Shagari's 2m scapegoats

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Published by the Socialist Organiser Alliance, 28 Middle Lane, London N8. Printed by East End Offset (TU). Registered as a newspaper at the GPO. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the SOA. EVEN while his government issued marching orders to an incredible two million "illeg al" immigrants from neighbouring states, Nigeria's President Shagari had the cheek to make a speech in India denouncing the racialism of South Africa's apartheid state.

Nothing • could more dearly indicate both the Hypocrisy of the "anti= partheid" rhetoric of the world's capitalist governments and the inextricable ank between capitalism and rational chauvinism.

Scapegoats While immigrants willed or unskilled - are selcomed into capitalist countries at times of economic expansion and boom as = source of cheap labour -ine pattern the world over is hat they are the first to be made scapegoats for econemic decline, pilloried to insert anger from the government and the ruling class, and all too often forcibly uprooted from their homes Socialist Organiser and jobs.

The capitalist government of Nigeria - the leading economic power in black Africa - is no exception. Faced with an acute crisis following the collapse of the price of oil, and unresolved problems in agricultural production, it has turned its attack upon the working masses in general, and the most downtrodden and vulnerable sections of workers in particular.

The form and scale of the attack - the untold tally of misery in the instant deportation of so many men, women and children - may seem completely incomprehensible: but in its cynical and reactionary content, Shagari's move is identical to the racist legislation and the continual - smaller scale -flow of deportations of "illegal" immigrants from Britain by Thatcher's Tory government.

Always the argument comes down to the same miserable cliches and distortions. There are "too many people" , too many MALI PER VOLTA GHANA Accra ATLANTIC OCEAN i Miles 300 "foreigners" taking the few available jobs.

Yet in Britain it is self-evident that Thatcher's racist government has presided over the scrapping of more jobs than there are black people.

In Nigeria, too, the victimisation the Ghanaian and other immigrant workers is used alongside an "austerity' plan as an alternative to any planned expansion of the productive forces to provide new jobs and raise the pitiful living standards of the majority of the country's 80 million people, 70% of whom remain illiterate, and whose NIGER • Kano Kaduna Maide BENIN NIGERIA. B9 Lagos?

CAN EQUAT.

GUINEA life expectancy is only years.

The natural wealth and resources of West Africa are ample to sustain its population if adequately developed.

But the • Shagari government is wedded to the capitalist oil monopolies, the western bankers and the Nigerian capitalist class; it is therefore wedded to a perpetuation of the reactionary and arbitrary • division of West Africa into separate, dependent nations.

The interests of the Workers and peasants of Nigeria and West Africa as a whole demand quite the opposite: the breaking down of national barriers and antagonisms, and the common struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist united states in the area.

The Nigerian working class - which staged massive strikes in 1981 - must play the key role in such a struggle. And this requires the building of a leadership prepared to confront Shagari's chauvinist canpaign.