By Obi Nwakanma

Nothing yet speaks more volubly and very pointedly about the crisis of late capitalism than the images out of London this past week, of off-duty English policemen joining in the street protests against the proposed austerity measures by the government of the United Kingdom.

These stolid defenders of the establishment, who are also about to be cut to fit the size of public government, have made it quite clear, that a reduction of the sort proposed by the Cameron government in the UK under its proposed austerity measures may endanger civil government and public safety, and may in fact torpedo the government.

But I’m drawn more to the stark symbolism of it. Who, as my African-American homies would say, have thunk it? Who would have thought that policemen, that institution often associated with any government in power and who are necessarily blind to the nature of power itself, would finally rise even in mild public protest against their economic condition? Is this the sign of things to come? Europe, now laboring under the current malaise of capitalism provides the true picture of what it means to be under real pressure.

Last week, French voters sent a clear and untrammelled message in electing the Socialist Mr. Francois Hollande and in booting the irascible Sarkozy out of office, that the French public has had it with privatization, deregulation, and the tightening of the public purse.

To paraphrase a rather pithy statement in the London New Statesman, the French public is showing us the way again to the revolutionary road. The road towards regaining the agency of the public voice. I think the New Statesmanmissed the point: the street protests in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s were the early precursors of what is now only just happening in Europe.

It is just simply ironic that Western Europe is only just beginning to taste the bitter medicine of austerity and deregulation to which most of the economies in Africa was subjected in the 1980s and the 1990s, and which still has lingering effects to date on the growth and development in Africa. I will use the specific example of Nigeria.

In 1983, the austerity measures forced on the Shagari regime by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank became a major campaign issue in the elections that year. The great Zik, in fact called the austerity measures, “otanisi” and the NPP, his party was a great opponent of the measures adopted and proposed by the NPN government.

The NPP laid out a broad, alternative economic plan, and campaigned on the stimulation of growth through the injection of capital to public services, a new tax regime, and a reform of the national revenue system. To be fair, the Shagari administration rejected much of the pressure by the international system, freshly under the impetus of the new “Reaganomics,” and adopted what we may now even consider to be limited measures rather than go full throttle towards austerity and deregulation as required by the international hawks.

He did not last too long. The military struck and under the leadership of Muhammadu Buhari attempted to roll back and renegotiate some of the prescriptions. General Buhari did not last for too long either before Ibrahim Babangida and his group struck.

Under Babangida, Nigeria became a full laboratory for the economic measures of the IMF and the World Bank which today has much of Europe up in arms against their conservative governments. With three neo-conservative economists – Kalu Idika Kalu, Chu Okongwu and Olu Falae – Babangida’s “three horsemen of the apocalypse” crafted a most destructive economic system that foreclosed the gains of decolonization, and subjected an entire generation to terrifying poverty even as it made only a handful extremely rich.

Nigeria’s economy has since been held hostage by the international system and any prospect of sustainable and humane growth has been compromised ever since, for indeed, Babangida’s policies were pursued without “a human face” to quote the very words of Obasanjo’s critique of it. Ironically, those policies were later pursued to its logical conclusion by Olusegun  Obasanjo himself, who in his second coming took Nigeria deeper into the belly of the beast.

To understand the fullest dimension of what has taken place in Nigeria from 1968 to date, all any thinking and literate Nigerian needs to do is pick up a copy of John Perkin’s intriguing book, The Confessions of an Economic Hit man.The puzzles – including the current crisis in the oil sector, the moves to privatize and deregulate the power sector and other areas of the public system, the cuts in subsidies, the huge level of unemployment and the mindless level of profits in the hands of a few individuals to whom Nigeria’s public investments were sold for a song – all will fall in place.

Nigeria, like other newly developing African economies, was forced to drink this poisoned chalice by the World Bank and the IMF especially in the 1980s. But it does seem that the poisoned hand has inexorably reached the European mouth.

The case of Greece is a true case in point, and might help situate the real story of how a people can mobilize to reject the attempts to dehumanize them economically. Opposition leaders have called the proposed austerity measures for Greece, whose debt crisis threatens the Eurozone, “barbaric” and are unwilling to cede their sovereign economic rights.

French elections were fought on a rejectionist agenda, in which Francois Hollande has pledged to overturn the proposed austerity measures, and renegotiate economic compact with Germany that would free France from the obligation to roll back public spending.

Even as the Queen laid out an economic proposal for austerity for the United Kingdom, a momentum is building against it, and that momentum is spreading quickly in Europe against plans to reduce public spending on public services in health, public transportation, education, jobs, etc. It is the wind of change that is bringing out the crowd into the streets of Europe, and forcing governments in Europe to rethink the economic models that have led to European and indeed global recession.

Nigerians ought to learn something from this movement in Europe, because in the end, as we tried even as university students to prove in the 1980s, in our protests against the SAP policies and the withdrawal of  Petroleum subsidies, and the rapid deregulation of the Nigerian economy along the Friedmanian lines, policies which President Jonathan continues to pursue, the echo on the streets is vox populi.

Those who do not rise to change their situation make change impossible. Nigerians must, for a brief moment, rise above the distractions of Boko Haram, and look squarely at their material and co-joined interests. We must look back in anger to those moments, particularly in the 1980s, where the rain began to beat us.