Northern Nigeria Stalled

One thing the colonial economy has consistently been criticised for is its failure to develop the productive forces in Northern Nigeria and to build a capitalist economy that would transform the peasantry. The British colonial economy was simply content with the extraction of surplus value from the peasant producers who were compelled through deliberate policies to shift emphasis to production for European factories, mostly located outside the shores of what came to be called Nigeria at the beginning of the 20th century.

Before the advent of colonialism, the peasantry used relatively crude implements, which it had used for ages, like hoes and cutlasses in crop production, and during colonialism, it used the same for commodity production, mainly to meet the economic needs of the colonisers.   What only changed was the essence of agricultural production. Before colonialism, agriculture was first and foremost aimed at meeting the food needs of the community. It was mainly self-subsistence agriculture, relying mostly on family labour. With the advent of colonialism, however, it became commoditised, cash crop-centred, producing mainly for markets. A number of policies, such as higher taxes on food crops, which had to be paid in the new currency introduced by the British, were put in place to compel farmers to shift their emphasis to cash crops. So long as the peasant production met the economic needs of the colonial economy, no efforts were made to develop its productive forces, thereby revolutionising agriculture, in tune with the progressive character of capitalism.

The colonial agricultural policy integrated the rural producers into the world capitalist economy, thereby commencing the process of erosion of the moral economy, built round kinship, that had guaranteed food security and provided safety nets, and exposing the people to the capitalist crises generated elsewhere.    This is one major contradiction of the colonial capitalist economy, which has continued to have impacts on institutions and development in the north. To what extent have these contradictions prevented, or rather slowed, the evolution of the social relations connected to capitalism in what is still largely agrarian northern Nigeria? Will a capitalist revolution, which will result in the erosion of what remains of the social mechanism that had guaranteed food security among the inhabitants of the region before the integration of the region into the world capitalist system, occur? Will capitalist transformation and its corollary, ‘genuine’ liberal democratic system, bring prosperity to the region and address the problems of ethnic and religious crises haunting the region?