Volume 5 1978 Issue 13

Number 13 Contents May-August 1978 Editorial 1 Editorial Working Group Chris Allen The Incorporation of Northern Nigeria into Manfred Bienefeld the World Capitalist Economy Lionel Cliffe Robin Cohen Bob Shenton and Bill Freund 8 Erica Flegg Mejid Hussein Hausa Women on Strike Duncan Innes Mustafa Khogali Sam Jackson 21 Roger Leys Jitendra Mohan Gavin Williams Labour in Kano since the Petroleum Boom Paul Lubeck 37 Overseas Editors Cairo: Shahida El Baz Dar es Salaam: Mahmood Mamdani Consciousness, Organisation and Action Maputo: Ruth First amongst Lagos Port workers Stockholm: Bhagavan, Bjorn Beckman Peter Waterman 47 Toronto: Jonathan Barker, John Saul Washington: Meredeth Turshen The Deepening Crisis of the Nigerian Contributing Editors National Bourgeoisie Basil Davidson Sam Geza Segun Osoba 63 Thomas Hodgkin Charles Kallu-Kalumiya Colin Leys Political Parties and Ideology in Nigeria Robert van Lierop Richard Joseph 78 Archie Mafeje Prexy Nesbitt Claude Meillassoux Briefings Ken Post Oil Boom and Crisis in Contemporary Nigeria; 91 Subscriptions (3 issues) The World Bank and Nigeria 101 UK Individuals £3.00 Institutions £4.50 Current Africana 108 Africa (except South Africa) Individuals £2.00/$4.00 Institutions £4.00/$8.00 Elsewhere Individuals £4.50/$9.00 Institutions £7.50/$15.00 Airmail extra £2.25/$4.50 Single copies UK & Africa £1.20 Elsewhere 83.50 Institutions £2.40/$7.00 Airmail-add £0.75/$1.50 Subscription to: Review of African Political Economy 341 Glossop Road Sheffield S10 2HP England The Review of African Political Economy is distributed in the U.S.A. by Carrier Pigeon, 75 Kneeland St., Room 309, Boston, Mass. 02111, and in England by Publications ISSN: 0305 6244 Distribution Co-operative, 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1. Editorial Marxist debates on the political economy of underdevelopment have centred on the question: can capitalism promote development? That is, can capitalism reproduce in Asia, Africa and Latin America the expansion of the productive capacity of human labour which it carried out in Europe, North America and Japan. In the English-speaking world, the terms of the debate were set by Frank's Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. He challenged Marxist orthodoxy on two points. Firstly, he argued that capitalism had underdeveloped Latin American economies and was incapable of developing them. It was not feudalism, but capitalism, that was to blame for the impoverishment and back- wardness of Latin America. Secondly, as Fanon had argued in The Wretched of the Earth, Frank saw the bourgeoisie of the underdeveloped countries as acces- sories to imperial capitalism, unable to challenge the foreign control of the means of production, distribution and exchange and, in particular, of the mono- poly of technology exercised by multinational corporations. Politically, the Cuban Revolution had shown Frank the way forward (a way previously charted by the Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions). Only through a socialist revolution could a people take control of their national resources and develop them to their own benefit. Such a revolution required a popular alliance of workers and peasants in opposition both to the local bourgeoisie and to imperialism. No independent national bourgeoisie opposed to imperialism existed, or could exist within the framework of imperial monopolies. These arguments are exemplified in the contributions to this special issue of the Review on Nigeria. We have reprinted a lecture given by Segun Osoba in 1978 in which he identified the 'deepening crisis of the Nigerian national bourgeoisie'. Nigeria's bourgeoisie has always operated as a junior partner, to British colonial authorities and commercial firms before independence, and to the imperial powers and their transnational corporations since then. As was recognised in a speech given to FESTAC* by General Obasanjo in 1977, most African countries are 'trading outposts', staffed by commercial, bureaucratic, technical and in- tellectual agents for their foreign imperialist principals. The inability of the bourgeoisie to create a relatively autonomous domestic capitalist order is the consequence of the structure of the world imperialist economy and the profit- ability of the Nigerian bourgeoisie's role as commission agents within it. In turn this generates contradictions within the bourgeoisie, exemplified by its need to unite as a national class, and its fragmentation into competing groups, as shown •FESTAC = Festival of African Culture. 2 REVIEW OF AFRICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY by the politics of state creation and by the manipulation of religion, as well as contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the masses, the enrichment of the former and the impoverishment of the latter. These contradictions have under- minded the authority of successive Nigerian rulers and explain the inability of successive bourgeois regimes, civilian and military. Osoba calls for the overthrow of the 'national' bourgeoisie and, to that end, the creation of a superior, people's revolutionary culture and its corollary, a people's revolutionary organisation. Terisa Turner has analyzed the way in which the activities of multinational corporations reproduce the crisis of the Nigerian bourgeoisie. In Review 5 she analyzed the conflicts over oil policy which followed the 1974 price rise and culminated in the overthrow of the Gowon regime. She showed how the oil companies competed with one another for supplies by establishing relations with Nigerian middlemen with access to the state. She has also analyzed, in Africa Guide 1911, the 1974 cement scandal to show how foreign firms compete for control of markets. As Lenin declared in Imperialism '. monopolies introduce everywhere monopolist principles; the utilization of connections for profitable transactions takes the place of competition on the open market.' Turner argues that the forms of competition among multinational corporations and their local agents promoted political instability and prevented, at that period, the adoption of technically rational policies. Opponents of Frank's approach, and of similar analyses of African countries, have challenged its two basic theses. Firstly, Cardoso and Warren {New Left Review 67 and 81) argued that imperialism could, and did, promote capitalist development in many underdeveloped countries. Secondly, in Review 8 Swainson (for Kenya) and Kennedy (for Ghana) argued for the existence of an independent class of local capitalists. Swainson showed how they used state power to expand their activities and were investing their commercial profits in industrial production. Colin Leys, in Socialist Register 1978, accordingly changed the view which he presented in his book Underdevelopment in Kenya of a 'continuing dependence of the African petty-bourgeoisie and auxiliary bourgeoisie on foreign capital.' Rather: The essential function of the state was to displace monopolies enjoyed by foreign capital and substitute monopolies for African capital, and also to supplement individual African capitals with state-financed capital and state-secured technology, to enable them to occupy the space created for them in the newly-accessible economic sectors. Its (the state's) initiatives reflected the existing class power of the indigenous bourgeoisie, based on the accumulation of capital they had already achieved. These two lines of criticism do not necessarily depend on one another. If indeed imperialism does promote capitalist development throughout the world, then the development of capitalism does not depend on the existence of a national bourgeoisie opposed to imperialism; imperialism may create an auxiliary bourgeoisie as an agent of its own development. The issues raised by Swainson and Leys about Kenya are clearly relevant to Nigeria, where many of the same phenomena had emerged even earlier. During the colonial period, a commercial bourgeoisie emerged which overlapped with the small professional class. In the 1950s, alliances of commercial, professional and bureaucratic classes, and in the North the office-holding aristocracy appro- priated political power. They used it to accumulate money, finance their political activities, appropriate commercial opportunities, extend the areas of economic activity reserved to Nigerian businessmen and, together with foreign capital, EDITORIAL invest in import-substitution industries. Nigeria, with its vast population, exten- sive internal maket, and oil revenues appears to command the resources neces- sary for its own form of capitalist development. Clearly we need to examine the development of industry and the relations of local to foreign capitalists since independence and, more particularly, since the 1974 boom in oil prices, to see how far one set of interests predominates, or whether, as Osoba suggests in his analysis of the local and foreign bourgeoisies, they are really compatible. John Carlson has summarized much of the evidence from official sources on Nigeria's industrial development ('Industrial cooperation in the Lome Con- vention, the case of Nigeria' Centre for Development Research, Copenhagen). Since 1960 there has been a rapid, if uneven, increase in manufacturing output. The value added in manufacturing in Nigeria has increased in roughly the same proportions. However, these figures would look far less impressive if prices were calculated at world market levels, rather than taking the prices Nigerian con- sumers pay for highly protected products. Manufacturing is still dominated by low technology light consumer goods, with

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