The Author is Dead: Long Live His Work

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 By Biko Agozino

When literary theorists talk about the death of the author, they do not refer to the death of the physical being but to the symbolic death of the text that the author could no longer keep alive with the addition of new words, sentences, paragraphs, pages and chapters. The published text becomes like a cadaver to be dissected by communities of interpretation and decoded either in line with hegemonic elite perspectives by conservatives, or in agreement with negotiated decoding by reformists, or bold decoding by revolutionaries in counter-hegemonic ways.

Thus, the death of the author actually signifies that the author has attained immortality in the sense that thousands of years to come, readers will continue to decode what is encoded in those books and continue to quote that Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo says this or that as if he is still sitting with us in the Chancery of the Eastern Mandate Union – his home and office that was open to all without security guards and gate-keepers at all hours of the day and with generous supply of food and drinks. Arthur is Dead: Long Live His Body of Works!

Few intellectuals today can lay claim to over 20 books to their credit and even fewer could do that while also publishing thousands of other authors that he sometimes commissioned for his own publishing house. To do all that while being a leading activist, philanthropist, and mentor to younger scholars but without any offer of research grants or professorship by any university in the decidedly anti-intellectual country lusting after filthy lucre is nothing but heroic. Thousands of years to come, we may forget who was the richest Igbo person at the time of the passing of Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo but I bet that the world will keep rediscovering his brave intellectual and moral leadership especially if professors encourage their doctoral students to subject his immense contributions to critical appraisal in their dissertations instead of parroting irrelevant Eurocentric jargon as the privileged theoretical perspectives for explaining African realities.

When I visited his home on January 3^rd 2020 with my High School teacher who mentored me on study skills and who also wrote for the publisher, a submission to the Justice Oputa Commission on Human Rights Violations in Nigeria, we sat outside his Chancery residence and started a seminar on political philosophy. My mentor said that he did not like democracy and would prefer a strong ruler who got things done well. Arthur lighted up and glanced at me. I smiled and said that Churchill also observed that democracy was the worst system of government, except for all the other alternatives. Plato and Aristotle also rejected democracy as mob rule and preferred the philosopher king or the aristocracy, respectively. That was probably why an Oxford educated theologian, C.K. Meek, was dispatched as a colonial anthropologist in 1930 to figure out why Igbo women declared war on colonialism. In his ‘intelligence report’ on Igbo Law, Meek said that the Igbo were ‘politically backward and undeveloped ‘because they were headless or acephalous societies and so could not be subjected to indirect rule like their more ‘advanced’ neighbors who had natural rulers.

Although Meek recommended direct rule under the British District Commissioners for the democratic Igbo, another Oxford anthropologist Margery Perham advised the military dictatorship in 1970 that what made the Igbo rebellious enough to secede (after being subjected to inhumane pogroms and genocide) was because they had no chiefs and were supposedly jealous of their more advanced neighbors with chiefs. To make the Igbo easier to control, the military dictatorship was advised to impose chiefs on them and this was decreed by General Obasanjo in 1976. I concluded that the Igbo should defend their democratic philosophy which says that all heads are equal and that the Igbo know no king because that is the philosophy of government promised by the republican constitution of Nigeria with no role for traditional rulers. In defense of democracy, those traditional rulers should have been abolished and replaced with town mayors and city councils who would be elected on fixed terms for more accountability. Arthur loved the exchange and told us that he was feeling a lot better with the fresh air before he asked us to help him back to his room upstairs.

His sister called me to inform me that her ‘father’ chose the beginning of Black History Month, February 1, to journey to the land of the ancestors with the assurance that his body of work will live on after him. Being in the presence of Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo always felt like having a front row seat in the performance of living history. I visited him in December and twice in January, the last being in hospital on January 8^th where he looked as if he was recovering. It was a shock to learn that he was gone to the next world but the sense of shock quickly gave way to the celebration of his immense achievements as a scholar-activist with enduring contributions to social thought, pro-democracy activism, and institution-building.

In January 2016, I conducted an interview with him about his celebrated Appeal Court case that struck down and deleted the clause of sedition from the Nigerian Criminal Code as being in conflict with the Presidential Constitution which provides for freedom of expression. If that court victory was his only contribution to the advancement of human freedom, it was enough to guarantee his eminence as a historical leader. But he went much farther than winning the court case. Before that case, he had already established himself as a conscience of the nation by writing timely books after books to challenge every dictatorial regime in the country and that was how a civilian administration arrested him and jailed him for a critical book on how his home state was being governed, offering him the chance to make history on appeal. Beyond writing his own books, he established a leading indigenous publishing house to provide the opportunity for thousands of African authors to be published at home. He still went beyond that to become a national leader of a pro-democracy movement, NADECO, that challenged the annulment of the Abiola Presidential election victory in 1993 and thereby earned himself more stints in detention. He went on to found a political organization to advocate for the Eastern region that remained neglected by successive regimes decades after the Nigeria-Biafra war.

After interviewing him in 2016 on his historic victory against sedition laws, he gave me a present of 20 books that he had written. I told him that I would write a book about all his books and he promised me that when I wrote it he would publish it. I wrote the book within two months and he published it instantly in 2016 as Critical, Creative and Centered Scholar-Activism: The Fourth Dimensionalism of Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo. In the book, I summarized and critiqued all his books, fiction and non-fiction. This approach differs from previous reviews about his work that mostly praised his genius without much criticism and they left out his creative writings whereas I took a critical approach and also covered his creative works. As I was writing, he was sending me more photocopies of more books to add to the review. I am sure that when his family goes through his papers, they will discover even more manuscripts that are yet to be published.

When I visited his younger brother, Dr. Ejiofor Benjack Nwankwo, who is now the Managing Director of the now struggling Fourth Dimension Publishing Co, one of the books he gave me in January 2020 was the 2018 fresh publication of his elder brother, Arthur Agwuncha Nwankwo – Nigeria and Her Path to Doom. I was hoping to review this book, maybe the planned review essay would be an addition as a chapter to my earlier book about his work, in case a second edition with better copy editing was forthcoming. That review essay may wait but I am now struck by the sense of foreboding by the author who opened the book with the prophetic announcement as follows:

‘This little book is motivated by the fact that I have become an elder statesman; a man in the twilight of his career as well as earthly existence and as is our custom, an elder does not stay in the house and watch the she-goat deliver in her tethers.’ With that proverb, he went on to outline the broad history of how Nigeria was established on a faulty trajectory that would lead to ruin and conclude with a critical appraisal of the Buhari administration and a recommendation for restructuring as the solution to the problems he identified. Personally, I hope that the restructuring will include the democratic option of the United Republic of African States, one of the points that I made earlier in my book about his body of works.

President Buhari and other politicians were quick to offer praise for Nwankwo when his death was announced but I doubt if they have bothered to read his living books. Buhari reportedly recognized Nwankwo as a national leader of NADECO and praised him for supporting the handshake across the Niger. The administration or his well-wishers should endow a research center and professorship in his name to encourage students to read his books and learn from the timely analysis and warning of how to avert the doom that is predictably looming before the people.

I thank the author for touching me personally and rubbing off on me a bit of his leadership gifts. I wish Nwankwo well on his journey to get some rest in the land of the ancestors before he returns with his fellow intellectuals, especially those of the Igbo School – Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chinua Achebe, Mokwugo Okoye, Victor Nwankwo, Hebert Ekwe-Ekwe, Adiele Afigbo, Flora Nwapa, Buchi Emecheta, Chike Obi, Chris Okigbo, Onwuka Dike, Ikenna Nzimiro, Chikezie Uchendu, and many others - to continue the struggle for democracy and social justice throughout Africa. To the family, I say; cherish the memories and celebrate the gift of an avatar that you gave to the world. His name, Agwuncha, means infinity and his works will live forever and ever.

Draft Platform of Africana Mass Party

Draft platform of Africana Mass Party

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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.

Morsi should Fire al-Sisi

By Biko Agozino

President Mohammed Morsi of Egypt was right in rejecting the ultimatum from the army chief for him and the opposition to reach a settlement in 48 hours or else the army would step in. If the army chief thought that the crisis could be resolved in 48 hours, he must be very mistaken. Talks about being on the side of the people and being ready to die for the people are expected from the military while the defiance of Morsi and his supporters to defend the popular mandate that was won in the election one year earlier is understandable. But there is no need for anyone to die, the ambitious army officers should resign and join political parties of their choice to pursue their leadership goals democratically (as Chavez did in Venezuela after serving time for his attempted coup) or they should be discharged. My recommendations are:

President Morsi should have fired the army chief, Colonel General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, for insubordination following his ultimatum of 48 hours before he toppled the democratically elected president. Morsi should have recalled Parliament immediately for it was never the intention of the voters that he should govern alone and given that as soon as he was sworn in, he did recall parliament but that was blocked by the constitutional court for some reason only for the head of the constitutional court to be imposed undemocratically as an interim president of the country. 

Egypt should initiate a constitutional assembly for the people to rewrite the constitution in line with the South African presidential system with multiple vice presidents and proportional representation; in line with the AU parliament's model 50-50 gender equity in representation if only to help halt the appalling sexual assaults against hundreds of Egyptian women in Tahir Square, apparently attacked by their fellow protesters; and in line with the US model of federalism with city, local government, state and federal levels of elected government protected by a professional military and facilitated by the separation of religion and the state, and by separation of powers, checks and balances among the executive, the judiciary and the legislature.

The US has announced more foreign aid to Egypt to help prevent the crisis from escalating into a civil war but President Obama should consider going beyond the threat to suspend the hefty $1.3 billion annual military aid if there is a coup or a semblance of a coup; it already quacks like a duck. Instead, the US should devote at least half the military aid to the funding of business start-ups for men, women and the masses of talented but unemployed youth as a better alternative to the wasteful spending on Africom and military aid. 

Promising more aid to help shore up democracy in Egypt is a sure sign that the announcement, by President Obama during his Cape Town University address, of a $7 billion package to ‘Power Africa’ is too paltry to make a significant impact. Rather, President Obama should raise his game plan by committing to allocate at least $100 billion yearly as reparations grants to African researchers, artists, farmers, schools, entrepreneurs, communities and for projects that would help to transform Africa for the better. Other countries that benefited from the African holocaust should be invited to contribute to such a reparations fund to enable Africans to fast forward to the African Union Government for the benefit of all Africans and for the benefit of the whole world.

The Egyptian military should support the redistribution of a huge chunk of their military aid to help fight poverty not just because their officers have announced that they are on the side of the people (as is always expected) but because they are not an army of occupation and should always be in support of the democratic mandate of the impoverished people. President Morsi, when he regains his mandate, should also amend the budget to provide annual grants of at least 10% of the budget that will be awarded directly to the people to support the research and development of enterprising ideas. The Egyptian army already runs small and medium-sized enterprises that should be handed over to cooperatives, communities and enterprising individuals.

The solution to a crisis of democracy is often more democracy rather than less democracy. The protesters cheering the military helicopters that flew the Egyptian flag over Liberation Square are not much different from citizens across the world who tend to cheer every military coup until it is clear, too late, that military dictatorship is not the solution to the crisis of democracy. When the people come out to demonstrate en-masse, it is not the crisis of democracy but the actualization of democracy in practice, according to Norm Chomsky.

Morsi deserves the opposition that his administration has earned after one year of a do-nothing one-man rule for he failed to insist on the recall of the elected parliament. However, there is a danger of turning Egypt into Algeria by using the military to fight an elected government with disastrous results for the people. Morsi deserves to be supported to serve his full term as an elected President unless he is recalled in another election but he must stop serving alone: recall the elected parliament now and make sure that 50% of the ministers will be women and representatives of popular organizations! The army is right in pledging that they would not support any plan to subvert the secular constitution of Egypt but the military coup is untenable and must be reversed.

There is no guarantee that the president of the constitutional court, 68-year old Adli Mansour, who was imposed by the military to take over from Morsi will have a magic wand to resolve the democratic and economic crisis at the root of the protests and a new presidential election could still be won by Mr. Mossi or his allies unless his critics unite and campaign for the next election in three years. Mr. Mahmoud should defy the military and hand over back to Morsi who should recall parliament and include more women in government.

Every cook can govern, wrote C.L.R. James, following Lenin. This is because in a democratic election, whoever is elected is supported to serve the people and if the person is perceived to be failing the people, then there could be a recall election as was the case in the governorships of California (successful) and Wisconsin (unsuccessful, with some elected representatives defeated in the recall election) or the people could wait and elect a new chief executive and new legislative representatives at the next election. Having struggled for decades under military rule before being given the chance of electing a government of their choice for the first time, the people of Egypt should wait three more years to re-elect or throw out the candidates at the next election and put in a clause of term limits if they do not have one already. The authoritarian populism of the military is the good intention with which the road to hell is paved.

The African philosophy of non-violence should be the guide for the protesters and for the government in Egypt. The right to protest must be defended by the government while the people must support the democratic process instead of yearning for a dictatorship. Mob rule and individual rule were the extreme reasons why Aristotle preferred the system of aristocracy as a golden mean compared to the systems of democracy and monarchy but the Egyptians are not asking for mob rule nor for the rule of the individual, they appear to be all pro-democracy (supporters and opponents of Morsi alike) even if the opposition forces paradoxically see the military coup option as a facilitator of increased democratization while the supporters of the Morsi regime rightly insist on the right of the parties and individuals with the democratic mandate to serve their term of office. There is no need for clashing supporters and opponents to continue killing Egyptians on the streets.