Imperialist plunder in Nigeria
{editorial}
The labor actions by oil workers, rail workers, public employees, and others that have rolled across Nigeria over the past two months register a loud voice of protest against the conditions of superexploitation imposed on them. Nationwide strikes demanding a higher minimum wage and protesting austerity measures are a beacon for workers and peasants throughout the African continent. This resistance shows that working people in Africa are fighters, not helpless victims or scavengers, as bourgeois pundits constantly try to portray.
The labor struggles in Nigeria reflect the increasing size and economic weight of the working class in Africa's most populous nation. Through their collective actions and use of union power, millions are gaining more confidence to deepen and extend their struggle against the exploiters at home and abroad.
Nigeria is a prime example of what imperialism has to offer the vast majority of people in the world today. It is a country rich in natural resources where the wealth produced by working people through their labor is transferred out of the country to enrich barons on Wall Street and in other imperialist centers. The imperialists have the audacity to demand the Nigerian government end subsidies on gasoline, a product produced in Nigeria from crude oil pumped from the ground and processed in the country!
The recent pipeline explosion, in which up to several hundred people were incinerated, places a spotlight on the impoverished and deadly conditions Nigerian working people are forced to endure. This is not the first time hundreds of people have been killed while collecting gasoline from a punctured pipe line.
To maintain this inequality, Washington has backed a series of repressive regimes. They have turned to the Nigerian government to provide troops to police imperialist interests in the region while maintaining abysmal social and economic conditions. But their drive to exploit Nigeria's resources has also led to the development of a relatively large and organized working class, which has begun to put its stamp on politics in the country.
"The only language they understand is the language of struggle, the struggle of the revolutionary classes against those who exploit and oppress the people," explained Thomas Sankara, leader of the Burkina Faso revolution in the 1980s, who began to chart a course to defend the interests of the toilers in Africa. Sankara's legacy of resistance to imperialist plunder is an example for working-class fighters in Nigeria, throughout the African continent, and indeed the world.
The "language of struggle" is something more and more working people resisting exploitation and oppression in the United States are beginning to speak. That we have common allies in Africa, as well as elsewhere in the world, strengthens the fight against the super wealthy minority ruling class--the class that is the beneficiary of the increasingly harsh conditions of life they are attempting to impose on the vast majority of humanity.
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