A casual look at any Nigerian newspaper shows serious discontent with the government. In an interview with Oshiomhole, the president of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) by Funmi Komolafe in Vanguard May 1 (May day) issue, he said: "The power sector remains epileptic, water remains unavailable in most respects." Water and electricity are basic necessities for the health and prosperity of any modern society in the 21st century. A government which cannot provide these does not deserve to exist. It should be pointed out that every single government in Nigeria since independence has failed the people in this way. The problem is therefore, perhaps, beyond any particular government or any particular president.

Different members of the intellectual class have ben eloquent in highlighting different consequences of this problem, from massive unemployment and underemployment to high crime and insecurity, from hunger and malnutrition to poor or non-existent sanitation. However, they have been mostly short on solutions different from what has already failed us. Some think that once government can get rid of corruption everything will be great. A crusade against corruption is currently being waged by courageous Mrs. Akunyili and her group, but it does not appear that the level of corruption in the Nigerian society has decreased very much it also does not appear to make a dent on the everyday problems of the common people.

Working masses
The bulk of intelligentsia seem to think that if only we have real democracy, we will be able to get a messiah president like Nelson Mandela who will fix everything. The next presidential election is in 2007 but already the struggle has begun. So much time and space are being used discussing whether IBB will run, or whether Obasanjo will run for an unprecedented third term or whether there should be an Igbo president. The Igbo elite have been screaming its their turn. In an article in gamji.com by Zulfikar Aliyu Adamu entitled:

"If I were an Igbo man", undertook to advise the Igbos, to form an economic think-tank that would fashion out the road-map to your economic dominance in the country!. This may well suit the Igbo elite, but the rank and file Igbo working masses have no need and are in no position to dominate the economy of the country. Their position is basically not different from that of the Hausa/Fulani working masses (the Talakawa). Femi Ajayi wrote an article entitled, Ndigbo road to 2007 presidential race: We must become the change we wish to see, in Nigeriaworld.com and said, the Igbo people disappointed themselves in the last presidential election, 2003. It is ironic that they all wanted to be the president without agreeing on any consensus candidate, no common front for the Igbo people. There is actually no common political front between the Igbo working masses and their elite politicians and this is equally true for the Yoruba as well as the Hausa/Fulani working masses.

The ethnic political platforms have been used by the different ethnic, political and business elite for bargaining their share of the so-called national cake. But baking this national cake has been the preserve of the ordinary working people of all ethnic groups. The Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa and Fulani working masses have move in common than with their respective ethnic elite.
Since the demise of the former Soviet Union, everybody is talking about democracy. It is out of style to talk about socialism or communism.  George Bush senior declared a new world order led by the United States. George Bush Jnr. now launched a crusade for this new world order with democracy as its battle cry.  But Nigeria is one of the democratic regimes in George Bush’s definition with an elected President Obasanjo, who is okay with the US government. Complaints about Obasanjo is essentially unimportant. Some of his critics accuse him of being dictatorial, and he in turn accuses them back of wanting to derail democracy in Nigeria.

Democracy has become the buzz word for market capitalism.  In the apparent US definition, democratic regimes in the so-called developing countries are governments whose economies operate by the guidelines set down for them by the World Bank and IMF. The main aspects of these guidelines are privatisation of public industries, massive cuts in social services and open local markets to the products of multi-national corporations.  Never mind that this is resulting in increasing impoverishment of the masses while at the same time increasing the appetite for consumption of highly manufactured goods. This deadly combination have very severe negative social consequences in countries like Nigeria.

Dictatorship government
Democracy or a lack of it is not our problem. Since the rise of democracy in Europe and United States it has never been for everybody. Listen to some of the fathers of American democracy. Alexander Hamilton wrote, the people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right and he recommended a centralised government to check the impudence of democracy. James Madison thought that it was necessary for persons of wealth and power to control the affairs of the nation in order to check the leveling impulses of the property less multitude who composed the majority faction. Thus, while proclaiming a system of government that represents all citizens,  in practice, even the fathers of democracy set out to build a government controlled by the propertied class.

It is clearly not possible to have an egalitarian political system without an egalitarian economic system. One of the great teachers of the working people of the world, the Russian born V.I. Lenin, showed clearly, in a document entitled the state and revolution, that all governments are dictatorships of one class over another, and also a democracy only for the ruling class. The issue for us is therefore democracy but democracy for who?
grows up with the acquisition of valuable property and that till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor?  Adam Smith who is said to be the father of capitalism. 

This is from the hose’s mouth.  Somebody lied to us.  They told us that if we have democracy then the government is for every citizen.  They failed to tell us the relationship between government and wealth.  The fathers of democracy knew this relationship, but they carefully concealed it from common people in cleverly written constitutions.  Our political scientists and lawyers are forever writing constitutions.  Now, in our own case, every clan, village, town, even family groupings are writing constitutions and there is always a sense of importance associated with this.  Where has that got us?  What we need, instead, is a good understanding of political economy.  What we need is to figure out how to organise ourselves in order to be able to produce and reproduce our means of existence by ourselves.

It is clear that the poor and propertyless cannot obtain these tools from agents of the propertied class who had perfected the art of hiding the true nature of things lest the poor might rebel.  We must turn to one of the greatest teachers of working people ever, Karl Marx, the Einstein of the science of society.  He also understood the relationship between government and wealth, but instead of hiding it from the propertyless like our social scientists, he proceeded to explain it in great detail to them and to show the path that will lead to eradication of poverty.

 No wonder why the propertied classes consider him a villain.  They have been making continuous efforts using their traditional economists, to disprove him, but every time they come back to the conclusions he arrived at over a century ago.  They say that the reversals of socialism in the former Soviet Union and China show that the teachings of Marx were not realistic.  This is like saying that the failure of the first rockets into space show that the physics of rockets is unrealistic.  The fact is that the rocket that failed was based on the physics of rockets and the correction that made subsequent ones work were also based on the physics of rockets. 

The first rocket failure did not prove that witchcraft or prayer or metaphysics is the best way of solving rocket problems or that it is impossible to send rockets into space.  Likewise, the failures in Soviet Union and China have not proven that Marxism, the science of society is unrealistic.  Rather, the solution of the problems of socialism also lie with Marxism.  We need to study historical and dialectical materialism and use them to understand political economy in order to understand the shortcomings of socialism and how to correct them.

Our future lies with collectives if we are going to survive.  There is need for self reliant cooperatives in the villages.  Anytime a people are beleaguered, they maximise their chance of survival by pooling together.

The cooperative system is an expression of this spirit.  It served our ancestors very well, otherwise many of us would not be here today.  In a separate article on Anambra State crisis, I have shown the proof of its economic viability even in capitalist terms.  The social viability is incalculable.  It is the best way for people with no capital to produce and distribute their needs.  The city dwelling workers also need to be organised to be able to make demands on the government.  Block associations, tenant associations can be formed.