Eskor Toyo and the Struggle for

the Working Peoples, By Edwin

Madunagu
Edwin Madunagu wrote from Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.
This is the Eskor Toyo funeral lecture delivered in Calabar, Nigeria on March
4, 2016.

Comrade Eskor Eskor Toyo was indeed an outstanding and

exceptional Marxist and Revolutionary Socialist. His commitment
to the ultimate elimination of oppression from the face of the
Earth through struggle never wavered; and his faith in the
Working Class and Working People as vanguard agencies for that
elimination never declined.
I Introductory Statements: Range of Eskor Toyos Revolutionary
Engagements
On Monday, September 20, 2010, Comrade Professor Eskor Toyo made what
may turn out to be, on further historical assessment, his last major outing as
a revolutionary Marxist public intellectual in Nigeria. On that occasion he
delivered the Nigerian Golden Jubilee Independence Lecture titled Project
Nigeria: The journey so far. The event was hosted by this institutions
Department of History and International Studies, and chaired by Professor
Okon Edet Uya. Both men are now late.
The 59-page lecture was Eskor Toyo at his intellectual and ideological best, a
long journey through the colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial stages of our
national history. It was radical, categorical, unflattering, but passionately
patriotic. The verdict which was also the conclusion was sad, very sad for a
man who had been active politically for more than 60 years. But it was
straight-forward: The journey had barely begun, or put more charitably, the
journey had been grounded near the very beginning. Beyond this, however,
the conclusion was a call on radical patriots, the working and toiling peoples
and, above all, the working class to rise and save the nation by freeing
themselves. The working and toiling masses cannot save the nation as
slaves, and yet they are the vanguard of the people that can save the nation.
It is a historical paradox. But a paradox that can be broken through struggle.
And Comrade Eskor Toyo believed till his last breath that Nigeria can still be
saved. So do the comrades he left behind.
Two days immediately preceding the lecture, that is on Saturday, September
18 and Sunday, September 19, 2010, Comrade Professor Eskor Toyo attended
a National Executive Meeting of the Academic Staff Union of Universities
(ASUU) here in Calabar. You know the battle the union was then waging for
the nation, for the education system and for its members. The battle is still
raging, even as I speak. Comrade Eskor had been an activist member of
ASUU since its creation in 1978 and a father-figure Trustee of the union since

1983. Beyond this, Comrade Eskor had been a leading partisan of ASUUs
predecessors and teachers unions generally as far back as the colonial era
and the First Republic.
Just hours after the lecture of September 20, 2010 a very long lecture,
which if I remember well, he delivered standing or partly standing Eskor
Toyo, then an 81-year old war-horse, entered a meeting of Nigerias
Revolutionary Left, also here in Calabar. The main item on the agenda of that
meeting, in fact the sole item, was one of the most difficult and contentious
issues in the contemporary history of Nigerias Revolutionary Left: namely,
party formation. The bone of contention, as they say, is not whether, in
principle, a party of the working peoples is necessary or not; not what it will
do or should do or can do when formed. The bone of contention was about
its timing and pre-conditions, and above all, its character, including whether
it should be a mass party or a vanguard party. In short, the partys strategy
and foundational statement to the working class and the nation.
Eskor Toyos position, not by any means an isolated position, was for a party
that could and should be formed immediately, a revolutionary socialist party
that would be strong and flexible enough to decide whether to take part in
electoral contest or not and, above all, a party that would be undissolvable by
any form of bourgeois rule from variants of military dictatorship to variants
of civilian democracy. It could be called a Socialist Party or a Working Peoples
Party or a Labour Party or even a Communist Party. Historically and
theoretically, the differences between Left parties formed under these names
do not reside in the names themselves, but in their programmes, rules and
strategies. The meeting of the night of Monday, September 20, 2010, though
turbulent as expected, moved the debate a couple of steps forward. And the
party, the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN), was indeed proclaimed before
Comrade Eskor waved us goodbye.
The following day, Tuesday September 21, 2010, Comrade Professor Eskor
Toyo held a one-on-one meeting with me at his residence. He had whispered
to me the day before that he would like to see me. The meeting turned into a
lecture, an extension of the previous days public lecture and the vanguard
meeting following it. The only difference was that the extension was delivered
to me alone, with no one even within earshot. Eskor Toyo spoke to me
continuously for about 90 minutes sometimes in whispers, sitting down, at
other times standing up and shouting. I shall presently return to what he was
saying.
Thus, for a period of four days from Saturday, September 18 to Tuesday,
September 21, 2010, Comrade Professor Eskor Toyo engaged various
segments of the population the working class and middle strata, the
academic community and its hosts and hostesses and the Revolutionary Left
at various levels but for the same strategic, passionate and all-consuming
objective, a single objective: Workers Power, Popular Democracy and
Socialism.
What I have just done is simply a selection of an extended weekend from a
life of continuous struggle and study, of scholarship, of dedication, of
sacrifice, of radical patriotism, of mass mobilisation, education and

organisation, of revolutionary commitment and intransigence spanning over

60 years.
II Eskor ToyoEdwin Madunagu Meeting of September 21, 2010:
Critique of the Nigerian Left
Eskor Toyos lecture to me at his residence was not a criticism of the Nigerian
state or the Nigerian government. That criticism is assumed as background in
every meeting of the Revolutionary Left. We are experts in radical and
wholistic criticism of this oppressive and sadistic system. Eskors insistence
was that we should not stop there. As the young Marx said: The weapon of
criticism should be replaced or, at least, accompanied by the criticism of the
weapon. Comrade Eskors lecture to me was, rather, a critique of the
Nigerian Left: The tragic failure of Nigerian socialists, over time, to offer the
type of liberating leadership that the long-suffering, but struggling, working
and toiling masses of Nigeria needed and, from time to time, demanded, in
various ways; the failure of Nigerian socialists to form and sustain a
revolutionary socialist party; factionalism and sectarianism; confusing
utopianism with Marxism; confusing social democracy with socialism;
intellectual laziness and political cowardice; inordinate leadership ambitions;
anarchist attitudes to democracy, democratic centralism and majority
decisions; and the almost chronic inability of Nigerian socialists to recognise
revolutionary moments. For Eskor Toyo, one of the most tragic and painful
demonstrations of the last weakness in contemporary history of Nigeria was
the failure to channel the working class-led popular protests under General
Abacha to remove the military dictator from power because, according to our
departed comrade, Abacha presided over the most isolated government in
Nigeria since independence.
Comrade Eskor Toyo made no mention of the situation in the country then. In
particular, he did not mention the preparations for the 2011 general
elections. He made no mention of it because his attitude to it which I shared
was clear. That attitude, once verbalised by an ASUU official, can be
described like this: Suppose armed robbers in Nigeria including the willing
and not-so-willing are persuaded to accept free, fair and credible elections
in their ranks, how does that solve the problem of armed robbery in the
country? This was not an argument against participation in electoral politics,
but it was a strong statement both on maximum realistic expectation which
we could allow ourselves to entertain, and on participation in electoral
contests in which the working and toiling masses and their parties are
essentially absent as a distinct and independent force.
Eskor Toyo did not also raise the triple subject of imperialism, neocolonialism
and independence. His position, shared by the Socialist Movement, had been
re-stated in the lecture he delivered the previous day, and that is: The
distinction between self-government and sovereignty, on the one hand, and
independence, on the other, is like the sociological distinction between
authority and power. Authority refers to right; power refers to capacity. In the
same way, self-government, autonomy and sovereignty refers to the right to
take ones decisions whereas independence means the capacity to be really
free from the power of other To use autonomy or self-rule to proceed to
independence, a country needs leaders who value independence and know
what it entails.

Eskor Toyo spoke to me directly as a revolutionary comrade and, through me,

to Left tendencies identified with me. Eskor Toyo, we should note, recognised
the inevitability of tendencies in the Labour and Socialist Movement, but
abhorred factionalism in a Left organisation once it has been formed and
proclaimed above ground or underground. I shall return to this point.
III Clarifications in the sense of Eskor Toyo: Capitalism, Socialism,
Working class, Working People, the People and Exploitation
The subject of this lecture is: Eskor Toyo and the struggle of the working
peoples: Workers Power, Popular Democracy, Socialism. For a fairer
understanding and appreciation of Eskor Toyos life-long struggle summarised
in these phrases, six particular concepts that are objectively, historically and
logically related, require brief clarifications not academic definitions here.
These are Capitalism, Socialism, Working Class, Working People, the People
and Exploitation. The irony here is that these clarifications are necessary not
just for, or even primarily for, the working people or the young ones
students and youths but also for the educated elite. As late as 2011, I
watched Comrade Eskor Toyo engage a University teacher in Social Sciences
on whether Nigeria is a capitalist country or not! What Eskor Toyo and his
comrades had to engage was often as elementary as this.
A country is not capitalist only when the majority of enterprises therein are
organised capitalistically, says Eskor Toyo in one of his unpublished
books, What Is Socialism? Neither is a country capitalist only when the
majority of persons engaged in money-making activity are capitalist. A
country is called capitalist when the firms organised capitalistically, however
few they may be, determine the direction of development of the economy
and the society. And they determine the direction when the political system is
organised in their favour.
In his book, Wage Freeze in Nigeria written about 35 years ago, Eskor Toyo
had the working class and students in mind when he defined exploitation in
simple but heuristic terms: When in a society a certain group of people call
them A occupies a position of political, economic or cultural privileges or
advantages over another group call them B such that the people in A are
able to enjoy an accretion of wealth or income to them that originate from
the effort of those in B, then A is said to be in a position of exploiter of B.
That was Eskor Toyo: He formulated his theses and propositions in such a way
that you must stand and fight or vanish, not run away.
Socialism is a new democracy, says Eskor Toyo. In fact, to Eskor Toyo,
capitalism is an impediment to democracy. Comrade Professor Biodun Jeyifo,
first President of ASUU, underlined this insistence by Eskor Toyo in his
immediate tribute when he learnt of the latters death. In a private handwritten communication to me some years ago, Eskor Toyo urged Marxists to
go back to the basics, namely, that socialism is a new democracy based on
social, that is, non-private ownership of the means of production and
distribution of income according to social needs and work only that is, to
the exclusion of any other principle. It is a regime where exploitation based
on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution is

abolished. Advocates of socialism must never lose sight of, or stray from,
this foundation.
In The working class and the Nigerian Crisis, a highly polemical but scholarly
work written in 1965 during the crisis that eventually led to the first coups
and the civil war, Comrade Eskor Toyo described the working class as the
vanguard of the toiling people as a whole. He gave the following
substantiation: In the first place, workers are organised for democracy in
their trade unions, and the trade unions are a powerful instrument of
struggle; secondly, workers are better educated than the peasant and petitbourgeois fractions of the poor and toiling masses, and therefore have, and
can have, a better understanding of public affairs; thirdly, workers are more
disciplined, for they live their daily lives through office, workshop or factory
discipline the type of which neither the peasants nor the poor urban
bourgeois groups know.
In the fourth place, workers can unite more easily on the national level since
the major establishments employing them are national in character; in the
fifth place, workers can move easily into action as a class since owing to the
grossly uneven development of the Nigerian economy, the working class is
concentrated in few urban centres which are fairly well linked together by
communication networks; by comparison the peasants are scattered in
thousands of clans, villages and isolated petty semi-urban centres throughout
the country. In the sixth place, workers have an effective weapon in the
strike, especially the general strike, and of the use of the last weapon the
Nigerian working class is a past master.
Eskor Toyo wrote this more than 50 years ago when he was about 36 years
old, a holder of a Bachelors degree in Economics by correspondence and a
school teacher and principal. The thesis requires only minimal revision today.
Comrade Professor Eskor Toyo presented a paper he titled Labour Movement
and Advance to Democracy in Nigeria to the seminar on Civil Society and
Consolidation of Democracy in Nigeria organised by the Institute of Public
Policy and Administration of this University in 2000. In that paper he
explained that the term working people embraces all those whose principal
sources of means of livelihood are work rather than property income or any
other privileged income like perquisites of office. Such people are wage
workers, peasants or small farmers, salaried personnel, artisans or small
businessmen and women, and self-employed professionals. He insists that
the core class basis of a socialist movement is the wage workers; but he also
explains that the socialist movement aims at the re-organisation of the
society as a whole with the working people not the wage workers alone as
the owners of the means of production and distribution.
Re-organisation of society as a whole around a new class core, the working
class core that is what socialism is, in the sense of Eskor Toyo. And in our
sense, also.
Comrade Eskor Toyo also provides a simple but ideological and heuristic
definition of the concept of the people or the common people which is
frequently employed in Marxist and socialist politics. The concept can be

distilled into three stands: economic, social and political. Economically, the
people or the common people means those people who do not exploit
other people, but are themselves exploited; socially it means those who
stand at the lowest point of the social ladder; and politically it means those
who are completely excluded in the governance of their country. To this I add,
invoking Karl Marx, that the people are those who are victims not of particular
social injustices, but of injustice in general; people who cannot therefore
liberate themselves without liberating society as a whole.
As a footnote and to assist young researchers I may insert here that I
consider the Identification and Classification of Social Classes and Historical
Materialism, that is, the Marxist Theory of History, as two areas where Eskor
Toyo made the most significant contributions to Marxism.
In the early days of the recent wave of capitalist triumphalism and imperialist
proclamation of the death of socialism or communism, Comrade Professor
Eskor Toyo repeatedly dialogued with the working class and students, in
particular, on a very simple subject: the various ways in which the term
socialism is used, and can be used. In the first place, socialism may be used
to mean the idea of a modern exploitation-free society. Secondly, it may be
used to mean the movement (that is, organisations and groups) advocating
such a society. And thirdly, it may be used to refer to the system that was
actually being built by some countries. The triumphalists deliberately mix up
the various senses. We must re-possess the distinctions. Beyond this, it is
important to distinguish between a movement and organisations of the
movement and between organisations of a movement and the leaderships of
these organisations. Once you are able to do these simple analyses, you
require only a long view of history and interest in what is happening before
your very eyes to see the great deception of the triumphalists.
Our position, the position of the Socialist Movement of Nigeria on this global
question can be re-stated before the world: If this planet Earth must be
reprieved from self-destruction, if this common homeland must be saved for
humanity, the present oppressive and irrational system called Capitalism
must be dismantled and replaced through struggle with a rational and
exploitation-free system that has gone by the name Socialism for more than
200 years. This replacement is a long and arduous task that has within its
articulation the means of self-criticism, self-correction and self-renewal.
IV Eskor Toyo: A Revolutionary-at-large
Eskor Toyo was an itinerant revolutionary, a revolutionary-at-large, moving
from South to North, East to West, campaigning for workers power, popular
democracy, socialism. He moved by the cheapest public transportation,
passing the nights with comrades or in the cheapest hotels, eating
proletarian food. He was a roving and tireless teacher, ambassador and
campaigner of the working class and its allies, including students and youths.
To the best of my knowledge Eskor Toyo did not miss a single Workers May
Day rally and did not fail to address any of such rallies from the time I myself
entered the movement more than 40 years ago until he was struck down by
a succession of strokes from mid-2012. There is no trade union, no federation
of labour, no populardemocratic formation, no anti-staquo group with
progressive outlook in Nigeria that Eskor had not addressed more than once

in congress or in special conference. He was actively and prominently

involved in popular-democratic mass protests, as well as in organised
workers strikes. He participated in struggles where big grammar is used, as
well as in struggles where the state is simultaneously held at the throat and
the testicles. He was found above ground where the mood and power of the
masses are tested and demonstrated as well as underground where the
revolutionary machine rooms are located. A leader of the Academic Staff
Union of Universities (ASUU) said that Eskor Toyo lived his life for ASUU from a
particular date to the end of his life.
I added that, in fact, Eskor lived his life for the working class of Nigeria and its
movement throughout his conscious political life.
V Theory and Politics of Eskor Toyo
When Comrade Professor Eskor Toyo died as the sun went down and
disappeared on Monday, December 7, 2015, I returned to the Archives
holding his works and works on him. What I found amazed me although I
placed them there. Before me was a massive collection dating from the
early 1960s to just two years ago made up of books, pamphlets, academic
papers, intellectual disquisitions, mobilisational papers, public lectures,
articles, essays and extended interviews in newspapers and journals, quasilecture notes, study notes, personal communications, political disputations,
party programmes, internal party memoranda, scores and scores of
unpublished manuscripts, etc. Truly intimidated, I simply took away just one
document: my 1994 tribute, In praise of Eskor Toyo, which was published in
my The Guardian column of July 28, 1994. I read that tribute which I wrote 21
years before his death again and again, and concluded that I, in fact, had
nothing substantive to edit, nothing substantive to subtract, but accounts of
more revolutionary work to add.
Eskor Toyo, a professor of Economics, is an accomplished Marxist intellectual
and one of the best the world has produced since World War II. He became a
leading theoretician and partisan of the working class in Nigeria long before
he read for higher academic degrees and became a university teacher. He
was a unique organic intellectual of the working class of Nigeria in the sense
of Antonio Gramsci. I confirmed this again to myself on February 6, 2016
when I re-visited and listened to his Larger Family at Oron.
With a long experience as a teacher and administrator in post-primary
schools in the West, in the East and in the North of Nigeria, rising to a school
principal, and with goundings in economics, history, sociology, anthropology,
political science, the natural sciences, mathematics and logic, and with
practical involvement in proletarian politics spanning about 62 years, Eskor
Toyo comes forth as a very valued teacher, even when engaged in polemics
against an opponent within or outside the movement.
Eskor Toyo was to Marxist politics what Zik was to bourgeois politics: a first
class polemicist, merciless and total. He dealt with an opponent as if asking
him or her to shut up for ever. Some indeed shut up, others said for where?
He was rigorous, but lucid; prolific, but uniformly deep and serious. He was a
captivating speaker, an orator. His command and deployment of the English
Language greatly assisted his presentations. Like Karl Marx and Vladimir

Lenin, he returned his readers, over and over again, to the fundamentals and
like Rosa Luxembourg and Leon Trotsky, he took them through broad
historical sweeps. Eskor rises to his best, to his most passionate level, when
defending Socialism, Marxism and the Working Class.
The range, quantity and quality of Eskor Toyos academic and political works
are, indeed, prodigious. He has authored enough books, papers, monographs,
essays, articles, lectures and speeches to occupy a research institute of
theoretical and applied Marxism. For introduction to the Marxism of Eskor
Toyo, a researcher may refer to three of his books: The Working Class and the
Nigerian Crisis (1965); The Working Class and the Third Republic (1986) and
Crisis and Democracy in Nigeria (Comments on the Transition From the
Babangida Regime) (1994), as well as his articles and essays in the Mass
Line (1973-1977) and (1987-1990). The first of these books is an analysis and
critique of proletarian politics in Nigeria between 1960 and 1965 and, in
particular, the 1964 General Strike together with the events preceding and
following it. In that Strike, Comrade Eskor Toyo was a participant, a mobiliser,
an organiser, a chronicler, an ideologue and a theoretician.
Again, as a footnote, I can say that Eskor Toyo would have opposed the
concept of The Marxism of Eskor Toyo in the sharpest language. I would,
however, have insisted. That is the type of argument which only history can
resolve.
Eskor Toyo had been actively involved in organised working class struggles,
and in trade union and socialist politics since the formation of the Nigerian
National Federation of Labour (NNFL) in 1948. He was a leading member of
the United Working Peoples Party (UWPP) (1953), Nigerian Youth Congress
(1960), Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT), Socialist Workers and Farmers Party
SWAFP (1963), Nigerian Labour Party (1964), Nigerian Afro-Asian Solidarity
Organisation NAASO (1967), Movement for Peoples Democracy (1974),
Calabar Group of Socialists (1977), the Peoples Redemption Party (1979),
Academic Staff Union of Universities ASUU (1978/79), Directorate for
Literacy (1987), the Nigerian Socialist Alliance (1989), the Labour Party
(1989) and most recently, the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN). He was an
editor of the Marxist journal, Mass Line during its first appearance (19701977) and the editor during its second appearance (1987-1990). A
revolutionary group, Mass Line Collective crystallised around the journal in
the 1980s and early 1990s. The Calabar Group of Socialists, the Directorate
for Literacy and the Mass Line Collective, as well as Democratic Action
Committee (DACOM) all working-class formations played a prominent role
in the campaign, election, and the subsequent Bassey Ekpo Bassey-led
Calabar Municipal Administration of 1988-1989.
Although Eskor Toyo has nice words for several of his predecessors and
contemporaries, he singled out Michael Imoudu for special praise. If he had
any hero at all, I suspect it will be Imoudu. In a private discussion with me
(and I think this has been repeated in at least one open meeting), he said
that the Nigerian Labour Movement has produced only one exemplary
proletarian politician, namely, Imoudu. He singled out Imoudu for his
proletarian and mass-line (as against petit-bourgeois and sectarian) approach
to working class politics.

To explain the struggle between the various factions of Nigerias ruling

classes, Eskor Toyo takes us back to the concept of primitive capitalist
accumulation which he defines as the sum total of economic and associated
social processes by which a capitalist class emerges and matures in a
country. He insists: Unless one understands the essence, processes,
contradictions, historical pressures and cultural emanations of primitive
capitalist accumulation in Nigeria, one cannot make headway in
understanding her politics.
It is not enough to be political scientists, he continues. It is not enough to
recognise that Nigeria has ethnic groups, is a neocolony and is
underdeveloped, or even that she is ruled by a bourgeois class with
unspecified character . Eskor Toyo is convinced that if one does not
understand that the military coups and other political convulsions that have
shaken Nigeria since independence are crises of the politics of primitive
accumulation in a neo-colonial and multi-ethnic national setting, his or her
analyses and advice either to the government or to the opposition will be
useless.
Were Eskor Toyo alive and conscious today, he would have responded to the
current war on corruption in similar terms, namely, that the next generation
will witness another war on corruption just like the last one and the one
before it unless the problem is tackled from the roots. Put explicitly: We must
apprehend the connection between the department of corruption now being
fought the department which I myself in 1982 called the Political Economy
of State Robbery and Primitive Capitalist Accumulation, which some
Marxists also call Primary Capitalist Accumulation. This is where the Nigerian
Socialist Movement is summoned by History to formulate that link and enter
the current battle as an independent organised political force and not as
individual cheer leaders.
Once one grasps Eskor Toyos thesis on the link between primitive capitalist
accumulation, state robbery and the political crises, one will be able to
understand why he did not regard the national question or ethnicity as an
independent phenomenon, but rather insisted on the building of a
revolutionary workers party whether the state approves of it or not and
entering the political struggle with it under the banner: Workers Power,
Popular Democracy, Socialism. This proposition is clear, bold and serious.
Responses to it whether in agreement, in disagreement or in modification
should also be at that level. That is the demand of Comrade Eskor Toyos
revolutionary heritage.
I wish to say, with all seriousness, and in tribute to Comrade Eskor Toyo that
his theses on the National Question, among some other important questions,
require responses, robust responses and bold discussions, the type of
discussions that Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg initiated just before the
First World War but which the global Left again neglected after the Russian
Revolution only to pay a very heavy prize for that neglect from the late
1980s. The Nigerian Marxist Left is still timid before the National Question,
afraid to discuss it, let alone take a concrete rather than abstract, position on
it.

VI Eskor Toyo and Intra-Group Struggle

That Comrade Eskor Toyo abhorred factionalism in Workers and Socialist
Movement does not mean that he shied away from inevitable and often
necessary internal struggles which ironically could only end in factionalisation
or liquidation of one or both sides of a dispute. Eskor Toyo waged internal
battles, epic battles, in his long revolutionary career. But his positions were
always clear and principled, and, of course, always articulately and
passionately argued. And he respected principled positions and arguments
even when he was in disagreement. You cannot earn Eskors respect simply
by supporting him. That was one of his strengths. And the Workers and
Socialist Movements benefitted immensely from that attribute: it prevented,
in particular, the emergence of what in the history of revolution is called the
cult of personality either around him or against him. Our history shows how
damaging to the struggle the cult of personality could be. And, conversely,
how helpful its absence could also be. I define the cult of personality simply
as fanatical hero-worshipping, automatic support that rules out, ab initio, the
need for debate, the possibility of error. The Nigerian Socialist Movement is
fortunate that Comrade Eskor Toyo never attracted that phenomenon, as
towering as he was. Let me provide a factual illustration.
The Calabar Group of Socialists (CGS) was formed in August 1977 by eight
revolutionary socialists (four intellectuals and four workers with varying
backgrounds and experiences): Eskor Toyo, Eboney Okpa, Udo Atat, Assim Ita,
Ita Henshaw, Bassey Ekpo Bassey, Bene Madunagu and Edwin Madunagu.
With Eskor Toyo leaving us only two of the foundation members are now alive.
In November 1977, barely three months after its formation, the Calabar
Group of Socialists was engulfed by a bitter internal struggle over rules and
discipline, and how to combine weapons in the confrontation with General
Obasanjos military dictatorship, among other issues. The struggle was
carried to workers and their organisations, to students and their
organisations, to academics and their organisations, to other strata of the
population and into civil and state institutions. But the struggle was
principled. Two factions emerged. One faction leveled the charges of
Anarchism and Dangerous Romanticism; the other responded with charges of
Petit-Bourgeois Degeneracy and Individualism.
The two sides argued their positions openly and underground, verbally and in
writing, locally and nationally. But there was no tribalism, no sectionalism, of
course no religious bigotry, no sexism, no appeal to age, experience,
education or social status. The fact that it was principled prevented the
emergence of a cult of personality and made reconciliation not only
possible but easy to initiate. Reconciliation was indeed initiated but at the
most unlikely location: the state police headquarters, when Eskor Toyo,
Bassey Ekpo Bassey, Bene Madunagu and Edwin Madunagu were arrested
and locked up in the same cell during the Ali must go students protest
of April 1978. With that reconciliation, there developed in Calabar and the Old
Cross River State one of the largest worker and student-based leftist groups
in the country. Calabar became one of the leading centres of post Civil War
Radical Politics in Nigeria.

Between that epic struggle of November 1977 to April 1978 and his death
three months ago a period of 37 years Comrade Eskor Toyo waged many
internal struggles but attracted no cult of personality either around or
against himself. This was extra-ordinary for a revolutionary of his stature:
influential, committed and deeply respected. From history we have also learnt
that he had a similar record in his earlier days before Calabar, before the
Civil War.
VII Eskor Toyo and History of the Socialist Movement
In the last decade of his life, Comrade Eskor turned some attention to aspects
of the history of the Left: Labour, Workers and Socialist Movement. He
completed several manuscripts some of which are autobiographical, others
relatively detached, but all rich, though combative. Last month at the
Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, during the 70th Birthday Anniversary
Conference in honour of Comrade Professor Biodun Jeyifo, I renewed the call
on Leftist intellectuals to start researching, collating and writing the history of
their movement. They should start by putting together materials that exist
today, including Eskors manuscripts. They should not allow the ruling classes
and those they sponsor to write their own history and then write ours. I am
repeating that call here in the name of Comrade Eskor Toyo.
VIII Eskor Toyo: On the nature of Marxism
As far as science is concerned the essence of Marx lies in his method,
Comrade Eskor said in a review of an essay on Marxian Socialism many years
ago. His propositions are otherwise empirical propositions to be upheld or
falsified by experience. His paradigm overall theoretical view and method,
that is, overall approach is powerful and the best in social science . But the
correctness of the paradigm does not validate every particular proposition
associated with it. I added on the margin: Or else, Marxism becomes a
religion, which it is not.
IX Eskor Toyo: A Dialectical Critique
In private life, Comrade Eskor Toyo was strict, but humane, humorous, and
generous within the limits of his austere circumstances. In internal
revolutionary politics, he often appeared overbearing and intimidating, but
this arose not from so-called natural inclination, but from a combination of
factors including his intellectual confidence and political boldness, our
movements defective organisational structure, with no clear lines between
organs according to the principles of democratic centralism, and sometimes
the timidity of others in the face of a repressive state apparatus and a vicious
class enemy.
Because he was such a knowledgeable man, disagreements with Comrade
Eskor Toyo were, some of the time, resolvable, not in theory, but in practice.
Because he looked and saw very far in both directions he sometimes
missed the contradictions just before him. But Comrade Eskor Eskor Toyo was
indeed an outstanding and exceptional Marxist and Revolutionary Socialist.
His commitment to the ultimate elimination of oppression from the face of
the Earth through struggle never wavered; and his faith in the Working
Class and Working People as vanguard agencies for that elimination never
declined.

X Eskor Toyo: Departing Message

In the final analysis, Eskor Toyo told me in a private communication, we
must remember that history does not guarantee anything. It only opens up
possibilities which become actualities through struggle.