For the Nigerian Left, the strongest lesson of what may now be called Nigeria’s #RevolutionNow—that is, the 5 August mass protests organised by some young fragments of the movement—may be formulated as a warning.

There is need to re-look at the word “revolution” and what it currently means in politics and history, especially when compared to other forms of government change.

The author argues that the Nigerian Left, if well organised, could represent a concrete revolutionary platform for restructuring politics in the country.

In discussing the disparities in the distribution of “development,” wealth, power and poverty in Nigeria, many people—most of them young, but educated—seem not to be conscious of two important factors, namely: the factor of history and the factor of capitalism.

The author argues that the conduct of Nigeria’s 2019 general elections demonstrated how the country had moved far away from even the lowest known standards of electoral democracy let alone being free and fair.

It should be agreed that there are different ways of apprehending and describing the situation in Nigeria as the country draws near “Election 2019”, the general elections beginning on 16 February 2019. But I have chosen, naturally and unsurprisingly, an angle and a perspective informed by the burning interests of the working, toiling and poor masses of the country. 

The author argues that the Nigerian Left is the only political formation that can bring about genuine change in Nigeria, as the country’s ruling class has not been able to produce a winning alliance of parties that can offer Nigerians anything new. 

In this essay, the author asserts that, despite the incumbent President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, appearing to be in a strong position before the 2019 general elections, the opposition candidate Atiku Abubakar would not be a “walk-over” in the contest.

For almost a year now, since I resumed writing for publication in the media, I have deliberately referred to the Nigerian Left—my primary concern in this ideological and political enterprise—as if it were a homogenous or monolithic entity. But I know that most of my readers know, as much as I do, that the Nigerian Left—described here as the aggregate of Nigerian Marxists, socialists and pro-people radical democrats—is neither homogenous nor monolithic and has never been. 

The author discusses about Nigeria’s history of military regimes and whether some of them could be categorised as “democratic” or simply as “dictatorships”.