May Day belongs to the workers, but Nigerian workers do not own it. The president speaks at Eagle Square, the governors hand out promises in the state capitals, the unions march past, and the day ends. The first of May has sadly become a public holiday emptied of the politics that produced it.
The politics we speak of was and is socialist and internationalist from the beginning. 80,000 workers walked off their jobs in Chicago on 1 May 1886 in the strike for the eight-hour day. Before the eight-hour day or the 9-to-5 we know today, industrial workers were commonly doing 10–16 hours a day, six days a week. Workers had had enough of handing that much of their lives to the factory, and the strike was their answer. When the bosses could not break it themselves, they called on the police.
The Police killed strikers at the McCormick factory two days later after a protest meeting at Haymarket Square ended with police firing into the crowd. Four labour and anarchist leaders were hanged 18 months after that, on 11 November 1887. In July 1889, socialists and trade unionists from across Europe met in Paris and founded the Second International (a federation of socialist and labour parties from different countries that coordinated international working-class politics), they took the date of the strike and named it International Workers’ Day!. This was done in memory of the dead and in support of the demand for the limitation of the working day. The American state could not tolerate this momentous day to recognise the workers who built the economy, so the president, Grover Cleveland, signed the Labor Day legislation in 1894 specifically to break the link between American workers and the Haymarket martyrs and the European socialist movement that had claimed them. May Day was already understood, by capital and labour alike, as a class day, a day that belonged to the workers, and the American ruling class wanted its workers nowhere near it.
Knowing this history matters, because the same issues are being swept under one big brush today. Nigerian workers fought to bring May Day into Nigeria for the same reason American workers fought to keep it. The colonial government in Nigeria refused to recognise the day because of what the day said out loud: Nigerian workers belonged to a working class whose enemy was capital itself, not just one bad colonial policy or another.
The post-colonial governments of the first republic and the military regimes refused recognition for the same reason. Why is it that a day the workers choose to recognise is denounced by the state? It is because the workers do have enormous power, the kind of power that can threaten the foundations of any government, and every ruling class knows it. The factories, the railways, the ports, the oil fields, the offices, the markets, the roads, none of these run without workers. A government that allows the workers to gather in their own name, on their own day, in solidarity with workers in other countries, has admitted in advance that it depends on people it would rather treat as a permanent underclass. That is why colonial governors refused the day, and that is why Balewa’s government refused it, and that is why every military head of state from Aguiyi-Ironsi onward refused it.
The first state recognition came in 1980 from the People’s Redemption Party government in Kano, under Mallam Aminu Kano’s political leadership, which was the only mass left government Nigerian electoral politics had produced. The Shagari administration, following from that, declared May Day a national holiday in 1981. Three years earlier, in 1978, the military government had dissolved the four existing trade union federations by decree and merged the country’s roughly fifteen hundred unions into a single body, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC). Union dues were now collected directly through the government payroll system, which meant the workers were paying their unions through the very government those unions were supposed to confront. The government granted the calendar entry while trying to take the autonomy. The recognition was a real victory for the workers, won through decades of agitation, and the workers knew the difference between the form and the content of what they had won. They went on to use the day, and the years that followed, to organise against the same government that had recognised it.
Nigerian workers are not now and have never been a passive class. The historical record shows a class that has repeatedly moved at revolutionary scale, only to be betrayed by its own leadership at the moment of decision. We need to walk through that record, because it tells us where we are, what we are capable of, and what is still missing.
In 1945, between 42,000 and 200,000 workers across 17 unions went on strike for 44 days and shut the colonial economy down. What speeches and constitutional petitions had failed to do in decades, Nigerian workers did in six weeks. The strike welded workers from Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, and Kano into one national movement for the first time. It forced the nationalist leaders, Azikiwe, Macaulay, and Awolowo, to publicly back the strikers, because they could see what the rest of the country was beginning to see, that the road to independence ran straight through the working class.
Four years later, in 1949, the British answered with bullets. Twenty-one miners were shot dead by colonial police at the Iva Valley colliery in Enugu. Their crime was striking against the racial wage system, in which an African doing exactly the same job as a European was paid a fraction of what the European was paid. The colonial state shot the miners because the strike threatened the surplus that the whole colonial economy was built on.
In February 2026, a Nigerian court ordered the British government to pay 420 million pounds in compensation, 77 years after the fact. That is what justice looks like when the workers have to wait for it.
In 1964, just four years after independence, Nigerian workers were already in open confrontation with the new Nigerian government. The Joint Action Committee brought the country to a halt for nearly two weeks. Labour leaders called publicly for the overthrow of the Tafawa Balewa government, and some trade unionists were quietly preparing a military coup in support of the strike. Workers marched in their thousands over Carter Bridge toward Parliament. The Nigerian police, the same colonial police force only now flying a different flag, beat them off the bridge in the same way British colonial police had beaten the Iva Valley miners 15 years earlier, because the police of any state, colonial or postcolonial, exists to defend the property and authority of those who own the means of production.
In 1994, the oil workers of NUPENG and PENGASSAN went on strike to bring down Sani Abacha and force the release of Moshood Abiola, who had won the 12 June 1993 presidential election and been thrown into prison for it. Around 200,000 oil workers walked away from the rigs, the terminals, and the storage tanks. Nigeria’s 2 million barrels a day of crude output collapsed. The military government understood, correctly, that workers who control the oil sector control the income of the Nigerian state, and that the moment those workers turned that control against the state itself, the state was in serious trouble. Abacha’s response was the response a ruling class always gives when it cannot answer the working class on the merits, force. He dissolved the elected leaderships of NUPENG, PENGASSAN, and the NLC, installed military administrators in their place, and arrested the oil workers’ leaders. The strike was broken, but it took the full weight of a military dictatorship to break it. That is the kind of power Nigerian workers can mobilise when they choose to.
In 2003, an eight-day general strike against the Obasanjo government’s fuel price increase shut Nigeria down. The Joint Action Council Against Hike in Fuel Price (JACAHFP) brought socialists, students, human rights groups, and the NLC into a single political front, and for those eight days the country saw what was possible when the working class moves in formation with its allies. Then the NLC leadership, under Adams Oshiomhole, settled. The settlement left fuel prices 30 percent higher than they had been before the strike began, which means the workers shut the country down for eight days and ended up paying more for petrol than they had been paying when they started. Oshiomhole, the same man who led that strike, later joined the All Progressives Congress, became governor of Edo State for that party, and went on to chair the APC nationally. The party he had organised strikes against became the party he led. There is no other word for that kind of trajectory than betrayal.
In January 2012, Occupy Nigeria came closer than any movement in the country’s history to sweeping a sitting government from power. After the Jonathan government announced the removal of the fuel subsidy on 1 January, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians took the public squares, the bridges, and the streets in Lagos, Abuja, Kano, Kaduna, Port Harcourt, and dozens of other cities. The mobilisation moved past the fuel price within days, into a wider revolt against the political class itself, against corruption, against the petro-rentier arrangement that puts the country’s wealth in the hands of a few while ordinary Nigerians are told to tighten their belts. The BBC called it Nigeria’s Harmattan and compared it to the Arab Spring. For two weeks, the question of whether the Nigerian state could survive a Nigerian uprising was a genuinely open one. Then on 16 January the NLC and TUC leadership called the strike off, against the wishes of a rank and file that was still in the streets, and the movement dispersed. The leadership chose to negotiate with the government, in a moment when the workers in the streets had already understood that this was no longer about petrol.
In June 2024, a general strike shut down the national grid in protest against the Tinubu government’s fuel subsidy removal and the cost of living crisis it produced. The unions opened the negotiation with a demand for a N500,000 minimum wage. They settled for N70,000, which is 14% of what they had asked for. The workers and their leadership opened a confrontation with a demand, then accepted a fraction of that demand and called it a victory. The bosses always know how to handle a workforce that has no organisation independent of the people sitting at the negotiating table.
The Nigerian working class can fight, has fought, and will fight again. What it has lacked is leadership willing to press the fight to its conclusion, and an organisation independent of any leadership that could carry the fight forward when those leaders chose to step back. That is the gap between every revolutionary moment Nigeria has had and the revolutionary outcome that should have followed. Closing it is the task in front of us.
To understand why every one of those moments stopped short, we have to look honestly at the system Nigerian workers actually confront, because the system itself is what shapes the limits of what wage struggle alone can win.
Nigeria is a deeply dependent capitalist country. That means it is a capitalist country whose economy is shaped by foreign capital, world commodity prices, and external debt to such an extent that the country does not really set its own economic terms. Crude oil typically provides around two‑thirds or more of federal government revenue and around 90% of Nigeria’s foreign exchange earnings. The Nigerian state owns the oil in law. The Land Use Act of 1978 vested all land in the state governors, to be held in trust. The subsoil minerals are vested in the federal government. Whichever section of the ruling class is in favour at any given time gets access to all of this. The Mineral Oils Ordinance of 1914 (passed by the British), the Petroleum Decree of 1969 (passed during the civil war by the Gowon military government), the Land Use Act of 1978 (passed by the Obasanjo military regime), and section 44(3) of the 1999 Constitution are the legal scaffolding that holds the whole arrangement up.
This is why state power in Nigeria is so valuable to the people who fight for it. The government allocates the oil blocks, the contracts, the foreign exchange, the import licences, the customs concessions, and the land itself. Whoever sits at the top of the government sits at the centre of capital accumulation in this country. People are willing to spend billions of naira to win elections that pay only millions of naira in salary, because the real prize is access to all the wealth that the state controls. The fortunes of Dangote, Rabiu, Adenuga, the major banks, and the construction firms are tightly bound up with the Nigerian state, that is, their profits depend heavily on government policies, licences, contracts and access to public resources, rather than on a neutral ‘free’ market. Foreign oil companies operate in Nigeria through joint ventures, production-sharing contracts, and local subsidiaries that depend entirely on the goodwill of the Nigerian government. The Nigerian state is the institutional form through which a comprador ruling class (a section of the local ruling class whose wealth depends on serving foreign capital rather than building an autonomous national economy) brokers access to Nigerian wealth for foreign capital, and pays itself a fat share of the brokerage fee.
Below this whole arrangement, the ordinary Nigerian survives. The National Bureau of Statistics figures for the second quarter of 2024 put self-employment at 85.6% and informal employment at 93% of those who work at all. Said another way, only about 7 in every 100 working Nigerians have a formal job with a contract, a payslip, and the protection of labour law. The other 93 are in the informal economy: traders in the markets, mechanics, drivers, food sellers, app-based workers, hairdressers, farmers on small plots, the millions of people who keep this country running every single day.
The Structural Adjustment Programme of 1986, imposed on Nigeria by the IMF and the World Bank, destroyed the formal sector that the post-independence Nigerian government had built with oil rents during the boom of the 1970s. What replaced that formal sector is the precarious mass of labour we have today, working with no contracts, no rights, and no one to call when they are cheated, working from sunrise to whenever the day decides to end.
The value of the naira itself depends on the price of crude oil in markets that no Nigerian worker has any control over. That means every wage victory the workers win is at risk of being eaten up by a devaluation tomorrow. Look at the numbers honestly. The N70,000 minimum wage that the workers settled for in July 2024 was worth about $40 a month at the exchange rate of the time. The N30,000 minimum wage it replaced had been worth about $75 a month before the Tinubu government devalued the naira in 2023. The workers won 133% more naira on paper, while losing 47% of what those naira could actually buy. This is what wage struggle ends up yielding inside a dependent commodity economy. The unions can fight for naira figures all day, and the dollar exchange rate decides the outcome behind their backs.
We have already informed that the NLC came into being by military decree. When the federal government withheld check-off dues through the IPPIS payroll system in early 2024, it confirmed what every honest organiser already knew, that the government can starve the unions whenever the unions take it on seriously.
The NLC and the TUC together represent only about 7 to 8% of Nigerian workers, those in the formal sector. The other 92 to 93% of working Nigerians have nobody to bargain on their behalf. Nigerian labour law itself was written for a model of employment, with a fixed employer, a fixed workplace, and a fixed contract, that does not describe how most Nigerians actually earn a living anymore. And the law has not been seriously updated to extend its protections to the trader, the bus driver, the platform worker, or the artisan.
The leadership of the movement does not stay with the workers. Michael Imoudu, who led the militant labour wing of the early independence years and was repeatedly detained for it, was the exception. Adams Oshiomhole, who led the 2003 strike and ended up running the APC, is the rule. The Nigerian ruling class has refined a method for buying out militant labour leaders, and the labour movement keeps producing those leaders and keeps losing them.
The Labour Party in its current form does not threaten any of this arrangement. It is a vehicle for businessmen, lawyers, and ambitious professionals to ride the votes of Nigerian workers into political office. The fight inside the NLC over whether the federation actually owns the Labour Party split the labour movement at the very moment, in 2023 and 2024, when the Tinubu government’s fuel subsidy removal demanded the maximum unity of the working class.
The Labour Party as we have it today offers no real challenge to the things that matter most: the petro-rentier state in which a small ruling group lives off oil rents while everyone else carries the consequences, the private ownership of the commanding heights of the Nigerian economy, and the way the value of the naira itself is set abroad by the dollar oil price. It is a Trojan horse for the political class, painted in the colours of the workers.
The question we are facing as Nigerian workers and Nigerian Marxists today was answered in outline more than 120 years ago. In 1902, in the Russian Empire, Vladimir Lenin wrote a short pamphlet called What Is To Be Done?.
The Russia of that time had a lot in common with Nigeria today: a peasant majority, foreign capital pouring into industrial enclaves, an autocratic state, factory workers crushed by long hours and low wages, and any independent political activity criminalised. Lenin’s central argument in the pamphlet was straightforward. Workers’ militancy, without a revolutionary party of its own, produces partial victories that the system simply eats back. The political work of taking the working class beyond purely economic demands cannot be left to spontaneous struggle alone. And the party has to be built before the crisis arrives, because once the crisis comes there is no time left to build it. Russian Marxists spent 15 years building exactly that kind of organisation. In October 1917, that party led the Russian working class to power.
The lesson here applies broadly. A working class that goes into the fight without a party of its own is fighting for ground its enemies will take back the moment the fight ends.
The Nigerian working class fought in 1945, in 1949, in 1964, in 1994, in 2003, in 2012, and in 2024. Every single time, the ground taken was given back. The party that could have held it was never built.
The Naija Marxists exists to build the workers’ party under Nigerian conditions. The work goes into formal sector workplaces and into the informal economy, into the universities, and onto the digital platforms where young Nigerians are being squeezed by algorithmic bosses. The cadres we are training study Marxist theory seriously, because the Nigerian working class needs a scientific understanding of the system that exploits it. The propaganda we produce treats Nigerian workers as a politically adult class, capable of running the country itself, and links every fight over wages, fuel, and the cost of living to the deeper question of who actually owns Nigeria and who actually runs the Nigerian state.
We accept no money from the Nigerian ruling class, from foreign NGOs, or from any government agency. Our funds come from our members, in their dues, their contributions, and their labour. Internally we operate by democratic decision followed by united action. The political independence of this organisation — from every other power in the country — is the condition of our existence as Marxists.
The Nigerian ruling class has its parties, its state, and its police. The international ruling class, the IMF, the World Bank, the major oil companies, and the foreign chancelleries that dictate fiscal policy to Abuja, stands behind it. What the Nigerian working class does not yet have, on the scale this situation actually demands, is its own party. Building that party is the central political task in front of Nigerian Marxists right now, and it cannot be improvised the day the next crisis arrives.
We are addressing this to every Nigerian worker in the formal economy and the informal economy, to every student and every unemployed graduate, to every young Nigerian who can already see that the current political order will not deliver the life the wealth of this country makes possible, and to every honest activist who has stood in the streets at any point in the past decade and walked away with the conclusion that the struggle does not end where the union leadership decides it ends. The task in front of us is to convert all the accumulated experience of the Nigerian working class into organised political power. That requires people who will study seriously, organise patiently, and contribute materially over the long term. The production structure of the Nigerian economy has to be transformed at the root. The commanding heights of that economy belong in public ownership under the democratic control of the working class. The whole imperial architecture that keeps the naira, the oil, and the labour of Nigerians subordinated to foreign capital has to be dismantled. The political instrument capable of carrying through all of this must be built, and it must be built now, by us.
The strikers of 1945, the miners of Iva Valley, the marchers of Carter Bridge, the oil workers who stood against Abacha, the workers and students of 2003 and 2012, and the young people of Lekki Toll Gate all paid for an unfinished task. We will finish it.
Join Naija Marxists. Organise with us. Study with us. Build with us.
The vanguard party will not form itself. The soul of Nigeria is in the balance.
Naija Marxists
On the occasion of International Workers’ Day