Edwin Madunagu

I cannot now remember exactly how I first encountered this phrase: “In defence of history”. But I think it was during my days on the Editorial Board of The Guardian newspaper, between mid-1980s and mid-1990s.

Early in the morning of Thursday, 9 August—about 48 hours after armed detachments of Nigeria’s Secret Service operatives took over the National Assembly complex in Abuja—I sent a text message to a number of activist Nigerian Leftists.

The year 1982 began with a revolutionary upheaval in Ghana: a group of young and radical military officers—some retired, others still in service—appeared to have seized power!

I have constructed this definition from several sources including Comrade Eskor Toyo, Comrade Biodun Jeyifo, and Karl Marx himself. It is an ideological and political definition: simple, but not simplistic, and designed for popular education.

They are: constructing a unified organisation of the Nigerian Left; drafting a people’s manifesto; inserting into Nigeria’s electoral politics (as organised groups); and seeking electoral and non-electoral alliances.

In a previous piece on this subject (Notes on political alliances in Nigeria, 4 July 2018), I proposed that the following three broad objectives have propelled Leftist organisations, at home and abroad, to seek political alliances with non-Leftist formations: to fight or to prevent the emergence

We may begin by recalling two key propositions that have so far emerged in the current discussions on the political responsibility of the Nigerian Left in this period.

The following notes are offered as a searchlight in support of this anticipated revised programme of the Nigerian Left. The Left should see the political terrain more clearly.

To appreciate, more fully, the current wave of political re-alignments in Nigeria and be able to make informed projections, we may need to go back to the Nigerian Civil War of (1967-1970) and the long preparation for the Second Republic (1979-1983).

It is a fact of the Nigerian history that President Olusegun Obasanjo’s executive proclamation and declaration were criticised, at that time, by the National Assembly, parties other than the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), state assemblies and governments other than those controlled by th