george augusto

felt very happy the other day when Doctor Aja Nwachukwu, the Minister of Education, announced the cancellation of the sale of Federal Government Colleges, Nigeria's Unity Schools.

The controversial sale of those schools by one of the most right-wing and particularly arrogant ministers of the Obasanjo regime, Obiageli Ezekwesili, had been one of the most unpopular decisions of the ancient regime. Broad sections of the Nigerian people from all walks of life had been opposed to the decision to sell the schools; this was especially true of those who know so much about the education sector.


But the arrogant Obiageli (who did not have a doctorate degree, but enjoyed lapping up the unearned title of "Doctor"), knew better than everybody, and from within the certainties of her narrow, right-wing ideological frames, the popular feeling which is at the heart of democratic decision-making did not matter at all. The overall strategic framework laid down by imperialism is what mattered to that reactionary woman and other pro-imperialist technocrats who drove the privatisation project of the Obasanjo regime. So despite the indignant protestations of the Nigerian people, an elaborate scam was imposed on the country. Of course, that was tucked away behind all manners of subterfuge and obfuscating phraseology from the manuals of the IMF/World Bank.

The sale of the Unity Schools represented one of the worst crimes which the Obasanjo regime perpetrated against the Nigerian people. It was indeed the ugly face of privatisation of public enterprises. The project had been opposed by the Nigerian people because the schools had been established for a national purpose which people felt remained relevant and should be protected. Those who took the decision to ignore that vital sentimental attachment to those schools did not share our national values; they sang from a different hymn book, which was written in Washington and at the Bretton Woods institutions. Imperialism's technocratic agents are the worst specimen of people with "competencies" which a nation can ever be saddled with.

There are no accidents in the world as seen by Naomi Klein. The destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina expelled many poor black residents and allowed most of the city's public schools to be replaced by privately run charter schools. The torture and killings under Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile and during Argentina's military dictatorship were a way of breaking down resistance to the free market. The instability in Poland and Russia after the collapse of Communism and in Bolivia after the hyperinflation of the 1980s allowed the governments there to foist unpopular economic "shock therapy" on a resistant population. And then there is "Washington's game plan for Iraq": "Shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all O.K. with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food," not to mention a strong stock market and private sector.

"The Shock Doctrine" is Klein's ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world. "Disaster capitalism," as she calls it, is a violent system that sometimes requires terror to do its job. Like Pol Pot proclaiming that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was in Year Zero, extreme capitalism loves a blank slate, often finding its opening after crises or "shocks." For example, Klein argues, the Asian crisis of 1997 paved the way for the International Monetary Fund to establish programs in the region and for a sell-off of many state-owned enterprises to Western banks and multinationals. The 2004 tsunami enabled the government of Sri Lanka to force the fishermen off beachfront property so it could be sold to hotel developers. The destruction of 9/11 allowed George W. Bush to launch a war aimed at producing a free-market Iraq.


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In an early chapter, Klein compares radical capitalist economic policy to shock therapy administered by psychiatrists. She interviews Gail Kastner, a victim of covert C.I.A. experiments in interrogation techniques that were carried out by the scientist Ewen Cameron in the 1950s. His idea was to use electroshock therapy to break down patients. Once "complete depatterning" had been achieved, the patients could be reprogrammed. But after breaking down his "patients," Cameron was never able to build them back up again. The connection with a rogue C.I.A. scientist is overdramatic and unconvincing, but for Klein the larger lessons are clear: "Countries are shocked - by wars, terror attacks, coups d'{-I}tat and natural disasters." Then "they are shocked again - by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy." People who "dare to resist" are shocked for a third time, "by police, soldiers and prison interrogators."In another introductory chapter, Klein offers an account of Milton Friedman - she calls him "the other doctor shock" - and his battle for the hearts and minds of Latin American economists and economies. In the 1950s, as Cameron was conducting his experiments, the Chicago School was developing the ideas that would eclipse the theories of Raul Prebisch, an advocate of what today would be called the third way, and of other economists fashionable in Latin America at the time. She quotes the Chilean economist Orlando Letelier on the "inner harmony" between the terror of the Pinochet regime and its free-market policies. Letelier said that Milton Friedman shared responsibility for the regime's crimes, rejecting his argument that he was only offering "technical" advice. Letelier was killed in 1976 by a car bomb planted in Washington by Pinochet's secret police. For Klein, he was another victim of the "Chicago Boys" who wanted to impose free-market capitalism on the region. "In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the 'war on terror' was a war against all obstacles to the new order," she writes.

One of the world's most famous antiglobalization activists and the author of the best seller "No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies," Klein provides a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries, and of the human toll. She paints a disturbing portrait of hubris, not only on the part of Friedman but also of those who adopted his doctrines, sometimes to pursue more corporatist objectives. It is striking to be reminded how many of the people involved in the Iraq war were involved earlier in other shameful episodes in United States foreign policy history. She draws a clear line from the torture in Latin America in the 1970s to that at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

In the first place, these individuals often have a self-righteous attitude rooted in right-wing religious confessions just like Obiageli Ezekwesili, and they believe literally that they are receiving divine guidance in their work. So who are the ordinary mortals that will question the inspired vision that drives their work (this messianic delusion they share with Obasanjo, Tony Blair and George Bush!). The mix becomes even more potent where there is the background of accepting the ideology-driven perspective that the only way the world can find the keel of development is when everything is privatised (do you remember Margaret Thatcher and the doctrine of "TINA", "There Is No Alternative"? That is the universe they all share, and it is from there that they have been inflicted upon society since the 1980s).


Thankfully, Malam Umar Yar'Adua has firm roots in education and it is testimony to his ability to respond to the popular yearning that he has called a halt to the dubious sale of the unity schools. The Minister of Education described the sale of the schools as being against the public interest. That is indeed an affirmation of the basis of democratic governance. If the people, the motive force of democratic society, oppose a decision of an elected government, it is the duty of such a government to pause, reflect on the opposition, fine-tune such policies, endeavour to convince the people of the overall merit of the decision and then win the people over to the implementation of the decision.

Unfortunately, that was not the case with General Olusegun Obasanjo. He had so much contempt for the people of the country and saw any tendency to bow to the popular feeling as an expression of weakness or a defeat. Haunted by the fraudulent manner that he got to power, especially in 2003, Obasanjo was aware of his unpopularity with the Nigerian people and so he was in turn contemptuous of the people. Privatisation was truly in tandem with his acquisitive tendency, that notorious propensity which he has always exploited for his own end. He plunged into the project, finding ways to benefit himself and his cronies, as we saw with TRANSCORP. In his effort to sell Nigeria to himself and cronies, he was aided by technocrats who pursued an ideological project that says that the only way there ever can be is to privatise everything! "Seek ye first the kingdom of privatisation; sell the damned nation to private entrepreneurs and everything else shall be added! Propitiate the gods of market forces and society shall live happily ever after"!! It was and is fairy tale, never really meant to have a happy ending, because they seldom ever do.

The privatisation of public enterprises is a controversial project and a contested terrain of societal policy. I have always been opposed to it, and the earliest piece that I wrote against privatisation dates back to 1986 for THE HERALD newspaper in Ilorin as well as THE DEMOCRAT newspaper in Kaduna. It was titled "IMPERIALISM'S PRIVATISATION PANACEA". So twenty years ago, we were laying bare the rotten entrails of the process that has sown ruination in third world countries; destroyed the public sector; transferred national wealth into the hands of a few individuals and very importantly has done a lot to weaken the trade union organisations of the working people by promoting casualisation of labour. At the heart of the privatisation process is the illusion that only private capital can generate growth and development; to give unfettered reign to the power of the capitalist class, trade unions must not be powerful and every effort is done to discourage them or legislation put into effect to whittle down their power and influence.

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