The Withering Away of the Law and Decolonization of Criminology

The Indigenous Criminologist

Saturday, 9 December 2017

Professor Biko Agozino - keynote address to the Forum for Indigenous Research Excellence Symposium 2016

The following blog contains a video - a keynote speech by Professor Biko Agozino (Virginia Tech) at the Forum for Indigenous Research Excellence symposium Decolonising Criminal Justice: Indigenous Perspectives on Social Harm, held at the University of Wollongong 24-25 November 2016.

The title of the presentation is: The Withering Away of the Law: An Indigenous Perspective on the Decolonisation of the Criminal Justice System and Criminology. 

PYTHONS DANCE IN THE JUNGLE

By Biko Agozino

The declaration (or ‘proclamation’, according to the Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Buratai) by the DHQ of the Nigerian Army that the ‘Independent’ People of Biafra is a 'militant terrorist organization' and the staging of war against IPOB supporters and their leaders amount to an apparent coup attempt. It is ‘unconstitutional and unlawful’ as the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, stated; it is an extra-judicial overreach of the sort condemned by Amnesty International in 2016. It is not the DHQ that declares war even under a military government. That is the prerogative of the legislative body that makes the law defining what is terrorism and it is up to the courts to follow the due process to determine if any group can be declared terrorist subject to appeals by the group. Nigerian courts ruled in March 2017 that IPOB is not an illegal organization. The executive arm of government has the power to deploy the military to quell an insurrection under Section 217 of the constitution. But the proclamation of the right to self-determination by the masses all over the country, not only in the relatively non-violent Southeast that is singled out for Operation Python Dance II, is not insurrectional unless accompanied by violence. No army is entitled to unilaterally declare as terrorists nor to proscribe, unarmed citizens who are calling for a plebiscite to decide their future relative to imposed colonial boundaries. It is fascistic to attempt to subject citizens to acts of war and threats to wipe them out for exercising free speech or even for throwing stones at military vehicles that tried to 'crush' them as directed by the president in a public speech after his return from over 100 days sick leave in London.

Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo who won the case that deleted sedition from the Nigerian criminal code in 1983 has consistently warned that the Nigerian ruling classes are playing an ‘end-game’ that he called ‘terminus’ because they operate ‘cimilicy’ through the empowerment of civilianized military officers and militarized civilian politicians to perpetuate unjust political structures and thereby provoke national disintegration. Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, has called for dialogue with leaders of the Southeast to remedy the marginalization of the region instead of adopting the unlawful act of deploying the military against peaceful civil disobedience, contrary to constitutional case law precedents and contrary to the adoption of dialogue and amnesty by ex-PresidentUmaru Yar’adua in response to even more militant crises in the past. Ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo also recently cautioned against another war in the Southeast and called for dialogue just like former military president, Ibrahim Babangida, given their leading roles in the genocidal war alongside the incumbent, President Muhammadu Buhari.

Nigeria is not a Zoo republic, contrary to the unexamined njakiri or joke by Nnamdi Kanu and his cantankerous IPOB followers. A zoo is one of the most orderly spaces that human beings structured and continue to restructure to accommodate new specimens, to save endangered species, and to add new attractions. No zoo will allow pythons to dance in triumph over the fee-paying public that have gathered for edutainment about the animal republic or kingdom. If a python escapes from its enclosure as was the case in Harry Porter where little Harry used his psychic powers to free it from a glass cage, the very shy python would slither away into hiding to avoid being caught and beheaded by the zoo keepers or by ordinary moguls. Zoo animals have never declared war against zoo visitors without being put down like the chimpanzee that dragged a child like a doll in a US zoo.

Far from being like a zoo, Nigeria is remarkably zooless because the zoo keepers have since starved the zoo animals to death while probably stealing the meat and food that they were supposed to feed to the captive animals. When the big or even tiny beasts died of hunger, the greedy zoo keepers most likely butchered them and shared the meat among themselves to see what lion, reptile or elephant meat tastes like. When the zoo was emptied of specimens, the politicians swooped and scrambled for the real estate which they cornered for themselves and their families after selling a big chunk to companies with huge kick-backs for themselves.

Nigeria is more like a jungle where might is right and where life is nasty, brutish and short, as Thomas Hobbes would put in Leviathan. The exception is that the jungle is often better than Naija because the jungle animals never have access to weapons of mass destruction with which to kill millions of their own species and or starve them to death while bragging that starvation is a legitimate weapon of war. Jungle animals rarely kill another animal that they would not eat as food but Naija cultists kill and humiliate one another for money medicine, intimidation, or for fun. Jungle animals never issue quit notices nor circulate hate songs nor wage sectarian religious wars. Of course, Nigeria claims to be more civilized than the jungle because they actually have a written constitution, universities, elections, motor cars, mansions and airplanes, they dress fashionably, have many billionaires and they are very religious. But for all of that, Naija is more like a jungle than a zoo and so, maybe, the name should be changed to Naijungle.

Nigeria has cultism enshrined in Schedule 7 of the constitution with reference to the oaths of office that elected officials, judges and political appointees are required to take. They swear or affirm their loyalty to Nigeria and commit themselves to upholding the principles in schedule 5 regarding the code of conduct for public office holders. They also promise to perform their functions ‘without fear or favour, affection or ill-will’. They ask God to help them to perform their official duties. If Nigeria is not a jungle, then the cultist Schedule 7 should have been amended by now to remind elected officials that they are expected to perform their duties with fear for the wrath of the masses if not for the punishment of God; in favour of the long-suffering people and not just to the benefit of their families and cronies; with affection for the innocent masses, not without affection; and with ill-will to the enemies of the people such as poverty, diseases and illiteracy. Do Nigerians even know that this schedule 7 in the constitution sounds like cultism? How can you require elected representatives to swear that they will govern the people without affection? That is a devilish oath crafted with the good intentions of making public officials objective and impartial but it is flawed like the paved road that leads straight to hell.

Governors of the Southeast states erred by proscribing the non-violent Indigenous Peoples of Biafra instead of advocating on their behalf with affection to legalize the flying of the flag of Biafra as free speech in memory of lost ones, by building infrastructures, and by demanding reparations for past wrongs.

IPOB erred by threatening to boycott elections in Anambra andthe rest of the Southeast. The referendum that IPOB is calling for could come in the form of elections through which the people of the Southeast can elect representatives who speak for them rather than against them. IPOB supporters should brave the electoral process and campaign for a party or candidates of their choice. If their supporters turn out to vote in support of their preferred candidates, they may elect officials that will advocate for them and help to negotiate the ‘unnegotiable’ towards the resolution of the crisis of legitimacy facing the country. If they lose or after being elected the officials sell out and turn against the people, they could be recalled or impeached.

After the federal government declared war on the people of the Southeast for proclaiming their rights non-violently, human rights attorneys should bring writs for crimes against humanity to the international courts of justice, for adjudication and for reparations.

The people of the Southeast have suffered unwarranted genocide in the hands of Nigeria. Never again, to echo the press release of Ambassador Bianca Ojukwu. Instead, offer the masses the choice to erase the colonial boundaries and join their African brothers and sisters to build the United States of Africa and terminate the genocidist state structures imposed by colonialism across Africa.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech.

Fake Anti-Igbo Song

Fake Anti-Igbo Song

I doubt the authenticity of the song circulating online that calls for genocide against the Igbo in Nigeria. To say that I doubt the authenticity does not mean that it should not be taken seriously, otherwise why bother commenting? Even fake news and fake songs can have devastating consequences if gullible people swallow the propaganda and act it out. Correct me if I am wrong but I think that Africans should not believe everything they hear on the internet. We should engage in more critical thinking.

I doubt if Hausa/Fulani warlords would authorize a genocidal war song and rely on women to sing it for the men to act upon. The Hausa/Fulani are very patriarchal in their culture and although they have had warrior queens like Queen Amina of Zaria and the Boko Haram used women as suicide bombers, it is very unlikely that they would use the voices of women to declare war. Women may ululate to celebrate victory by their men but it is unauthentic for women to be the ones calling for the rape and genocide of Igbo women, children and men by Hausa/Fulani men.

I doubt the authenticity of the song also because the accent is not a native Hausa speaker accent. Although I do not speak Hausa (Ba na ji Awusa), the pronunciation of the genocidist term Nyamiri in the song as Nyamuri is an indication that the singers were not native speakers but agents provocateur trying to egg the Hausa/Fulani youth into a genocidal frenzy against the Igbo who have never done them any wrong, contrary to genocidist propaganda that the Igbo killed northern leaders in the past when the Igbo did no such thing.

Western Nigerian officers (including some Western Igbo) led the first bloody coup in the country to free their leader, Awolowo, from prison and impose him as the Prime Minister. They later blamed it on Eastern officers who actually foiled the coup. Then Western Nigerian and Middle Belt Christian officers led the genocidal war against the Christian Easterners and blamed it on the Muslim Northerners to ignite an endless religious war but the Igbo have managed to avoid buying this trap. Yet the hatred of the Igbo remains the major thing that unites all other Nigerians, according to Achebe.

The authenticity of the anti-Igbo song is also raised by the fact that the song made an exception for the Yoruba, calling for them to be spared in the genocide against the Igbo. Yet it will not be easy to tell who is Igbo and who is Yoruba in the absence of tribal marks that are no longer common among the Yoruba. When the rain falls, it will not fall on one man’s house top.

I doubt the authenticity of the song furthermore because the beat is not the traditional Hausa beat with traditional instruments. Rather it is a computerized disco beat that is actually danceable and I doubt that genocidists would prefer to use disco beats to issue genocidist calls even if their target audience is the Hip-Hop loving generation of today. Dem go de Pose, is what Baba Fryo called such a pretense.

I call on all Africans to disavow songs of hatred and proclaim the fact that the Igbo are not ‘a curse to Nigeria’ but a blessing to Africa. All Nigerians should reject genocidist propaganda and add their voices to the defense of those who are targeted by haters, no matter their ethnic groups. Choose roses than rape, choose Ubuntu than Ubulani, urges the people’s poet, Mzwakhe Mbuli.

Dr. Biko Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061.

‘Trump and the Trumpists’

By Biko Agozino

I was invited by editors to respond to WolfgangStreeck’s synthesis of Marxist analysis of Bonapartism with Weberian Status Group pluralism. Although this response was not selected for publication due to a high volume of responses, the publishers offered to pay me for my time and I asked them to donate it to an NGO that works to prevent mass starvation. Below is my response to the essay:

Du Bois and Azikiwe

The essay by Streeck provided an intriguing perspective on the emergence of politicians that he characterized as ‘Trumpists’. However, his critical essay is in need of more thorough conceptual clarifications to address some theoretical inadequacies and empirical untenabilities that threaten the validity of his analysis and the policy efficacy of the implications.

The author uncritically presented a rehash of Marx and Weber to suggest a hegemonic crisis characterized by the ‘death of the center-left’ that created a void to be filled with ‘class, status and party’ in a US supposedly dichotomized between the cities in apparent resentful polar opposition against the hinterlands. From this he concluded that the governmentality of Trumpism is potentially ungovernable and predicted that Trump may be forced to resign before the end of his term.

Streeck nearly ruined his essay from the start with the cyborg premise that ‘strange personalities’ can be identified by the atavistic stigmata of ‘extravagant dress, inflated rhetoric, and show of sexual power’ – gangster rap stereotypes that Trump evidently lacks given that his corporate suit is far from being extravagant, his rhetoric is monosyllabic, and he engaged Marco Rubio in size-of-hand envy.

The joke that the US had lost every foreign war since the defeat in Vietnam risks becoming an iatrogenic war-mongering capable of goading the most powerful military in the world (as if more excuses are needed) into the search for a face-saving winnable war.

Instead of jeering at Americans that they have 11 million illegal immigrants despite their ‘elaborate immigration policies’, Streeck should have asked what fortress Europe could learn from American pragmatism regarding the inevitability of immigration and the need to pursue increased diversity while providing a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reforms.

On Bonarpatism, Streeck invoked The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx to remind us that Trump is not the first figure to come to power and seek to rule as an absolute monarch to the disadvantage of the masses of peasants who supported Bonaparte simply because they liked his ideas. Streeck neglected to inform the readers that Marx did not intend this concrete historical example to be overgeneralized for he counted the instances of Bonapartism on two fingers of one hand. The concrete example was used by Marx to show that sometimes, the infrastructural mode of production is less of a determinant of historic outcomes than the superstructural ideology of his much-abused architectural metaphor.

Of course, Trump is no emperor and even if he wanted to rule the US the way that Bonaparte ruled France, Trump has to get past the Congress with anxious eyes on the 2018 Mid Term elections, past the courts that block his CEO style of orders, past the critical press that reveal scoops to force sacks from the government, and past the energized electorate ready to call his bluff from one ill-advised Executive Order to another dead-on-arrival attempt to replace Obamacare with Donaldon’tcare. Streeck repeated the Orwellian fact that Trump ‘won’ the election but failed to add that he actually lost the popular votes by nearly three million.

If Streeck had looked beyond German Sociology in his search for a suitable theoretical framework for the US, he could have stumbled on the theories of Thatcherism and Authoritarian Populism by Stuart Hall or Intersectionality by Kimberley Crenshaw as a more suitable paradigm for the analysis of the politics of race-class-gender articulation, disarticulation and rearticulation in societies structured in dominance.

Another major weakness in the essay is the uncritical adoption of Weberian Status Group theory to explain the election of Donald Trump despite the fact that every status group was split between the two candidates. The error in Weberian pluralism is that it tends to underestimate the enormous power that is held by the military-industrial ruling elites as C.W. Mills demonstrated in The Power Elite.

Weber traveled to the US to interview German immigrants for his influential book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism but scandalously ended up not noticing that capitalism had more to do with hundreds of years of the enslavement of millions of Africans as Marx, Du Bois, Eric Williams, and C.L.R. James proved.

The pitfalls of nationalist sociological preferences may have marred the essay beyond redemption when Streeck asserted that ‘Trumps seem to emerge easily in countries with a colonial past –‘. He conveniently failed to add Germany to the list of imperialist countries despite the savage plunder by imperialist Germany in Africa, according to Du Bois, Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Fanon, Rodney and Cesaire. Nazism emerged from this track record as the logical conclusion to the Weberian Enlightenment longing for rational modernization without compassion in the administrative quest for domination, according to Zygmunt Bauman.

Streeck erred by concluding that only groups that wanted to use the bathrooms that corresponded with their gender identity were interested in bathroom birther laws. On the contrary, many Americans opposed prejudiced laws that picked on other groups because history teaches that such authoritarianism eventually escalated violence in society to the detriment of all. When they came for the Jews, many said nothing because they were not Jews, then, finally  …

Biko Agozino, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, author of Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason and writer of ‘Trumpism and Authoritarian Populism’ in C-Theory.

Draft Platform of Africana Mass Party

Draft platform of Africana Mass Party

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Getty Images

Biko Agozino

May 11, 2017

Africa needs a democratic revolution led by the working people. For that to happen, the united peoples of Africa must start their own socialist party whose primary goal is to take over state power from the neocolonial bourgeoisie and their imperialist allies. Once in power, the party must embark on a revolutionary programme of actualizing Africa’s unfinished liberation.

The revolutionary situation in Africa today can be analyzed concretely and strategically under the following themes and categories as a guide to the resolution of activists committed to launching a platform for a social democratic revolution across Africa under the ideological leadership of the working people and revolutionary intellectuals in alliance with the peasantry, following Lenin closely (1):

The articulation of race-ethnic-gender-class politics

The old neocolonial regimes across Africa have been thoroughly discredited and have lost the hegemonic struggles for legitimacy before the people. They represent the less than one percent of the class of phantom bourgeoisie, a parasitic class that lacks any of the productive capacities usually associated with a capitalist ruling class, according to Fanon. The rulers use clientilism to buy the services of the workers in the state machineries of the army, police and the bureaucracy as the state apparatuses for oppressive and exploitative rule over the masses. They are in alignment with archaic monarchical rulers who should have been abolished throughout Africa and replaced with elected Town Mayors checked by Town Councils. The African comprador bourgeoisie are maintained in office with the support of the foreign bourgeoisie who are only interested in the expropriation of surpluses from our hard-working people and in the extraction of natural resources.

In some African states, power has shifted to reformist regimes that frequently prove incapable of transforming the structural contradictions that condemn more than one billion talented Africans to a life of insecurity in the midst of abundance. Some of these neoliberal regimes try to legitimate themselves in office by obsessing about the recovery of public funds stolen by past regimes while the elements in the current regimes rarely get caught until they are out from office and their bourgeois rivals try to recover stolen loots from them, to be stolen by the incumbents in turn.

None of the neoliberal reformist regimes in Africa has shown interest in convening the constitutional conference of all Africans to chart a new course of state formation that would benefit all Africans at home and in the Diaspora with emphasis on class-race-ethnic-gender justice articulation or intersectionality. All the ministerial appointments are given to lackeys of the bourgeoisie and the vast majority of them are masculinists and ethnic triumphalists without room for gender parity despite the immense talents of African women and their enormous contributions to the decolonization struggles and despite the symbolic gender parity in the African Union parliament.

Given the above conditions, no bourgeois regime deserves the loyalty of African activists, workers and peasants. It is up to us as scholar-activists to ally with workers and peasants and build an alternative platform for the masses and boldly campaign to win power democratically and thereby end the misrule of our people by a parasitic gang of exploiters and oppressors.

The foreign policy of Africana Mass Party

The Africana Mass Party must avoid being boxed into the colonial boundaries imposed on Africans by imperialists. Already, opportunist groups are laying claim to the name of parties circumscribed by the boundaries of individual neocolonial states in Africa. Let us leave them with their discredited ideologies of bourgeois nationalism and let us avoid what Fanon identified as the pitfalls of national consciousness.

Let us boldly call our party the Africana Mass Party with a manifesto to organize in every African state. Instead of regarding Africa as the center of our foreign policy, let us smash the colonial boundaries that the masses have disdainfully disregarded. Africa should be the center of our domestic policy and the working people should be mobilized to erase the crippling colonial boundaries and allow our mighty people to rise and be counted as citizens of the 21st Century.

In alliance with imperialism, the ruling classes across African states have intensified the war of maneuvers and war of positions against our people by colluding to arm terrorist groups and the genocidal states as the excuse for foreign aggression in Africa (4). The reformist regimes run around the imperialist countries begging for more arms with which to wage war against our people and simply hide the huge military aid funding that they receive annually from imperialists in foreign bank accounts while committing genocide against our people with crude fetishes of militarism. They divide the masses by inciting the lumpen proletariat to rise up and attack fellow Africans whose languages are mocked as incomprehensible Makwerekwere (2).

The Africana Mass Party in Africa will abolish the importation of arms from any foreign suppliers and will concentrate on building social security by investing in agricultural, educational, health, scientific, and technological revolutions that will also enable Africans to develop and produce all the means necessary for the defense of our people. Since the armies, police and bureaucracies across the states in Africa have shown no interest in fighting against the enemies of Africans but only specialize in committing genocide against our people, let us commit ourselves to the abolition of the armies of occupation and the repressive police forces that the imperialists imposed to keep our people under oppression eternally.

The need for dual power now

The Africana Mass Party must organize a dual power now even before we win any state office. We must have organs for the education of our people, for health research, for agricultural experiments and outreach for cooperative economics, for media and cultural work and for the security of the workers and peasants without waiting for the discredited phantom bourgeoisie to offer leadership to Africans. This will enable the Africana Mass Party to counter the dictatorship of the phantom bourgeoisie with the democracy of the working people across Africa.

Let us plan our local party branches in every ward and in every state across Africa and in every diaspora African majority state that commits to our program to enable us to hold our annual congresses as soon as possible. With the trust that we are bound to enjoy among the majority of Africans at home and abroad, if only one-third of Africans are able to sign up as card-carrying members of our party it will be one of the biggest mass parties in history.

As a revolutionary party, the masses of our people will be attracted to our party and will rapidly swell our ranks. We had better be ready to lead this massive awakening in our people lest petty bourgeois ideologues hijack them and deceitfully use them to shore up the discredited system of neocolonialism. Let the bourgeois parties go to the people against the Africana Mass Party and let us see who would more quickly organize and mobilize our people across the ridiculous colonial boundaries that our people have always transgressed in their search for survival.

The tactics of the Africana Mass Party

We must concern ourselves with objective conditions and not with any ideas in the heads of any individuals. Our work is carved out for us by Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Claudia Jones, WEB Du Bois, Pierre Mulele, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, CLR James, Samora and Justina Machel, Ruth First, Joe Slovo, Kwame Toure, Chris Hani, A.M. Babu, Samir Amin, Edwin and Bene Madunagu, to mention but a few, as that of the merciless practical critique of the pitfalls of national consciousness with which the phantom bourgeoisie has been dividing and dominating our people (3).

As Steve Biko observed, the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressors is the minds of the oppressed. If we allow our people to be seduced permanently by the ideology of nationalism, sexism and ethnicity, they will continue to refer to the comprador bourgeois dictatorships across Africa as ‘our national leaders’ whereas the working people have no nations yet, all we have is Africa full of oppressed and exploited working people yearning to be mobilized and united to free ourselves from oppression and exploitation democratically.

The bourgeoisie maintains its domination over the masses in Africa through the exercise of hegemony or intellectual and moral leadership sold to the people, not by force but not without force or the threat of force, but through coerced consent engineered through ‘deception, flattery, fine phrases, promises by the million, petty sops, and concessions of the unessential while retaining the essential’, as Lenin put it (1), followed by Slovo and by Madunagu in the defense of national democratic revolution strategy as a step towards revolutionary internationalism (3).

To counter the bourgeois propaganda and threat or use of force, we need to launch our newspaper as an essential tool in the mobilization and re-education of our people across Africa. The availability of Internet and information technologies means that we have no reason to postpone this crucial decision any further except the lethargy that Eskor Toyo railed against. Even before the party is launched, let us constitute the party organ and start reaching out to the people on a daily basis (5).

Petty bourgeois defense of the nation

Given the threat of wars and terrorism across Africa today, it is common to observe petty bourgeois intellectuals calling for the defense of the fatherland by all patriots. This is a way to deceive the masses by making them believe that their interests are the same as those of the bourgeois dictatorship and their imperialist partners. The defeat of terrorism is sold to the masses as a task for all the people but the propagandists have never offered any example where terrorism was ever defeated militarily even by the mighty militaries of imperialism. Instead, wherever the imperialist forces have intervened militarily to defeat terrorism, they have managed to make matters worse for the poor masses who are routinely destroyed by the imperialists as collateral damage while being simultaneously targeted by the terrorists for kidnapping and suicide bombing.

Down with militarism and up with education of the masses as a way to eliminate the oppressive conditions of mass impoverishment that breed terrorism. Down with national consciousness that seeks to divide and weaken Africans and up with internationalism among African states to leverage our immense resources for a peaceful and democratic development of our societies. Down with sexism and sectarianism!

How can war be ended in Africa?

The wars raging across African communities cannot be ended with mere slogans. The wars cannot be ended merely by appealing to the working people of Africa to declare their will and preference for peace. The wars are raging across Africa not because the bourgeoisie is an evil class bent on the complete destruction of the people; although bourgeois war-mongers definitely benefit from the wars.

The wars raging across African communities are the result of 1000 years of underdevelopment that stripped Africans of our indigenous philosophy of non-violence and imposed the rapacious ideology of capitalist greed as the means of achieving societal goals via selfish profits. To end the tendency to wage wars across Africa, we must overthrow the system of capitalism and replace it with socialism.

When the working people take over control of state power across Africa, there will no longer be any need for the workers’ state to wage war against the working people. The Peoples Republic of Africa will be too busy providing the social security needs of Africans and will not have the time or resources to devote to war-mongering internally or externally. With the unity of the working people across Africa as citizens of a democracy of scale, no internal or external ants would ever be tempted to attempt to swallow the African elephant again by force or by fraud.

The Mass Party will usher in a new type of state in Africa

The dual power structures built by the party now will lay the foundation for a new type of state across Africa through which the people shall govern their own lives. The bourgeois states imposed on Africans by imperialism and retained by the comprador classes rely on the monopoly over legitimate force to keep the people under domination.

The Africana Mass Party will abolish the capitalist state of militarism as soon as we achieve state power, the proletarian state would cease to be a bourgeois state for the oppression of other classes by the bourgeoisie. The standing army and the police state would be abolished and replaced by the masses of the people armed with knowledge and technologies of the self to defend their rights and maintain their wellness democratically and non-violently.

The Africana Mass Party is not an anarchist party because we recognize the need to win state power and use the power to smash the exploitative structures of capitalism before allowing the state to wither away when there is no longer any need for the state to be an instrument for the oppression of other classes by the ruling classes. We will prevent the restoration of the police force by organizing community watch committees across Africa and by relying on restorative justice models as opposed to retributive justice.

The agrarian and national program of the Africana Mass Party

Currently, there are agrarian and nationalist crises all over Africa. Nomadic cattle herders are frequently in conflict with sedentary peasant farmers because somebody’s cattle ate somebody’s crops and somebody is always trying to steal somebody’s cattle, resulting in armed conflict in which massacres are common.

The cattle herders should be commended for single-handedly supplying the beef that has fed our people for more than 100 years and the peasant farmers must be commended for growing most of our staple food items. The current crises arose from the fact that the mode of production lags behind the means of production and we must revolutionize both the mode of production and the ownership of the means of production in the agrarian sector and in the industrial sector.

Instead of relying on the archaic medieval methods of herding cattle for hundreds of miles in search of pasture and water, we must develop cattle ranches where the cattle must be kept and feeds are brought to them instead. This will create sources of livelihood for the youth who may specialize in cutting grass and supplying to the ranches while the ranches would help to improve nutrition by supplying milk to school children.

Moreover the youth who are employed by wealthy absentee owners of the herds would finally have the ample opportunity to go to school with their peers. Some of the peasant farmers may team up and start their own cooperative ranches too with the support of grants from the Peoples Republic of Africa.

With the threat of desertification intensifying and forcing ethnic nationalities to encroach on the land of their neighbors, the Africana Mass Party will nationalize all land in Africa and allocate land to all who need it to avoid a situation where a few capitalist farmers own all the fertile land while the masses of the people are reduced to unemployed landless farm workers. We will support the conservation of forests by developing wind and solar power generators for cooking and electricity across Africa. We will launch a program of planting trees for each African citizen every year to help us to sequester the carbon emission in the atmosphere.

The Africana Mass Party seeks to defeat those who are bent of dividing the people along ethnic lines. We will build a larger state to encompass the whole of Africa as an alternative to unviable multiplication of sovereign state structures that imperialism mushroomed across Africa for the obvious purpose of underdeveloping the divided and weakened Africa, as Rodney observed.

However, the unification of Africa will not be attempted by the Africana Mass Party through militarism and violence but through the democratic unification of the people. The more democratic the Peoples Republic of Africa, the more confident the Africana Mass Party will be in guaranteeing the right to self-determination for all ethnic nationalities, and the right to secession from the Peoples Republic of Africa.

Africana Mass Party and Africana womanism

The Africana Mass Party recognizes the undeniable contributions of African women to the liberation struggle. As Samora Machel stated, we do not regard the liberation of women as an act of charity for which the men expect to be patted on the back. Rather, we regard the liberation of women from sexism as inextricably intersected or articulated with the struggle against imperialism and racism; it is the precondition for the revolution (3). Accordingly, all elected or appointed offices of the Africana Mass Party, all offices of the Peoples Republic of Africa and all employment opportunities in industries will be filled on the basis of gender parity.

We will enforce compulsory education for all our people, including women and men. We will enforce equal pay for equal work. We will legalize the right of women to choose abortion and we will legalize sex work. We will legalize same sex relationships and provide comprehensive health coverage for all Africans. Women and men will have equal access to land and equal human rights in the Peoples Republic of Africa where oppressive widowhood practices will be outlawed.

The need for a new international socialist alliance

Socialists are not nationalists; we are internationalists. Thus, the Peoples Republic of Africa will offer citizenship to the African Diaspora internationally and to working people globally who wish to join us in building the People’s Republic. As the crises of late imperialism force poor people to risk their lives in their attempts to migrate, the peoples republic of Africa will be welcoming poor refugees and migrants who seek to come to Africa in search of peaceful coexistence, irrespective of race-class-gender.

We will ally with socialist parties in other parts of the world and collaborate in the innovation of policies that will advance socialism worldwide for the benefit of the working people of the world. For this purpose, the Africana Mass Party will convene an international conference of all socialist parties in the world to be held in Africa for the first time. We must declare to the world that the Africana Mass Party is active in the new Socialist International without waiting for an international congress and that we are ready to advocate for all oppressed nationalities anywhere in the world.

Our internationalism starts right here in Africa by abolishing the ridiculous colonial boundaries that imperialism imposed on us. Our internationalism is extended to the African Diaspora all over the world who have a right to return as citizens of the Peoples Republic of Africa united democratically, while Diaspora states that wish to join the Peoples Republic of Africa will be welcomed with open arms.

What should we call our party?

We must call our party simply the Africana Mass Party without limiting the organization to the colonial boundaries of any African state or to the continental Africa, excluding the Diaspora. We must reach out and organize branches of our party across Africa and the African Diaspora and avoid the lethargy of nationalist parties.  As Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem used to scream: Do Not Agonize! Organize! (6)

* Biko Agozino is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech.

Further readings and references

1.  V. Lenin (1963) ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution: Draft Platform for the Revolutionary Party’, in Selected Works, Vol. 2, Moscow, Progress.

2.  B. Agozino (2016) ‘Series Editor’s Preface’ in David Matsinhe, Apartheid Vertigo: Discrimination Against Africans in South Africa, Aldershot, Ashgate.

3.  See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York, Grove Press, 1963; Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, London Thomas Nelson, 1965; Claudia Jones, Carol Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of a Black Communist Claudia Jones, Durham, Duke University Press; WEB Du Bois, ‘The Pan-African Congresses: The Story of a Growing Movement’ in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, David L. Lewis, ed., New York, Owl Books, 1995); Pierre Mulele, Ludo Martens, The People’s Uprising in the Congo (Kinshasha) 1954-1968: The Way of Patrice Lumumba and Pierre Mulele, Brussels, Labour Party of Belgium; Amilcar Cabral, Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1979; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London, Bogle l’Ouverture, 1972; CLR James, A History of Pan-African Revolt, Washington, D.C., Drum and Spear Press, 1969; Samora and Justina Machel (Ian Christie, Machel of Mozambique, Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1988); Ruth First (The Barrel of a Gun: Political Power in Africa and the Coup d’Etat, London, Allen Lane, 1970); Joe Slovo (The South African Working Class and the National Democratic Revolution, SACP, 1988); Kwame Ture (Ready for the Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael, London, Simon & Schuster, 2003); Chris Hani (My Life: An Autobiography Written in 1991, Johannesburg, SACP); A.M. Babu (African Socialism or Socialist Africa?, London, Zed Press, 1981);  Samir Amin (Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or ending capitalism?, Oxford, Pambazuka Press, 2010); Edwin Madunagu (Problems of Socialism: The Nigerian Example, London, Bogle l’Ouverture, 1982); Bene Madunagu, (Women’s Health and Empowerment: Speeches, Essays and Lectures, 1995-2006, edited by Edwin Madunagu and Akpan John, Calabar, Clear Lines Publications, 2007).

4.  A. Gramsci (1971) Selections From the Prison Notebooks. London, Lawrence and Wishart

5.  Eskor Toyo (1989) The Working Class and the Third Republic, Calabar, Directorate for Literacy.

6.  Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Pan-Africnism: Politics, Economy, and Social Change in the Twenty-First Century, New York, New York University Press, 1996.

First published by Pambazuka News May 11, 2017.

Open Letter to TT Prime Minister

The Office of the Honourable Prime Minister of TT

Through

The Office of the Honourable Attorney General

Through

The Office of Law Revision Commission

lawrevision@legalaffairs.gov.tt

Dear Honourable Dr. Rowley,

AN OPEN LETTER ON POLICY CHANGE

I wish to commend your government for maintaining the status of Trinidad and Tobago as a High Human Development Index country, along with most Caribbean countries, according to the annual ranking of the UNNDP. I hope that you will increase the rate of development, say in the area of gender equality, to help TT to join the Very High Human Development Index countries soon. I also hope that you will share your secrets to success with African countries that continue to hug the Low Human Development Index ranks with a few exceptions.

I worked at UWI St. Augustine from 2006 to 2009 as a Professor of Sociology. During that time, I was fortunate to receive a government of Trinidad and Tobago researcher-initiated grant to study the ‘Causes of Crime in the Country, the Region and Globally’. The major activities were mentoring junior researchers, the formation of the Caribbean Criminology Network across the three campuses of UWI, and the hosting of an international conference on the theme of Developing a Caribbean Criminology.

I am writing to share one of the policy implications of the findings that you may wish to consider to help the country and the region to reduce the high rates of violent crime and serve as a shining model to other developing countries and regions. Similar policy recommendations have already been published and so you may already be familiar with them but I am using this opportunity to urge you to summon the political will and courage to implement them at little or no cost for the benefit of the people.

In April 2016 The Honourable Faris Al-Rawi, the Attorney General of TT, told The Guardian Newspaper that in Trinidad and Tobago, “A remand cell has nine people in it, four of whom are in for charges of murder and the rest there for possession of two joints of marijuana. They share the cell for two and three years and then you have to ask yourself if you are encouraging recidivism or criminality by association.”

From the statistics that he cited, it can be estimated that marijuana remand prisoners cost the government 75 million dollars annually for remand prisoners alone. Given that criminologists have for a long time validated the theory of differential association by Edwin Sutherland according to whom criminality is learned through association with other criminals, the detention of nonviolent drug users and other petty offenders with violent offenders could only lead to the petty offenders becoming more violent when released.

The government can change this overnight by instructing the Law Revision Commission to immediately reclassify marijuana as a legal substance to be regulated in the same way as tobacco and alcohol which kill lots of people every year while marijuana has never killed anyone.

We educators can be relied upon to teach young people to say no to all drugs and when they suffer any adverse effects, the hospitals will help to reduce the harm without involving the criminal justice system as is the case with the much more dangerous tobacco and alcohol.

Besides, doctors are willing to recommend marijuana for medicinal uses to patients and so the government should allow this option to be exercised legally instead of forcing patients to patronize drug gangs. Raffique Shah wrote a passionate plea in The Express of March 13, 2017 seeking permission to be allowed to use cannabis oil to treat his Parkinson’s disease.

As you may already know, Jamaica has taken the lead in the region by decriminalizing the medical uses of marijuana. Trinidad and Tobago can afford to take a step further by legalizing it for recreational purposes and regulating it to ensure that underage children are not able to purchase it from licensed dealers contrary to the current situation where anyone can buy from dealers who do not check the age of the buyers.

The only ones benefiting from keeping marijuana illegal are the drug gangs and they will be forced out of business by legitimate dealers who would be licensed and who would pay taxes on their sales to generate more revenues. Other products could also be manufactured from hemp to help diversify the economy.

The government will also save money from ending unnecessary prosecutions by directing police officers to cease and desist from going after non-violent marijuana users. This move will earn police officers more respect and love in the community and they may no longer be called Babylon. Instead, more ladies will wine on them during carnival.

This policy has bipartisan support with Mr. Basdeo Panday once expressing his support for re-legalization since he remembered when sugar cane field workers were paid part of their wages with marijuana during the colonial days. Dr. Peter Hanoomansingh supports this with evidence from his doctoral dissertation in History.

Internationally, South Africa and Israel have decriminalized medical marijuana this year with huge business potentials, the Italian army is authorized to grow medical marijuana and supply to hospitals, eight states and the District of Columbia in the US have voted to legalize it for recreational uses and 26 states have authorized the use of medical marijuana, Portugal has decriminalized all drugs since 1997 and The Netherlands has been experimenting with legalized marijuana sales in coffee shops since 1976. Uruguay recently legalized marijuana for recreational uses.

If the government is afraid of the electoral consequences of legalization, then call a referendum on the policy and let the people decide. Otherwise, encourage a bipartisan bill to be presented in parliament for legalization. Or encourage citizens to sue the government for the deprivation of liberty and let the courts decide. The more courageous move would be for the Honourable Prime Minister to lead the policy change with an immediate directive to the Law Revision Commission to reclassify marijuana as a legal substance.

Since the law against marijuana was imposed by colonial officials without justification, it is time for Trinidad and Tobago to echo the mantra of the founding father, Dr. Eric Williams, by telling the people that Massa Day Done so that law abiding adults can use their freedom to decide what to consume without posing a threat to themselves or to others in a democratic society.

Yours truly,

Dr. Onwubiko Agozino

Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies

Virginia Tech

Blacksburg

VA 24061

USA

540-231-7699

agozino@vt.edu

CC:

Omatie Lyder, editor in chief, Express: omatie.lyder@trinidadexpress.com

Fazeer Mohammed, host of Morning Edition, TV6: fazeer2001@gmail.com

Jones P. Madeira, editor in chief of Newsday: jones.madeira@gmail.com

Anthony Wilson, EIC, Guardian: anthony.wilson@guardian.co.tt

Carisa Lee, producer of The Morning Brew: lee.ccarisa@mail.com

Joshua Seemungal, reporter, TV6: jseem001@fiu.edu

Satesha Mahabir: satesh@cnc3.co.tt

Varun Bhagerty, CNMG: varun@cnmg.tt

Sandra Maharaj, CNMG: smaharaj@cnmg.tt