Tag: AREGBESOLA

In any theatre of life with which he is identified, every one of us has an orientation…If you meet a politician who is unwilling or unable to declare and, as precisely as possible, describe his position in relation to the cardinal points of political compass, you will feel strongly tempted to denounce him as a fraud, a total misfit, or a hopeless drifter”. These were the words of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo in his essay titled “Case For Ideological Orientation”. Affirming his own ideological commitment to democratic socialism, Awolowo contends that the aim of any progressive government must “include social justice, equal opportunity for all, respect for human dignity, and the welfare and happiness of all, regardless of creed, parentage and station in life”.

One politician in this dispensation who, like Awo, clearly does not operate in an ideological vacuum is Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, the Governor of the state of Osun. Whether or not you agree with his politics and his style, what is beyond dispute is that within a span of three short years, Aregbesola has recorded unprecedented developmental strides in a state, hitherto regarded as one of the poorest and least resource-endowed in Nigeria. A new book titled: ‘Work In Progress’, published by a progressive group, Osun Development Agenda, offers fresh insights and perspectives into the mind and persona of Aregbesola, his ideological disposition and the philosophical bases of his administration’s policies and programmes.

The Osun Development Agenda is a group of left-oriented activists, politicians, administrators and scholars with Mr Kehinde Bamigbetan, Chairman of Ejigbo Local Council Development Area of Lagos State as Convener and Mr Shenge Rahman Akanbi, a lawyer and campaigner for the rights of nationalities as Deputy Convener. It is thus not surprising that this work, which runs into almost 200 pages and is divided into eight chapters, is not your run of the mill hagiographic offering. Rather, it is a rigorous intellectual dissection of achievements, problems and challenges of an administration that is valiantly striving to summon the power of ideas to surmount the obstacles to the peace, progress and prosperity of the long-suffering people within its sphere of jurisdiction.

As expected, the book provides detailed information as regards the successes recorded so far in the actualization of the Aregbesola administration’s Six-Point Integral Action Plan – Banishing poverty, banishing hunger, Banishing unemployment, Restoring healthy living, Promoting functional education and enhancing communal peace and progress. Thus, we have a meticulous itemisation of the administration’s initiatives and achievements in diverse sectors including food and agriculture, tourism, transportation, road construction, job creation, improvement in health care facilities, the environment, water provision, education, housing, security and electricity among several others. Of course, as the title of the book suggests, this is only an interim report as it is all still work in progress.

However, the most important contribution of this book, which utilises the radical political economy mode of analysis, is its effectively situating the successes of and challenges confronting the Aregbesola administration within the appropriate historical, economic, political and ideological contexts. It offers an overview of the political economy of the State of Osun as a component of the larger political economy of dependency and underdevelopment in Nigeria. Ever before the imposition of PAX BRITANNICA, the authors note, the peoples and Kingdoms that make up the area today demarcated as Osun – Ife, Ijesha, Osogbo, Iwo, Ila, Ede etc – had existed for centuries. By the 17th century, they had established strong monarchical political systems, a prosperous commercial economy, a land tenure system upon which thrived a vibrant and self-sustaining agricultural sector producing a variety of food crops and an effective health care system predicated on traditional pharmacology.

All these were nourished culturally and spiritually by the Ifa Corpus, which was “the indigenous divination system that serves as compendium of Yoruba history and culture”. However, as the authors note, these politically stable, economically viable, and spiritually cohesive societies were sabotaged by the colonial intrusion and the subsequent imposition, directly and indirectly, of alien political, economic, social as well as cultural structures and values. Hence, Osun like other parts of Nigeria became “gradually incorporated and finally integrated into te global imperialist system as a dependent, peripheral entity”. This was best illustrated by the forced displacement of the traditional agricultural system based on food crop production by the growing and selling of cash crops to European trading firms with the consequent “promotion and expansion of European manufacturing industries and the decline of indigenous production”.

Administratively, Osun was part of the Western Region in the First Republic. It became part of Oyo state when Oyo, Ogun and Ondo states were created out of the Western region in 1976. The area finally emerged as an autonomous state on August 27th, 1991. At its creation, the authors note, the character of the state was still neo-colonial with “disarticulated infrastructures, externally-oriented, rentier system of crude oil appropriation leaving 70 per cent of the people in rural areas in poverty”. Almost a decade after the creation of the state in 1999, its dependent, poverty-stricken, underdeveloped status of neo-colonialism had hardly changed.

With a meagre annual federal allocation fluctuating between N6 billion and N7 billion annually, the Chief Bisi Akande administration between 1999 and 2003 took remarkable steps to lay a viable foundation for the transformation of the state. The authors however note with regret that the impressive gains made by the state under Akande in various areas including road construction/rehabilitation, free education and rehabilitation of schools, free health services and direct engagement of indigenous artisans and technicians in public projects, were reversed during the seven and a half years of the Olagunsoye Oyinlola administration. The latter indeed left a debt burden of N18.38 billion, which was inherited by Aregbesola.

Confronted with the monstrous scale of poverty and underdevelopment in Osun, the Aregbesola administration had to think outside the box and adopt what amounts to revolutionary strategies and policies to commence the liberation of the state from the throes of underdevelopment. The authors contend that Aregbesola’s ideology of governance and development rests on a tripod of Black Nationalism, Marxism and Spirituality. They arrive at this conclusion after an examination of Aregbesola’s intellectual and ideological antecedents.

As a student at The Polytechnic, Ibadan, Aregbesola was the President of the Black Nationalist Movement. Inspired by Martin Delany and Marcus Garvey in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, the movement championed the restoration of the pride and dignity of the black man. Some of their objectives included campaign for the return of blacks in the diaspora to the African homeland as well as fighting for the rights of the Negros in America. This background of consciousness of the value of African culture partly explains continuing efforts by the Aregbesola administration to “retrieve the concept of Omoluabi from the moral philosophy of Yoruba civilization” and utilising it as a tool “to re-mould the people to develop a new consciousness without which the revolutionary programmes would fail”.

According to the authors, Aregbesola was later to gravitate from Black Nationalist ideology towards revolutionary Marxism under the influence of the late Marxist theoretician and economist, Comrade Ola Oni. This was because “Black Nationalism proved an inadequate paradigm to apprehend the complexity and contradictions of the international capitalist system for the young Raufu”. Here again we can trace the roots of the progressive, welfarist orientation of his administration given the constitutional and political limitations of Nigeria’s neo-colonial bourgeois order.

The third strand of Aregbesola’s ideological orientation, the authors contend, lies in the realm of the spiritual. He was brought up as a Muslim in the ‘spiritually dense’ Ikare community of Ondo State but was also influenced by the liberal and tolerant religious outlook of the Yoruba of the South West. But how would Aregbesola reconcile the materialist basis of Marxist thought with the ideational, mystical emphasis of religion? The authors believe that such contradictions were resolved for the young Aregbesola in the mid-70s with the emergence of liberation theology both of the Christian and Musilm varieties “that brought religion to the service of change”. According to the authors, “It is the totality of these values…that has conditioned the elaboration of a new path of dignity, self-reliance and peace for the people of the State of Osun”.