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Let’s fight back
Achilleus Uchegbu
Not
many people know Joe Hill. By November 19, 2004,
it would be 89 years since he was executed. Hill was a Swedish immigrant worker,
who was executed in the yard of Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City,
United States of America (USA) in 1915. He was found guilty of murder. But while
awaiting outcome of his trial, he authored the following stanzas;
Workers of the world, awaken!
Break your chains, demand your rights.
All the wealth you make is taken
By exploiting parasites.
Shall you kneel in deep submission
From your cradles to your graves?
Is the height of your ambition
To be good and willing slaves?
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Fight for your own emancipation;
Arise, ye slaves of ev’ry nation, in One Union Grand.
Our little ones for bread are crying; And millions are from hunger dying; The
end the means is justifying, ’Tis the final stand.
In the years following his execution, the
above became a popular refrain for organized labour protests. His vision,
expressed in the above could not be far from those of the legendary Karl Marx,
who in co-authoring "Manifesto of the Communist Party" with Frederick Engels,
called on workers of the world to unite against oppression by capitalists. Marx
was actually vexed by class identifications in the society he lived in and
thought of a classless one, which will be brought about by a natural sequence of
dialectic.
For him, whatever rational change must
come to society must be done by man. Man is however seen by Ludwig Feuerbach as
an abstract, which transcends the realms of inactivity to become a living man by
being a participant in history. In other words man cannot claim to be part of
history unless he participates in it. Participating in history, in itself,
requires a level of activity, which must necessarily transform society and
create a place in history for him.
In doing this, man must necessarily
respect the urge towards happiness in others. As Feuerbach argues, "the urge
towards happiness is innate in man and must therefore form the basis of all
morality." He would go on to warn that "if we do not respect the same urge
towards happiness in other people, they will defend themselves and so interfere
with our own urge towards happiness"
This exhortation to activity is an act of
patriotism, which serves to liberate man, and of course, his dependants, from
the clutches of oppressors, who in their drunken rage, unleash raw power on
defenseless man, called citizens, in order to emasculate and snuff life out of
him. The idea expressed by Hill in the above lyric, is in itself a replication
of what has become of the Nigerian worker. His life has become a tool in the
hands of a democratic government for the creation of wealth for those who see
themselves as destined to reap the benefits of labour. The Nigerian worker, who
has several dependents, has become like a machine in a factory, with no value
added to his life by way of higher wages. He, like a machine, is constantly
taxed and tasked to do more for the sustenance of society, which operates in a
system, which the oppressors call democracy.
Richard Peters, in his work "
Authority, Responsibility and Education" asked, "Are men responsible for
their actions, or are these determined by their past history?" He would go ahead
to argue that the rise of modern science, especially the human sciences such as
psychology and sociology, has given modern man insight into why people behave as
they do. However, the apologetic Nigerian would reason that we act the way we do
because we are in a democracy and are expecting its dividends in another year or
two. But I think we are living in a political environment sophistically called
democracy, but which is borne out of a deep culture of despair.
This deep-rooted despair is one caused by
a hopeless wait for a shift from our culture of democratic dictatorship. In
answering the question whether democracy is a myth, the legendary English writer
George Bernard Shaw said, "democracy is an illusion, just a big word we accept
without question." In reflecting the effect of government on the lives of the
British people, he wrote, "what we want to know is how little government we can
get along with without being murdered in our beds"
In his usage of murder, he did not think
of mere physical murder, but murder by instalement which governments subject
their citizens to with economic policies that make a jest of living. He agrees
that we cannot govern ourselves adding that "yet if we entrust the immense power
and revenues which are necessary in an effective modern government to an
absolute monarch or dictator, he goes more or less mad unless he is quite
extraordinary and therefore very seldom obtainable person." He however has a
remedy.
"When we see parliamentarians like ours
kicked into the gutter by dictators, both in kingdoms and republics, it is
foolish to wait until the dictator dies or collapses, and then do nothing but
pick the poor old thing and try to scrape the mud off them: the only sane course
is to take the step by which the dictator could have been anticipated and
averted, and construct a political system for rapid positive work instead of
slow nugatory work made to fit into the twentieth century instead of the
sixteenth."
But just as Shaw holds that every citizen
cannot be a ruler and that a nation of prime ministers is as absurd as an army
of field marshals, the religious philosopher, Blaise Pascal, maintains that "the
power of kings is founded on the people’s reason and folly, and mostly on its
folly." So, certain rulers in Nigeria must emerge because the people are fools
and their foolishness is greatly exploited by the "king" who emerges as the
conqueror. We must accept the reasoning by Pascal that "men are so necessarily
mad that not to be mad would be madness by another shift of madness." Situate
recent face-off between government and Nigerians. Fact is that government has,
for far too long, taken Nigerians for a ride. Nigerians, have on the other hand,
been too cowed and allowed government to ride on their backs without resistance.
In Nigeria, we find it too easy to scale the wall when we are pushed to it than
to fight back. We lack capacity for social anger. We lack capacity for
resistance. We are all too willing to accept whatever rubbish government forces
down our cavities. It is not comfortable for us to be actively involved in
writing our own history. We want others to come and write it for us. We are too
scared to stand and raise our voice. That is why it is too easy to jump ship in
our political life. That is why we constantly face collective insult and abuse
from government and those we gave meal tickets as representatives. That is our
democracy. We operate a capitalist democracy and for this, every Nigerian wants
to be the last man standing, so he could inherit the land and tell the story to
the coming generation. That is our folly which government continues, unabatedly,
to ride on.
As a people, for us to get out of the woods and clip the
wings of government, we must be ready to resist and also spill our blood. The
lyrics by Hill are in this regard, an exhortation to action. An action that will
re-write the history of Nigeria. Not taking our destiny into our hands, means
allowing government and all the oppressors of the people, decide for us, and
their decision will never be good for the masses.
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