Nigeria: National Transformation and the People

24 September 2012
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On September 18, I was a discussant for the paper presented by the former President of Ghana, John Kufour, at the independence anniversary lecture.

The theme was - Nigeria: Security, Development and National Transformation. In my paper, I questioned the assumption of President Jonathan that national transformation is about what presidents do on their own. I argued that transformation is what has been on-going in Nigeria for the past three decades and the motive force of the transformation has been the role of trade unions, professional associations, citizens and civil society in putting up barricades to confront three decades of military dictatorship and fight against tyranny at a very high cost to their lives and liberties. The result has the return of democracy based on popular struggles. In the march of the Nigerian people to impose the transformation agenda, those in power were stumbling blocks rather than partners. In the 1980s, our ruling classes took the side of the multilateral agencies, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They told Nigerians a narrative about how we have lived above our means in a context in which our production was not at pace our consumption so they must impose discipline and austerity on us. It was in that context that SAP was imposed. There were cuts in public employment, massive devaluation of the naira and inflation, the withdrawal of the state from social provisioning and so on.

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