A person who labours for the general good of all serves society and is worthy of his hire. Therefore, such bread-labour is not different from social service. What the vast mass of mankind does for self or at best for family, a social servant does for general good. – M. K. Gandhi.

For almost a year now, since I resumed writing for publication in the media, I have deliberately referred to the Nigerian Left—my primary concern in this ideological and political enterprise—as if it were a homogenous or monolithic entity. But I know that most of my readers know, as much as I do, that the Nigerian Left—described here as the aggregate of Nigerian Marxists, socialists and pro-people radical democrats—is neither homogenous nor monolithic and has never been. 

With the end of the cold war, the independence of Namibia in 1990 and the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994, the Southern African region entered an era of relative political stability and competitive multi-party politics. But the peace dividend proved unable to finance the hopes and promises, and more and more political analysts point to the “mixed bag” of democratisation processes. 

The magnificent Ramada Plaza Hotel in Tunisia’s capital city, Tunis played host to lawyers across Africa on 27-29 September 2018 for the ninth annual conference and general assembly of the Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU) whose theme was “One Continent, One People, One Economy: Developing Africa through Continental Free Trade and Movement”.