Edwin Madunagu

Engagement with the Nigerian Left

Edwin Madunagu Apr 27, 2021

About three years ago, a young comrade of mine who was then a student of History and International Relations at the Federal University Lafia, Nassarawa State of Nigeria, asked me a loaded personal question. He told me he prepared the question after consultation with one of his lecturers who had been following my public writings. […]

Clarifications and re-statements

Edwin Madunagu Apr 04, 2021

My last article, “Further notes to the Nigerian Left” (late February 2021), was a deliberately condensed message. It was so because I feared that Nigeria was approaching another dangerous bend in its history. I therefore wanted to indicate, even for my own self-assurance, where the movement could stand and all that it could do and […]

Facing 2021: Notes to the Nigerian Left

Edwin Madunagu Jan 22, 2021

The last paragraph of my last published article for the year 2020, titled “Study notes on state and state failure” (December 22) started with a number of questions to the Nigerian Left. Please note that, our wishes notwithstanding, we do not see or present the Nigerian Left, as of today, as an undifferentiated entity. Rather, […]

Study Notes on “Revolution” and “National Unity”

Edwin Madunagu Sep 28, 2020

The importance and urgency of this subject to the Nigerian Left, at this time, demand that I begin the discussion with a series of clear propositions. And that is what I intend to do here. None of the propositions, in its essence, will be new to the movement or in the movement. What may be […]

Reorganising Nigeria’s Left Politics

Edwin Madunagu Jul 22, 2020

There is a contradiction between an enduring desire of the Nigerian Left (the aggregate of Nigerian Marxists, socialists, and fragments of radical democrats), on the one hand, and the actual history of Nigeria’s Left politics on the other. That contradiction can be stated like this: Nigerian Leftists have always hoped to found a substantial and […]

In praise of Marxism

Edwin Madunagu Jun 26, 2020

One of the earliest objections we encountered from our opponents when we entered the organized Marxist political activism in the early post-Civil War years was the one built around the thesis that Marxism, our ideology, was alien to Africa and to Nigeria in particular. We soon realized that this objection was not new, that it […]

For Comrade James Crentsil

Edwin Madunagu May 21, 2020

When my mobile telephone rang around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, April 15, 2020, I knew, before checking it, what news I would receive: the death, at the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH), of James Kolawole Kwame Crentsil, popularly known as Comrade James Crentsil in and outside Calabar and in and outside the Nigerian Socialist […]

Re-introducing “The Lugano Report”

Edwin Madunagu Apr 22, 2020

Sometime in 1999, as both the 20th century and the second millennium were drawing to a close, the Pluto Press, London, released a book with the title: “The Lugano Report” and subtitle, “On preserving capitalism in the 21st century”. The author, Susan George, who shares this name with another well-known but the much younger woman, […]

Revisiting a national political debate

Edwin Madunagu Mar 28, 2020

One of the first definitive steps taken by General Ibrahim Babangida on displacing General Muhammadu Buhari in a “palace coup” and coming to power in Nigeria in August 1985 was to set up, four months later, a 17-member committee (two women and 15 men) to organize, conduct, collate and then report on a general national […]

“Insecurity” in Nigeria: What can the Left do?

Edwin Madunagu Mar 03, 2020

Reflections on the current “insecurity” and “threatening state failure” in Nigeria – and what the Nigerian Left can do – recently led me, in a tortuous manner, back to a formulation on a revolutionary intervention which I thought I had transcended long ago. We shall first discuss the formulation and then come to “insecurity” and […]

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