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Tag: Eskor Toyo

  • A dying art

    What would you do if opportunity beckons for you to come back home to Nigeria after spending years in the United States of America (USA)? From what you can gather, the level of intellectual discourse you were used to before you left is a far cry from what is presently obtained. Should you remain in the US with its state-of-the art education facilities or return to contribute your quota toward the development of Nigeria? This is the dilemma a former colleague faces as he determines to take a decision that could make or mar his future.

    I saw in him an individual who truly loves Nigeria. After spending close to an hour on phone discussing about intellectuals and social critics in both countries, he was baffled that things are worse now than when he left. “All the news I seem to hear from Nigeria is practically about negative news; what is really happening on ground, are the news true”? How did we derail and get to the ridiculous level I hear and read about? He queried.

    He told me that there is not a university in the US or Canada where you will not find, at a minimum, one Nigerian professor or professional. There is not a single hospital where you will not find Nigerian medical doctors and or nurses and other professionals. There is not a single private or public institution anywhere in the US that you will not find Nigerian students. He said the same may be true of the UK. These intellectuals and professionals dispersed when the environment gradually gave way to mediocrity and sycophancy.

    Those of us who grew up listening to – and reading – the likes of the late Gani Fawehinmi; Beko Ransome-Kuti; Yusuf Bala Usman, J. F. Ade-Ajayi; Eskor Toyo; Biodun Jeyifo; Claude Ake; Olatunji Dare; Kole Omotosho; Tam-David-West; Tai Solarin; Grace Alele Williams; Niyi Osundare and a host of others would’ve been appalled that intellectual pursuit and social criticism is a dying art in Nigeria. These and other individuals I cannot all mention because of space would never remain silent in the midst of injustice. Beko and Gani, for instance, spent times in detention because they refused to remain quiet. Their times in detention aggravated their health challenges.

    One thing is certain; there is a price to be paid for silence and cowardice in the face of oppression and injustice. What we see today is the majority looking the other way as things deteriorate. Nigeria is now paying the price for abandoning intellectual pursuits. We already see the decay in the system. We see this in our national priority. We see it in how and what our country is becoming. And we see it in the pervasiveness of hopelessness and in the moral and political corruption that have come to characterise our country. Is this our Nigeria?

    Why do I love intellectuals? I do because they are men and women who have committed their lives and times to the pursuit and or dissemination of rigorous ideas and serious knowledge. They can be found in all areas of life – including music, arts and culture, medicine, mathematics, economics, politics, law, philosophy, and literary criticism.

    Beside the university or institution-based intellectuals, there are the public intellectuals who, for the most part, are engaged in very public discourses within the public sphere. However, it should be pointed out that there are times when it is difficult to differentiate between public intellectualism and political activism — or between political activists and social critics. The lines are sometimes blurred; however, all exist to make society better.

    I still recollect the days of military rule when many of these men and women were labelled “radicals” or “leftists.” Retired Colonel Lawan Gwadabe was once quoted as saying the government abhors “undue radicalism.” But those who knew better knew that these were the salt of our nation. They were the nation’s conscience.

    Many – during the military era- were prosecuted, persecuted, harassed, jailed, or sent into exile. Civilian administrations also contributed to the malaise. In the end, some of our best and brightest who could not stand mediocrity left in search of stability and greener pastures elsewhere.

    That was how our decent into infamy began. Gradually, the distasteful and impermissible became permissible and sacred. It became the norm to not only steal, but to loot. It became acceptable to be a professional “intellectual” sycophant. They revere men and women with inferior IQ and dubious character, all because of crumbs from the master’s table.

    Those who study how societies develop and progress know too well that we need a bourgeoning class of intellectuals to highlight alternative paths to development and social progress. Without them, our society may stagnate, regress or even disintegrate. Even as brutal and repressive and unpredictable as some military regimes were, the Nigerian intellectual class, along with a budding class of social critics, helped to keep the government in check. But today, things have changed. Nigeria is different.

    Intellectuals have always played major roles in society, from the philosophers of old such Plato and Aristotle who articulated thoughts about government, science, and biology to modern intellectuals who go about speaking truth to power and working toward informing and empowering average people.

    Currently, intellectuals are split into three camps: public, private, and dual intellectuals. The public intellectual is usually a university professor who researches, writes, and shares his ideas in the public sphere via books, conferences, and being guests on radio and television shows. While this may seem to be a positive occurrence, much of this information remains in the realm of academia or academia-related areas with little of it becoming truly disseminated to the mainstream public. The danger in this is that the books may be published and the conferences occur, but the only people who know about them are mainly people who are either in that field professionally or already have an interest in that area of study.

    The private intellectual, on the other hand, is one who uses his intellect for the benefit of private groups, corporations, or individuals. This intellectual is mainly concerned with passing his knowledge to a select few, mainly big time corporations and businesses who are often established for profit purposes. He earns hefty fees in return.

    Dual intellectuals are members of the intelligentsia that have one foot in both worlds, occupying the space of a public intellectual and also being, or having been, a private intellectual. Intellectuals within this fold are arguably the most powerful as not only do they have the connections and power that comes from being in the private sector, but they also have major sway over the collective consciousness of a society. Dual intellectuals can make their ideas public, put them out into the mainstream society, and because they also have a background as a public intellectual, the public is much more willing to trust them as they see such people as experts.

    We have lost fair grounds already, but we can still make amends for future generations by repositioning our universities to take their rightful place in the knowledge economy. We can incorporate the Japanese example where graduate teachers are the best paid public servants. There was a time in Nigeria when the salaries of professors were in tandem with that of a federal permanent secretary.  Today however – and despite the increased workload of professors – a distinct pay differential has emerged between apex positions in the civil service and those of senior academics.  Ironically, it is this sense of unfair disparity that has turned our academics into perpetual agitators with destructive consequences for the academic calendar.

    I am yet to hear from my former colleague if he has decided to leave the safety nest of the US for the unpredictable waters of Nigeria.

  • Eskor Toyo: A tribute

    I am writing this piece from my humble family home in Makurdi, the Benue State capital. I travelled to see my mother after over three years of my last seeing her. During mother and son sharing, she brought out a series of old pictures she has meticulously kept which showed how skinny I was some years back. While we were laughing about some of my boyhood escapades, some tiny sheets of paper fell from within some of the pictures. Taking a closer look they turned out to be a 1983 note I took from a public lecture I attended at the then Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) of the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.

    The good old FASS used to be the hotbed of intellectual and academic excellence which was why successive governments pay close attention to what happens there. My note turned out to be a 1983 lecture titled the “Marx and Africa Conference.” It suggested it was organised to mark the centenary of the death of the great revolutionary, Karl Marx. It was surprising that I attended the conference years before I became an undergraduate!

    These were some of the names on my sheet; Professor Eskor Toyo, the highly revered University of Calabar Marxist Economist, who died last month. Others include late Dr. Yusuf Bala Usman, a world class historian, Professor Claude Ake, a notable political economist who died in a plane crash and Professor Bade Onimode, another Marxist Economist some of us grew up to love.

    Sadly, with the death of Professor Toyo, all these renowned scholars and thinkers on the Left are now dead. Following these intellectuals from that time onward, my stay in the university was smooth as my intellect was sharpened even before I gained admission; and it has remained so to date. It is in this light that I want to write a humble tribute to Eskor Toyo whom I only saw physically from afar in 1983.

    For the benefit of those who may not know, our varsities were once a citadel of ideological debates. Yes, in this same country! From my note, Toyo’s presentation at the conference was made during the session called “Methodology” where he made clarifications on misconceptions about Marxist philosophy.

    Ever since that 1983 encounter I followed his writings and submissions diligently. As a Marxist, his approach to politics was clearly class based. He believed in and worked for the political power of the working class. He challenged socialists to move from the margins of national politics to the mainstream. This he demonstrated by being an active member of the late Aminu Kano led People’s Redemption Party (PRP).

    Toyo took the practical aspects of the struggle seriously, believing that a progressive politician should be immersed in the people for his activities. That perhaps explains his immense admiration for the late Gani Fawehinmi – who incidentally was his student. He declared Gani “the greatest politician in Nigeria” for always standing with the people. A man who always stood on the side of justice, Toyo played a prominent role within the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) for the improvement in the conditions of lecturers’ and the universities.

    During the “great” Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) debate of the late 80s to early 90s, Toyo was quite eloquent. He wrote series of articles in newspapers and magazines arguing why Nigeria should not accept the International Monetary Fund/World Bank loan. Most of his thoughts were later encapsulated in his 2002 book titled ‘Economics of Structural Adjustment.’

    Looking backward to the debate and forward to present realities, this books relevance cannot be discountenanced. Our country is still in the vice grip of neo-liberal components of privatisation, currency devaluation, deregulation, removal of subsidies and restriction of the sphere of the state in economic matters as espoused by these institutions.

    These policies are more glaring today than they were even in the late 80s. We are still battling with the exchange rate for the naira. Some are arguing that we allow “market force” to determine the “true” rate of the naira against foreign currencies, while others argue that government should play a role by fixing an official rate. Most – if not all – government owned companies have been privatized or “unbundled” over the years. Most importantly, the “good old” subsidy debate is still ongoing!

    Apart from being a Marxist, Toyo was also a realist. He identifies three types of critiques of SAP. The first sees the programme as necessary, but with a caveat; it should not be solely private sector driven because of the often unbridled quest for profits. The second questions the actual design of SAP and some of its component policies. The third – which Eskor Toyo identifies with – offers a more fundamental critique of SAP as a set of policies designed to save capitalism as a global economic system.

    Toyo – like most Marxists – was ‘boxed into a corner’ when the Soviet Union disintegrated into its constituent parts, and with it the entire Eastern bloc. Socialism also went under. The ideological dissolution of socialism and the triumph of capitalism and free market painted the picture of the superiority of capitalism as a “better” system of economic management.

    However, any student of current studies will not fail to notice the persistent cyclical crises that continue to characterise capitalist economies throwing millions of people into unemployment, poverty and homelessness thereby increasing social inequality. Just like was done during the SAP riots in Nigeria in the early 90s, proponents of capitalism have been clamouring to give the system “a human face.” In the West, there have been several bailouts of companies that were run aground by their managements. Ironically, they were bailed out with public funds!

    Whether or not one agrees with Eskor Toyo’s ideological orientation, he raises certain critical questions which must certainly attract the attention and interest of the managers of a neo-colonial economy like Nigeria. For instance, he raises the key issue of the dichotomy between growth and development. He contends that the two cannot be conflated.

    During the last administration, we were continuously inundated with Nigeria’s “impressive statistical growth rates.” It was brandished in our faces each time the government wants to score cheap political points. Yet right thinking citizens could not fathom the high unemployment rate in the country. Neither could they make sense of our infrastructural decay or the overall well-being of the vast majority of Nigerians. It was at the tail end that some grudgingly agreed that we had growth without visible development.

    Can anyone then contend with Toyo that development means a qualitative change for the better in the capacity of man to control his environment while growth, by contrast, means mere expansion of scale without necessarily improvement in the environment? I doubt if anyone will.

    Because our economic policies are managed by scholars and theoreticians trained to wholly accept the IMF/WB solutions without question, Toyo and his colleagues operate from the fringes by providing alternative solutions. He once argues that “It is the facile focus on GDP growth rate as such that enables the World Bank and the IMF to mislead. A country can, in fact, be developing while the growth in per capita income is zero.”

    He cites the example of a country that decides to save to build an iron and steel industry and train its own scientists and engineers to man it. Even if nothing changes in terms of per capita income during the gestation period of this project, he argues, “because of the crucial transformational role of the character of the investment, the country by that investment has made an incalculable leap in development.” How true!

    This great Economist of the Left was indisputably the master of his profession. He was diligent in what he professed. His liberal and conservative professional colleagues might not be comfortable with his ideological position, but none could dismiss his excellent scholarship; he was a scholar to the core. By his death the rank of the true Nigerian Left has reduced. He dreamt of a Nigeria where social justice and economic wellbeing will be the norm. I pray this dream come true in my generation.

  • Eskor Toyo: 1929-2015

    Eskor Toyo: 1929-2015

    •Nigeria’s leading Marxist activist and thinker departs

    The death on December 7 of Professor Eskor Toyo of the University of Calabar marks the passing of one of Nigeria’s most consistent and forthright advocates of an unrepentantly Marxian approach to economics, governance and social policy.

    Toyo was at the forefront of a pantheon of radical intellectuals that included Professors Bade Onimode, Festus Iyayi and Jibrin Ibrahim, as well as Comrade Ola Oni and Drs. Segun Osoba, Edwin Madunagu and Dipo Fashina which argued articulately against the imposition of neo-liberal economic strictures that they believed conspired to stunt the country’s development and impoverish its people.

    Like those comrades, Toyo’s commitment to his beliefs was a lifelong one. It was marked by close collaboration with such heroes of the labour movement like the legendary Michael Imoudu to oppose perceived anti-labour policies of the colonial government, actively contribute to the struggle for independence, and promote workers’ rights and economic policies which could uplift the ordinary citizen.

    Toyo’s moral convictions were also shown in the way he lived his beliefs. As a Professor, he dressed simply, and often chose to walk to his destinations; usually asking those who offered him lift to carry students whom he felt better deserved such assistance. He was not only popular among students, he was famous for his habit of paying for the education of indigent students because of his heartfelt faith in the power of education as a means of enlightenment.

    In a nation where political prostitution has become an art, Toyo’s consistency is truly worthy of admiration. He was not a so-called champagne socialist who espoused populist ideas for ultimately selfish ends; he did not call himself progressive because it was fashionable in an age of military autocracy and civilian incompetence. His beliefs stemmed from a genuine desire to see that Nigeria’s enormous potential was realised to the benefit of the most down-trodden of its citizens.

    This was the attitude that informed his career as public intellectual, labour activist, political theoretician, social critic and author. He repeatedly pointed out the flawed assumptions that underlay many of the economic nostrums proposed by multilateral financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for developing countries like Nigeria, especially their failure to take national peculiarities into consideration.

    Toyo was at the heart of the many confrontations between a succession of military administrations and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in the latter’s quest for better conditions of service and greater autonomy. Such was the comprehensiveness of his vision that he fought for and achieved the restoration of ASUU’s affiliation with the Nigeria Labour Congress, which the Babangida regime had broken in an attempt to weaken the union. Along with Madunagu, he sought to popularise an alternative socialist approach to the resolution of Nigeria’s many problems in lucidly-written articles that were famous for their pungency and intellectual depth.

    Given his unquestioned patriotism, it is a pity that Toyo did not appear to develop the ideological flexibility necessary to build bridges to co-travellers who were similarly interested in fundamentally changing Nigeria for the better. He did not seem to realise that honest and competent Nigerians occupied the full range of the ideological spectrum and could not be disregarded simply because they were not committed Marxists. Greater flexibility might have given birth to a more truly progressive strain in the country’s political life that would have helped to make the country’s politics less mercenary.

    In spite of that, however, Professor Eskor Toyo’s life is exemplary for the honesty of purpose, depth of intellect, and purposeful activism that shone through it. In a nation where such qualities have become tragically rare, there is little doubt that this giant of socialist thought and practice stands out as an authentic Nigerian hero. May he rest in peace.

  • Eskor Toyo and the economics of Neo-Liberalism (2)

    As we noted in the first part of this piece, Prof Eskor Toyo’s book, ‘Economics of Structural Adjustment’, published in 2002 is still of enduring relevance because the country’s current economic policies are still no different from the neo-liberal components of privatisation, currency devaluation, deregulation, removal of subsidies and restriction of the sphere of the state among others. He identifies three types of critiques of SAP. The first sees the programme as necessary but questions the extent to which some of its components have been carried out. The second associated with the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) is essentially nationalist or post Keynesian and questions the design of SAP and some of its component policies. The third, which Eskor Toyo identifies with, offers a more fundamental critique of SAP as a set of policies designed by western financial institutions supported by neo-liberal western regimes to save capitalism as a global system.

    The latter perspective raises questions about the desirability of capitalism as a system of economic management and its inherently limited capacity to promote positive human values such as “freedom, justice, the welfare of the majority, society’s unity, social stability, individual and collective security, social efficiency and progress”.

    Of course, critics of Eskor Toyo’s ideological position will contend that the socialist states have collapsed and virtually all transformed into free market economies precisely because of the superiority of capitalism as a system of economic organization. Yet, the triumphalism in the West attendant on the collapse of communism has ebbed because of the persistent cyclical crises that continue to characterise capitalist economies throwing millions of people into unemployment, poverty and homelessness while increasing social inequality. But whether or not one agrees with Eskor Toyo’s ideological orientation, he raises certain critical questions which must certainly attract the attention and interest of the managers of a neo-colonial economy like Nigeria.

    For instance, Eskor Toyo raises the key issue of the dichotomy between growth and development. He contends that the two cannot be conflated. The managers of Nigeria’s economy have continuously inundated us with the country’s impressive statistical growth rates which are not reflected either in massive creation of jobs, improvement in infrastructure or the overall well-being of the vast majority of Nigerians. He contends that development means a qualitative change for the better in the capacity of man to control his environment while growth, by contrast, means mere expansion of scale without necessarily any improvement in the environment.

    Unlike members of our current economic management team who uncritically regurgitate International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank ideas, Eskor Toyo argues that “It is the facile focus on GDP growth rate as such that enables the World Bank and the IMF to mislead. A country can, in fact, be developing while the growth in per capita income is zero”. He cites the example of a country that decides to save to build an iron and steel industry and train its own scientists and engineers to man it. Even if nothing changes in terms of per capita income during the gestation period of this project, he argues, “because of the crucial transformational role of the character of the investment, the country by that investment has made an incalculable leap in development”.

    If I read him correctly, Eskor Toyo’s view is that it is the non-pursuit of policies that can promote an autochthonous industrial and technological base that has made it impossible for countries like Nigeria to transcend mere growth and achieve genuine, self-regenerating development. In this regard, he makes a crucial distinction between basic and non-basic industries arguing that the engine for any country’s transformational development are it’s indigenisation of the basic industries such as iron and steel, non-ferrous metallurgy, machinery, chemicals, fuel and power and construction material such as cement and glass among others.

    “Each of these industries”, he argues, “produces an indispensable input into the processes of all or most other industries. They constitute the prime movers of industrialisation”. Consequently, a country’s capacity to develop in any meaningful sense will necessarily be a function of its “ability to build, expand and transform its own basic industries by its own skills”.

    To illustrate his thesis, Eskor Toyo cites the example of South Korea and Brazil, two countries that have achieved a commendable level of ‘Dependent Growth’ largely through trade in manufactures. But he points out that the two countries can expand manufactures or increasingly export manufactured capital goods “because there has been built there an industrial base and on the basis of this there is developed a technological base”. In sharp contrast to this, he asserts that Nigeria cannot attain self-sustained growth through current policies that are geared towards expanding trade in light industrial manufactures rather than establishing a solid industrial and technological base for the country.

    In the case of China and India, Eskor Toyo states that the secret behind the economic transformation of these countries is that in the 1950s and 1960s their leaders took the deliberate decision to force their countries’ pace of industrialization. This they did by paying primary attention to the basic industries as a basis for technological self-reliance, developing a local raw material base to avoid the huge debt overhang attendant on heavy importation as well as developing their industries primarily to serve their large internal markets.

    Thus, contrary to neo-classical economic orthodoxy, he submits that “The rapid development of a complete self-reliant industrial base demands a thoughtful restriction of trade, foreign transnational investment and the mere assembly type plant”. He notes in this respect that while they were industrializing, countries like Japan, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe practiced autarchy while Germany created a customs union to protect its infant industries. In its case, the United States “erected very high rates of tariff to protect her industries and adopted the Monroe doctrine to preserve the whole of the American sphere for herself”.

    Again, contrary to the claim that the economic ‘miracle’ achieved by the so-called Asian Tigers were due to the adoption of neo-liberal policies, Eskor Toyo contends that the key distinguishing feature of the Newly Industrialising Countries including India, Pakistan, Mexico and Brazil “is that as a rule they decided to establish the basic industries as a foundation for all-round development”. Indeed, the High Performing Asian Economies are distinguished by their early decision to break out of the Import-Substitution-Industrialization net in which Nigeria is still trapped. They placed their emphasis rather on manufacturing for export.

    It is against this background that Eskor Toyo trenchantly condemns the lack of seriousness with which the Nigerian ruling elite treat industrialisation and wonders “how a country that consumes so much foreign exchange on luxury imports or whose citizens keep large fugitive funds in foreign countries cannot find the operational or infrastructural capital for its basic industries”.

    One of Prof Toyo’s fundamental disagreements with neo-liberal SAP policies is their assumption that a country like Nigeria can be extricated from poverty, depression and indebtedness without first taking the imperative step towards a real industrialization and modernisation of its industrial base. This is why, he contends, that despite the achievement of many of SAP’s objectives – a positive growth rate, improved capacity utilisation, increased local raw material sourcing, increase in non-oil exports, rescheduling of debts and lightening of the debt burden, increase in saving, more Naira in the hands of the Federal Government and attaining a ‘realistic’ exchange rate – Nigeria remains as dependent and underdeveloped as ever.

    Some would consider Eskor Toyo’s vision and programme for a socialist Nigeria as impracticable and utopian. But then, let us recall the words of the late radical American Political Economist, Paul Baran, “Socialist Europe; there are moments when I ask myself whether it is not a utopia. But each idea not yet realised curiously resembles a utopia; one would never do anything if one thought that nothing is possible except that which already exists”.