The former Ekiti state governor and minister of solid minerals, Kayode Fayemi, declared that the APC owes Nigerians an apology, because the party has failed to deliver on its promises to the people. He said this during an interview which was part of the celebration of his 60th birthday in the first week of February.
This follows an earlier apology he tendered in September 2023, that time to former president Goodluck Jonathan, over the 2023 January Uprising, otherwise known as #OccupyNigeria. This was during another 60th birthday celebration; for the ex-Marxist, Professor Udenta Udenta. Fayemi argued political motivations drove the mass protest. By this, he meant the political interests of the section of the ruling class, which he is a part of.
This argument contained a policy element. As he pointed out, “all political parties in the country agreed and they even put in their manifesto that subsidy must be removed. We all said subsidy must be removed.” This included the Action Congress of Nigeria. There was also an element of agency. He suggested that the uprising was sparked by the ACN in particular and some other disgruntled capitalist politicians whose parties would join the ACN to form the All Progressives Congress the following year, and dislodge Jonathan and the PDP in 2015.
This is a perspective that reduces history to the actions and interests of a few powerful people or better put to the contestation between different sections of the ruling class in their intra-class struggle for dominance in their shared ruling over the working people. But history is much more complex than this. We, the people, play pivotal roles in the making of our histories. It might not always be as we want it to be. And different sections of the ruling class do also play their own self-serving roles. But history is much more than just want they do or what they want.
Focusing on the #OccupyNigeria mass movement, what happened? Several things happened, which were all interconnected. But the primary thing that happened was mass resistance, an uprising against an unpopular policy which was common to the different sections of the ruling class and their parties from PDP to ACN, ANPP, CPC and APGA. They were all committed to making us, the poor people to bear the burden for the economic crisis of capitalism in Nigeria.
What the opposition parties to PDP did was to seize the opportunity of the popular mood of the moment. They neither planned nor kicked off the uprising. We can best define revolutionary situations, moments of uprisings, and the heady winds of rebellion as festivals of the oppressed. But they are also moments of contestation (and for different reasons – collaboration) within and between classes.
That is why revolutionary activists need to be unwavering in pointing out wolves in sheep’s clothing to the working masses and radical youths when we rise to fightback against our oppressors. No section of the class of exploiters has our interest at heart. All what different factions of the ruling class want is to be the one in charge. They cynically exploit and discard us in popular struggles.
This is also why the call for APC to apologise is Nigerians is little more than grandstanding. This position promotes the assumption that there could have been anything different that the APC could have done from what it has done so far. But that is not true.
As Fayemi pointed out, ACN at the time – and which was the backbone of the merger process that brought about the formation of APC was 100% committed to the same neoliberal reforms as PDP.
The out-of-power ruling class deploys empty promises to create the illusion of difference. Here, Fayemi’s apology aims to do the same thing for APC from inside APC.
Fayemi and the APC can keep their apologies to themselves. We do not need crocodile tears. We equally reject attempts by sections of the ruling class to rewrite history about the January Uprising. At least 17 working-class protesters died at the barricades, while capitalist politicians safely addressed rallies from podiums in safe theatres of that struggle.
by Ségun ÒGÚN
