The debates spilled over to the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC). In his 11 June, 1984 letter to then NLC President, Hassan Sunmonu, over alleged misrepresentation that he was anti-labour, Usman said there was a need for clarification because in ABU there are “hunting-dogs, barking ‘Marxism-Marxism-Marxism’ at convenient targets…” The debates split ABU, Leftists and social scientists in the country. The pro-Usman group found his assertions well-grounded in praxis, while the opposing one claimed Bangura cut Usman to seize and demystified him.
Dr Yusufu Bala Usman was, in the 1980s, a lion in the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU). His roar could be heard across the country. He was a domineering academic and political figure with followership in the country. His reputation had been boosted when, in 1976, he and fellow radical academic and historian, Dr Olusegun Osoba, as part of the 49 Wise Men charged with writing a new Nigerian Constitution, broke with the rest to present a radical Minority Report.
Then in 1984, Yusuf Bangura, a 34-year-old lecturer, challenged Usman’s academic and intellectual scholarship right in his ABU lair.
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Usman had in January 1984 delivered a lecture at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University. It was titled: “Middlemen, Consultants, Contractors and Solutions to the current Economic Crisis.” He had explained the Nigerian economic crisis as being the result of comprador elites generating huge profits for their foreign masters and repatriating them to the metropole. So, he focused on the ways the Nigerian economy had “…been shaped and moulded to serve the capitalist economies of Western Europe, North America and Japan…”. Usman added magisterially that anyone who refuses “…to face these fundamental facts about our economy and society, when we are on the verge of economic collapse, is not only unpatriotic, but actually treasonable.”
His lecture, coming four weeks after the military overthrew the Shagari administration, included two declarations which appeared to support the coup. First, Usman condemned representative democracy. He claimed thus: “A representative is simply an indigene of an area who perpetuates the illusion that the various parts of the country are engaged in a competition for the allocation of scarce resources and he is a champion of one part. His representation begins and ends with ethnicity and the appropriation of the ‘scarce resources’ into his pockets.”
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Usman’s second shocking declaration was that: “There is nothing inherently popular or democratic about rule by civilians in this country or anywhere in the world. The distinction between military rule and civilian rule is a purely legalistic one.”
His solution to the crisis was that the country should properly allocate and manage resources and build a self-reliant and efficient capitalist system as a prelude to the establishment of a socialist Nigeria.
Bangura’s paper, four months later, titled, “Overcoming the Basic Misconceptions of the Nigerian Economic Crisis”, was a broad analysis of the conceptual frameworks used in analysing the crisis. He situated the Nigerian crisis within the capitalist system and the class struggles that can resolve it. So, it was not really a response to Usman’s paper. However, in an end-note, he argued that the solution does not lie in “alternative strategies from the Left that concentrate on technicist and economic solutions such as sectoral linkages, diversification of the economy and a rationalised contract system…”. Rather, he advocated a concentration on the struggles of the working people against challenges like retrenchment, job insecurity and repressive laws as preparation of “the working class movement and the construction of a socialist alternative to end capitalist crises.”
Usman responded to Bangura with a paper titled, “Misconceptions, Misrepresentations and Evasions”. He said his emphasis on contractocracy was to “…systematically move from the known to the lesser known…”. He argued that the contradiction between production and consumption does not find expression in the oppression of the working peoples of the world capitalist system “but primarily in those countries under imperialist domination.”
Bangura fired a rejoinder titled, “The Poverty of Disjointed Empiricism”. He argued that “…one can only understand the essence of the crisis if we can identify the laws of motion of the economy bringing out its various contradictions…”. He added that: “Despite Usman’s laudable concern to get at the root causes of the crisis, he ended up staying at the branches and left his readers with the difficulties of relating the branches with the roots.”
He posited that Usman’s claim of wanting to proceed from the known to the less known “should not give him the liberty to flout the fundamental procedures in scientific investigations, which start from an examination of the inner dialectical connections and motions of the system one is investigating.”
Bangura argued that, “It is the failure to understand the nature of capitalist exploitation which led to Usman’s inability to grasp the general laws of motion of the capitalist world economy, notwithstanding his refuge in Lenin and Castro.”
He concluded by asking: “What are we to make of ‘contractocracy’ as a ‘government which ‘is for contractors, by contractors and of contractors?’ Are we to believe that the ruling class in Nigeria are all contractors and that government exists exclusively for contractors? What has happened to the transnational companies, the Euro-American imperialist states, the various stock exchanges, the IMF, World Bank, etc? Have they also become contractors? Is imperialism the same as contractocracy?”
Usman fired back with a paper titled, “Further Misconceptions, Misrepresentations and Evasions: A Rejoinder.” He accused Bangura of engaging in “West European Leftist cover up of the real nature of imperialism”. This, he said, includes the claim “that most of the surplus generated, and invested as capital in the metropolitan countries of imperialism comes largely from the exploitation of workers of these imperialist countries…”. This group, he said, presents the national struggles for independence, liberation, unity and solidarity by non- Western nations as “… necessarily opposed to the interests of the workers and peasants of those countries, these regions and these continents, because the true interests of these classes is to fight only class struggle…”.
He further accused Bangura of a deliberate “anaemic and spineless” avoidance of the situation in his home country of Sierra Leone. Usman said his rejoinder is “a small contribution to our intellectual liberation from imperialism in all its guises, including its leftist disguises.”
Bangura countered this with a rejoinder titled, “The Deepening Intellectual Crisis and Petit-Bourgeois Opportunism.” Usman, he said, had not raised any new and constructive issue, was confused and should, therefore, be forced to retire to his study room.
The debates spilled over to the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC). In his 11 June, 1984 letter to then NLC President, Hassan Sunmonu, over alleged misrepresentation that he was anti-labour, Usman said there was a need for clarification because in ABU there are “hunting-dogs, barking ‘Marxism-Marxism-Marxism’ at convenient targets…”.
The debates split ABU, Leftists and social scientists in the country. The pro-Usman group found his assertions well-grounded in praxis, while the opposing one claimed Bangura cut Usman to seize and demystified him.
Those debates were 40 years ago and they vibrated across campuses and social circles. On Monday, 2 December, I stared at a face in Abuja. I walked up to him and ‘accused’ him of being Yusuf Bangura.
Owei Lakemfa, a former secretary general of African workers, is a human rights activist, journalist and author.
