Comrade Dr Segun Osoba and Class Struggle in Nigeria since the mid-1970s.

Omotoye Olorode,

[Member, Movement for Socialist Transformation (MOST) Secretariat Collective].

Odoje Biodiversity Center,

Odoje-Orile,

Ogbomoso.

omotoopo@gmail.com

 

Introduction

On at least three occasions (1992, 2015, and 2023) some of us have had the privilege to reflect on our individual and collective encounters (since 1970) with Comrade Dr Segun Osoba as a friend, as a committed intellectual, and as a leading Comrade and mentor in our engagement with the struggle of the working people and the oppressed in and beyond Nigeria. These occasions were Comrade Osoba’s retirement at Obafemi Awolowo University in 1992, at his 80th Birthday get-together at Ijebu-Ode in March, 2015 and at the Segun Osoba Conference at the Tai Solarin University of Education (TASUED), again at Ijebu Ode, in December, 2023.

We have reflected not only on Comrade Dr Segun Osoba’s engagement with teaching and researching economic and social history, especially at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile-Ife, but on his political practice throughout the period of our encounter with him (see Olorode and Awopetu, 2023).

We need to delimit the period of our active encounter with Comrade Segun Osoba roughly as between 1970 and 2010; that was up to twenty years before he retired as a senior lecturer at Ife. We were of course, at less active levels of interaction with him from then until his transition on May 14, 2026. Within that period major public policy shifts have occurred as a prelude to the current total take-over of Nigeria by neo-liberal forces. In the process, the victims of neo-liberal forces, that were led for years by the armed wing of the Nigerian bourgeoisie, responded patriotically and creatively until their resistance began to ebb at the end of the 1980s as a result of internal subversion and attack from a more confident agency of market forces ideology and “liberal democracy”. Of course, liberal democracy and its periodic electoral contests among factions of the bourgeoisie which they call political parties continued to enable the dismantling of the public sector and unprecedented private, largely primitive, accumulation. In all of these the ruling class as, Osoba observed, in one of the references cited below, continues to enact and manipulate regional, ethic-nationalist and confessional antipathies among their class victims—Nigeria’s working and oppressed people.

In this presentation, I intend to explore the nature of the ebb, if not full collapse, of the resistance of the movement of the oppressed and the collapse of its parallels at the global level, and in relation to the crisis of capitalism, and management of the crisis in the metropolises and the peripheries, like Nigeria, under neo-liberalism.

 In the course of our effective resistance in the 1980s and 1990s to capitalism and ruling class management of the crisis, our movement had become weakened and splintered in spite of various attempts to maintain its cohesion. It is obvious that this splintering had to do with different visions and perceptions of strategy and tactics. These differences have always been there. Having regard to weakening and loss of cohesion in the movement, the question of how to restore strength and cohesion (generally captured as the question of “left unity”) had arisen repeatedly, but quite often parried with the mantra of “principled unity”. The time has come, if the solution is not overdue, for us to clearly determine what these principles are if we are going to deal with the urgent historical emergency that confronts Nigeria’s working people.

As part of the introduction to this discussion, I wish to highlight some thoughts concerning the dialectical relationship between individuals and collectivities and the influence of the environments and times in which they operate. Many questions arise, including speculative ones, such as the “What ifs…” This appears important as empirical materials for emphasizing unequal development and degrees of exemplariness of individuals in the evolution, quality of work, cohesion, and endurance of the contributions, visions and limitations of organizations and organising.

 

Segun Osoba: Nigeria’s Neo-colonial Character, the Nigerian bourgeoisie and the Deepening Crisis of Underdevelopment Today.

Two main forces that have shaped the fate of most countries like Nigeria that suffered colonial conquest and exploitation are continued foreign exploitation of former territories, and unending collaboration of indigenous elites with the foreign exploiters as junior partners. Under this situation which Kwame Nkrumah (1965) called neo-colonialism, and further characterized as one in which foreign economic interests, state actors and all, exercise power without responsibility. Osoba (1987) captured this situation regarding colonialism and de-colonisation as follows:

A most significant outcome of British colonial rule in Nigeria was the creation of an economy that was foreign-dependent and export oriented, and an elite, which, conditioned by the colonial educational system and persuaded by the substantial political and economic advantages that would accrue to it from power-sharing with the colonial authorities, was broadly committed to protecting this colonial economic bequest.

The ideological and programmatic foundation of the “bequest” was the World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) Report, The Economic Development of Nigeria, of 1955!

Having regard to the establishment and maintenance of the said colonial “bequest”, Osoba (Ibid) highlighted the significant element of the development and the activities of what he termed a “counter-elite”:       

The Counter-elite……..was organizationally and ideologically heterogeneous. It included groups belonging to one or other of the established elitist parties… and also elements of radical youth … and trade union bodies which owned no allegiance to any existing political parties. At various times, it also had in its ranks whole parties, which had been thrown into the opposition and political disadvantage… or were being threatened with political extinction. 

These are all characteristics of the counter elite which remain extant in today’s Nigeria, and which manifest as political parties that are, actually, factions of one single party!

The divide-and-rule strategy which colonialism deployed in the administration of Nigeria also continues to be central to governance policies of the post-independence ruling class up till today. In this regard, Osoba (1969) observed regarding the period around 1960:

As progress was made in the 1960s towards self-government, the single-minded ruthlessness, with which the majority ethnic groups in the regions-Hausa-Fulani  in the North, Ibo in the East and Yoruba in the West—tried to strengthen their political control of their home regions by conformity, provoked new fissiparous tendencies in the regions themselves. Consequently, the 1980s and 1960s, apart from the acrimonious rivalry and antagonism among Nigeria’s three main ethnic groups, the other main disruption factor in Nigeria politics was the demand, sometimes backed up with violence, by minority ethnic groups in the regions for political autonomy.

The same fissiparous tendencies underpin the unending agitation for the creation of more (and new) states and new local government councils! 

Claude Ake (1978: pp. 71) tied together the political economy of this pre-independence and neocolonial situations, in general terms, of the pre-occupation of the neo-colonial ruling class with private, and largely, primitive accumulation:

… primitive accumulation is taking place all over Africa: the direct use of coercion to appropriate economic surplus or the means of production…..Sometimes it is done under the cover political conflict….Sometimes it is done under the cover of religious or ethnic conflict…..Quite often it takes the form of direct class action. For instance, many of the land registration and consolidation conflicts were a cover for depriving peasants of their land and for capitalizing agriculture… As the hegemonic faction of the ruling class successfully uses force to expropriate other factions of the ruling class as well as peasants and workers, the concentration of energy on politics is reinforced. 

Osoba’s (1996) piece exemplified the mode and magnitude of corruption (primitive accumulation, including privatization which Chief Bola Ige, Obasanjo’s Minister called “looting” in Karl Maeir’s 2001  This House has Fallen). We must understand what the ruling class call corruption, then, as the logical consequence of private wealth, largely primitive, accumulation under capitalism. Copying their masters in Europe and America, they reduce this consequence of accumulation to a moral, rather than structural and ideological, matter! That way, the ruling class constantly seeks to persuade their victims that sermons will alter what the ruling class use their political and economic dominance to actively enforce.

Class Struggle, Crisis of Capitalism and Crisis of  the Left in the Metropolises and the Peripheries like Nigeria.

Perhaps, the best review of the relevant issues concerning the crisis of capitalism in the West was the preface of Kagarlitsky’s (1991: pp. vi-x) book. It was observed:

Capitalism is in crisis, but so is the left. While the structural crisis of the capitalist world-system became visible from a common-sense perspective only in 1998 when the Asian “tiger-economic” and Russia collapsed, the crisis of the left was a permanent one….  

Ideologically, 1968 was an attempt to combine liberation culture with Marxist theory… Marxism was declared dead and the radical middle-class intellectuals who led the movement…, surrendered.

These were all a result of capitalism re-asserting itself via post-World War II social democratic reformisms. The recourse to social democracy of course did not rescue the left which moved more and more to the right. The subsequent and unabating crisis of course, did not blame capitalism. It blamed the over reach of social democracy and installed neo-liberalism which it then globalised. Again, as Kagarlitsky (Ibid., p. vii) pointed out:

Ironically, it is the very success of neo-liberal capitalism that is making the traditional socialist project as defined by Marx and Engels necessary and feasible. It is not Marxism but its revisions that are becoming outdated in the era of free market capitalism and globalization……Capitalism is a system which generates poverty and crisis. It is also a system which generates class struggle and revolutionary socialist movements. If the old movement is dead, it is time for the new one to be born.

What happened to capitalism and its reform in Nigeria, the consequences for the development of class forces, and the struggles of the victims since 1945, had been typical for countries at the periphery of the global capitalist system.

The eclipse of colonialism across the world was about struggle against colonial exploitation led world-wide by working people and the petty bourgeoisie and expressed significantly as nationalism. The contradiction embedded in the coalitions that won independence also ensured the transition to neo-colonialism significantly as the general promise of “freedom”, egalitarianism and indigenization of economy, and economic control by the erstwhile colonial subjects appeared palpable.

The socialist movement, post-World War II, globally and in Nigeria, was pivotal in the formulation and articulation of the “Promise of Independence” and the general birthing of decolonization, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and Social Democracy, thus forcing concessions from the hands of global capitalism. The general project of neo-colonialism till today has been about the dismantling of the socialist-led promise of independence expressed basically as the struggle of the social strata which Osoba (Ibid) characterized broadly as the “Counter-elite”.

The Neo-colonial Project and the Social Base of Socialist Struggle in Nigeria: 1976-2026.

By the late 1970s, the social democratic pretense of Nigeria’s post-independence elite, bolstered especially by the post-Civil War “Oil Boom”, had come to an end. The armed wing of Nigeria’s ruling class led the termination which was inspired by the IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development). The main opposition to the neocolonial project consisted of the labour movement, the intellectuals (academics, journalists, students, lawyers, doctors), and the youth (students at various levels). This opposition, which coincides generally with Osoba’s “counter-elite”, is the middle class which Alinsky (1971: pp. 18-19) characterized as “Have-a-little, Want-Mores”:

Torn between upholding the status quo to protect the little they have, yet wanting change so they can get more, they become split personalities. They could be described as social, economic, and political schizoids…..Thermopolitically they are tepid and rooted in inertia.

This segment of society itself which Alinsky (Ibid., pp. 18) construed to be a “trinity” of social classes, had increased significantly demographically in Nigeria in the last fifty years or so. That increase also partly explains the social and political emasculation of what Osoba characterised as the “counter-elite”!

It is from that class the opposition emerges with the unequal development inside it, its social and political ambivalence, and its capacity to produce recruits into ruling class machine at the same as it produces those that would burn their “class boots”—those that commit themselves, again at different levels of intensity, to socialist transformation.

Just as the global capitalist project and its constant revitalization and its escalating crisis, the neo-colonial capitalist project in Nigeria had not only made tremendous progress, it has wounded its victims and their organizations (the labour movement, the intellectuals, and the youth) critically especially since about 1988. I will attribute all these to the individual and group subjective limitations (individualism, personality-related group dynamics, etc.) and objective circumstances imposed by national and global circumstances (imperialist projects like NGO-ism, enlarged opportunities for private accumulation, etc.)

All of the foregoing need to be addressed and understood if the left is going to re-invent itself and build a cohesive, disciplined and effective agent of change, and overcome the crisis of splintering and sectarianism. Some Truth Telling Conference, of whatever we think remains of the Nigerian Left, had become an imperative.

Conclusion: Directions indicated by Comrade Dr Segun Osoba’s Personality and Intervention in the Struggles of the Working Class in Nigeria and Beyond.

The socialist movement, especially its manifestation not just as an ally but as part and parcel of the working class movement, had been most effective at its point of unity and coherence. That unity and coherence did not arise spontaneously, from nowhere! It resulted from creative organizing in collectives and groups, and in which individuals played exemplary  roles that not only kept their groups alive but built bridges across groups and across moments.

A fairly detailed account of the work of Comrade Osoba was attempted in Olorode and Awopetu (2023: p.34; pp.48-49) in relation to building locally and building bridges across organizations nationally and internationally:

In 1979, Comrade Segun Osoba, already had built contacts with radical scholars, socialist professionals, and labour activists like Wahab Goodluck, Michael Imuodu, Mokwugo Okoye, Alao Aka-Bashorun, Tunji Otegbeye, Baba Omojola, Ola Oni, Omafume, Onoge, Bala Usman, Eskor Toyo, Gambo Sawaba, Ikenna Nzimiro, etc.

……the success of SFC’s (Socialist Forum Collective’s) overall success (sic), including link-up with organizations in liberation struggles, was due, in no small measure, to Comrade Dr Segun Osoba’s attention to details, warm and unassuming personality, confidence, decorum in debates and discussions, unpretentious empathy: a combination of rigor and simplicity, generosity and frugality, respect for truth and courage of conviction.

Writing this essay about the circumstances of the intervention of Comrade Segun Osoba in the work of our movement has compelled me to continue my contemplation on the individual/collective dialectic, the importance of individual’s personality, collective leadership and leadership recruitment and maintenance in the task of re-inventing our movement.

My tentative perspective is that we have so much to learn from exemplars and so much to teach by our being exemplary towards prioritisising and enlarging collectivism and the collective.

 

Literature Cited 

Ake, Claude. 1978. Revolutionary Pressures in Africa. Zed. London

Alinsky, Saul D. 1971. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Vintage Books, New York.

Kagarlitsky, Boris. 1999. New Realism, New Barbarism: Socialist Theory in the Era of Globalization. Pluto, London.

Nkrumah, Kwame. 1965. Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. International Publishers, New York.

Olorode, O. & Idowu Awopetu, 2025. Comrade Dr. Segun Osoba: Individuals, Collectives, Moments and Movements. Darosat Global Limited, Ibadan.

Osoba, O. 1969. Ideological Trends in the Nigerian Liberation Movement and the Problems of Nation Identity, Solidarity and Motivation, 1934-1965: A Preliminary Assessment. In: Akanmu G. Adebayo and Olutayo C. Adesina (Eds.). Critical and Contentious Issues in Modern and Contemporary History of Nigeria. Obafemi Awolowo University Press (2024): pp. 1-20.

Osoba, O. 1987. Decolonization as a Transition to Neo-colonialism In: Akanmu G. Adebayo and Olutayo C. Adesina (Eds.). Ibid. pp. 21-44.

Osoba, O. 1996. Corruption in Nigeria: Historical Perspectives. In: Akanmu G. Akanmu G. Adebayo and Olutayo C. Adesina (Eds.). Ibid. pp. 57-74.