Today, Thursday 27 November, scholars, activists, and citizens will gather at the University of Jos for the Frantz Fanon Centennial Conference. It is a fitting location, for Jos sits at the crossroads of memory and conflict. It holds the scars of violence that mirror the anxieties Fanon described and the aspirations he refused to surrender.
As the world marks one hundred years of Fanon’s birth, Nigeria stands exposed as one of the most powerful case studies of his warnings and his hopes. Our national condition reads like an extended marginal note on The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon wrote with an urgency that burned through the page. He saw that societies either confront their contradictions or are devoured by them. Nigeria has allowed its contradictions to fester. In The Wretched of the Earth, he declared that “the national bourgeoisie… is incapable of great ideas. It is totally incompetent in all matters of governance”. His words fall upon Nigeria with the weight of judgment. Our political class shuffles between offices without imagination. It governs without national purpose. It wields power without responsibility. It pursues privilege without shame. It has mastered the art of surviving without leading.
But our tragedy does not belong to the political class alone. It is also the tragedy of the Left that has surrendered the discipline of struggle. At a time when Nigerians search for a vanguard that can articulate alternatives to the national drift, the Left remains a scattered archipelago of brilliant individuals who cannot convert insight into power. Fanon would have called this a betrayal. He once wrote that “every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor”. This is not an insult. It is a warning. It means that silence in the face of decay becomes a form of complicity. The Fanon conference in Jos offers a moment of reflection, but it must be more than reflection. It must be a call to duty. It must confront the fact that Nigeria is falling deeper into what Fanon described as a “zone of nonbeing”. This phrase was his way of depicting spaces where people live without dignity, without safety, and without a stake in the future. Entire regions in Nigeria live in such a condition. Communities are terrorised by armed groups. Villages are emptied by terrorists and hunger. Roads are ruled by fear. Young people migrate not out of adventure but out of despair. Fanon’s thoughts are relevant, but we must also remember the wisdom of Amílcar Cabral, who reminded revolutionary movements that the task of the Left is not to comment on national crises. It is to build a national struggle that can transform the social order. Cabral insisted that liberation movements must “return to the source” and anchor themselves in the lived experiences of the people. For him, liberation was impossible without organisation. He believed that the people must be mobilised through clarity, discipline, and sacrifice. Cabral understood that the power of the people is not an abstract concept. It emerges only when a conscious vanguard commits to national struggle and not intellectual theatre.
Nigeria has no such organised force today. The Nigerian Left has retreated into academic seminars. It debates rather than organises. It analyses rather than mobilises. It recites Cabral and Fanon with elegance, but it avoids the hard labour of building structures that can survive state repression and internal ego. It cannot build alliances that can shift national consciousness. It cannot train cadres who understand that liberation requires sacrifice. It cannot offer the poorest Nigerians an ideological home. Fanon was clear that the intellectual who claims to stand with the people must “put himself in the school of the people”. The Nigerian Left has instead remained in the school of the abstract. It prefers theory without soil. It prefers critique without constituency. It prefers commentary without consequences. Meanwhile, the masses it claims to speak for navigate terror, poverty, and abandonment.
Cabral would have found this intolerable. He wrote that a movement that cannot organise its own forces cannot organise a nation. He argued that liberation demands a political instrument that is both disciplined and rooted. Such an instrument does not emerge from poetry. It emerges from work. It emerges from commitment. It emerges from the resolve to confront the national structure rather than applaud one’s own analysis of it. Cabral believed that the greatest betrayal is the betrayal of mission. Nigeria’s Left risks such betrayal. At this moment, Nigeria hangs between paralysis and possibility. Even the most ordinary Nigerian feels the weight of a country that has lost moral direction. Civil servants who cannot afford transport to work. Parents who bury children taken by violence. Graduates who wait for years without employment. Traders and farmers who pay taxes to non-state actors. Schools that plead for protection that never arrives. Fanon wrote that the people “find themselves in a state of profound discontent” when the nation fails to deliver the fruits of independence.
This discontent cuts across Nigeria.
This discontent could become the engine of national renewal, but without organisation it becomes wasted anger. Fanon recognised this danger. He warned that without political education and disciplined mobilisation, the energy of the people is squandered. It becomes a spontaneous revolt rather than constructive movement. Cabral understood the same truth. He insisted that the task of the revolutionary is to transform anger into a project. Nigeria has no project today. It has protests without platforms. It has courageous citizens without political instruments. It has anger without direction. The Left must confront its own responsibility for this vacuum. The Nigerian condition did not occur in the absence of warning. Thinkers, activists, and progressives have long predicted our collapse into insecurity and moral decay. They have long denounced the failures of the elite. They have analysed everything from oil dependency to identity conflict. But analysis has not produced organisations. Organisation is what Cabral demanded. Organisation is what Fanon respected. Nigeria does not lack thinkers. It lacks disciplined political organisers. It lacks a moral vanguard that refuses corruption, refuses cynicism, and refuses the laziness of intellectual comfort. Fanon believed that societies collapse when their moral centre rots. Nigeria is approaching that precipice. Those who claim the Fanonian legacy must decide whether they will remain commentators or become builders.
Fanon wrote that each generation must discover its mission and fulfil it or betray it. Nigeria stands at that fork. The Fanon conference in Jos offers both memory and warning. Memory of a thinker who insisted that liberation is a practice. Warning to a nation that continues to postpone the work of renewal. The Nigerian Left must choose. If it fails to organise, if it fails to build, if it fails to lead, it will join the long list of actors who watched Nigeria bleed and did nothing.
Fanon deserves more than celebration. Nigeria deserves more than despair. The task is clear. The time is now. As the Fanon conference begins in Jos, it must provoke more than nostalgia. It must force those who invoke Fanon and Cabral to confront themselves. If the Left cannot build a national struggle, if it cannot offer the people a path out of despair, if it cannot unite its fragments into a force that carries moral authority, it will be remembered as a movement that chose comfort over duty. Cabral taught that the mission of the revolutionary is to build the national struggle, the duty of the Left today is to engage that national struggle and fulfil its mission. Nigeria stands on the edge of a future that can collapse or be rebuilt. The Fanon centenary in Jos offers both memory and challenge. The challenge is simple. Those who claim to honour Fanon and Cabral must choose whether they will remain observers or become builders of a national struggle that can rescue Nigeria from the abyss. The central hope is that the Fanon Conference in Jos will not degenerate into yet another talk shop, a mere reminder of the ideological left’s long-standing failure and its loss of clear vision and mission.
