Nigeria is a country in crisis. Why is that?

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

We often read in the big business mass media about countries that were formerly colonial possessions of the western democracies and how dysfunctional they are. And the truth is that they are dysfunctional in most cases. If we pay attention, the reason we are told is corruption; they are corrupt. Of course, non of them can equal the corruption and criminal activity that exists in the advanced capitalist countries, especially the US.

Here in the US we have an official, open policy of bribery when it comes to the body politic. It's called. lobbying in the US mass media. Many of the members of the US Congress, most of whom are millionaires, take jobs as lobbyists when they retire form the Congress with their great pensions. Who better to steer corporate bribes in the US legislature than those who have participated in it for decades.

If we pay close enough attention to these reports from the western media about the failures of the former colonial countries to achieve basic democracy, we will see that beneath the surface there will always be a racial, religious or some other explanation for this failure. "The blacks can't can't govern themselves" I once heard and Afrikaner say justifying the Apartheid system in South Africa.

We've heard it about Iraq, the birthplace of western civilization, or the Arabs in general. Yet the Arab world produced great scholars and scientists for centuries before Europeans. The truth is simpler in that the capitalist class in these countries are incapable of introducing democratic systems akin to the European bourgeois democratic states as they have arrived on the scene of history too late. They are dominated by imperialism and to an extent their landed aristocracy that are also linked to imperial power and global capital and are then unable to lead the working class in a revolutionary struggle for bourgeois democracy.

My intent in the video though is an introduction that will hopefully encourage workers to search for more. I simply want to point out how important it is to understand why these nation states are where they are historically, dysfunctional and unstable and unlike the nation states of Europe, a progressive development that began a century or two earlier.