the ruling class circles and their party political formations all of which have really not been more than faction of PDP. First, arising from the crisis, if PDP survives, it will not be exactly the same PDP. That, of course, is not anything to celebrate because given the fluidity of alignments, decamping, and recamping, the ruling class have almost infinite capacity and ideological cohesion (across the main parties) to regroup and carry on with neo-liberal reform--deregulation, privatisation, PPI, concessioning, getting rid of poor people to build megacities etc.

The foregoing gets us to the other agenda; the agenda that is not just asking which factions of the Nigerian ruling class, in their ethnic or confessional enclaves or what they call political parties, takes state power, but whether that power is exercised in the interest of the masses of Nigeria and in the pursuit and entrenchment of their sovereignty. In spite of their factionlisation, the ruling class sustains its commitment to private accumulation through seizure of public assets (privatisation), consistent attacks on publicly-owned institutions, enactment of vicious of laws towards weakening the traditional institutions of civil society (labour laws, pension laws etc.), support for deregulation and attacks on subsidies to social services (education, health care, water supply and infrastructures) and attacks on poor peoples' settlements (Maroko, Oshodi, Lugbe, Gwagwalada).

The working peoples' agenda, the agenda of the masses of the Nigerian people is the agenda of the victims of the market-forces, a privatise-everything agenda which metamorphosed from SAP to Vision 2010 and Vision 20:2020 with the multiplicity of parastatals that now supervise the auctioning of Nigeria. The mass agenda asks questions about who owns Nigeria? It asks how come private wealth of few had bourgeoned in the midst of escalating mass poverty. It interrogates why Nigerian masses are being divided into Northerners, Middle Belters, South-South, Ibibio, Hausa, Yoruba, Idoma etc. when we are not told who owns, the oil-blocks, who owns the banks, the cement companies, the oil companies, Transcorp etc., who presided over the banks which they privatised, are now being subsidised with public funds, and are about to be auctioned to foreign "investors"! The mass agenda wonders which of the leading political parties, ethno-nationalist caucuses or geo-political or religious factions of the Nigerian bourgeoisie defended the thousands of civil servants sacked by Obasanjo, or oppose the current imposition of school fees in our neglected and decaying public schools. Which of these factions is defending the right of Nigerian teachers and workers generally to decent minimum wages across the country? Which of these factions understands that the escalation of corruption at all levels arises from the denigration, by the entire Nigerian bourgeoisie, of the primacy of public, as opposed to, private-profit purpose?

These are the questions that arose, and continue to flow, from the conflict of the agendas-the ruling-class agenda that worship private wealth and liquidate public patrimony one hand, and the mass agenda on the other. The questions underlie the war inside the ruling class and between the few rich who have taken our country to ransom, and the masses of the poor and other toilers across our country; the questions underlie the decay of public infrastructures, the collapse of public education, hospitals, roads etc., and the scandalous conditions of our peoples in the Niger Delta! The questions underlie the subversion of Nigeria's sovereignty which allows all sorts of minor functionaries of foreign powers like USA to issue condescending and audacious encyclicas about Nigeria's internal problems-problems which they helped actively to generate in the first place. These questions have been raised by many generations of nationalists and generations of toilers and their allies like Saad Zungur, Mokwugo. Okoye, Alao Aka-Bashorun, Raji Abdallah, Abubakar Zukogi, Bala Usman, Ola Oni, Michael Imuodu, Gani Fawehinmi, Gambo Sawaba, Mahmud Tukur, Adegboro, Chima Ubani, Kola Gbodi etc, to mention those who have passed on.

The said questions underscored the agenda for the struggles of the Nigerian working people whether during the Political Debates of 1986, the so-called IMF Debates of 1985/86, the anti-SAP struggles of the 1980s, the anti-military struggles of the 1980s and 1990s the anti-deregulation struggles of the last ten years and the current struggle of the Nigerian labour movement for decent living wage for Nigerian workers.

What Nigeria's toiling people and their allies are then called upon to do is to strategically re-instate their own independent platform and agenda while keeping studied watch on, and tactically intervening in the unending contradictions which the private accumulation agenda of Nigeria's ruling class and its multiplicity of factions are bound to continually engender and deepen. Failing this, Nigeria's toiling people will continued to be mobilised behind various factions of the ruling class--the class that, along with global ruling circles, continue to assure the prostrate position of the toilers of the world and to frustrate their struggles and those of their allies. That is why in spite of sprawling and money-guzzling bureaucracies and slogans such as "transparency", "due process", "rule of law", they continue to immerse our country in more and more alarming scams, corruption and electoral violence. The agenda of the ruling class and their foreign collaborators will allow neither peace nor peaceful changes. Only the agenda of Nigeria's toilers can guarantee both!