Community Organising As Nation Building

8/12/2019 Community Organising As Nation Building

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Community Organising As Nation Building

Kunle Ajibade

The British academic, rabbi and author of The Politics of Hope, Professor Jonathan

Sacks, observes that community is society with a human face. It is larger than the

individual but smaller than the state. According to him, it is where problems arebest understood and solved, where individuals not otherwise politically engaged

can be enlisted in the service of others. Sacks goes further to say that the

neighbourhood, the parish, the congregation, the youth club, the town union, the

professional body, etc, are where people experience directly and immediately the

power of working together to achieve what none of us can do alone. In the same

vein, Tip ONeill of the US Democratic Party who represented Boston districts in the

House of Representatives for 34 years and served as Speaker of the same House

for ten years once said: All politics is local. It is local because the majority of

informed citizens in their immediate neighbourhoods know when their politicians

are serving them and when they are not. Woe betides any politician in the US who

doesnt listen and act decisively on the complaints of his constituents.

In the US, UK, Australia, Canada and South Africa, community organising is

regarded as a capacity building process from the bottom up. Because of its

importance, numerous books have been written on it. To mention just a few:

Collective Action for Social Change: An Introduction to Community Organising by

Aaron Schutz and Marie Sandy; Let the People Decide: Neighbourhood Organising

in Americaby Robert Fisher; We Make Change: Community Organisers Talk About

What They DoandWhyby Kristin Szakos and Joe Szakos; Small is Beautiful by EF

Schumacher; and Defending Community Organising by Ben Smith. In those

countries, as you all know, loyalties to their communities, sport clubs, schools,

hospitals, bookstores, cultural and political institutions are always in full display.

Between 1880 till date, the history of community organising has gone through

many significant phases. From organising immigrant neighbourhood in urban

centres through civil rights movements, anti-war movement, anti-apartheid

movement, womens movement, feminist movement, the Arab spring movement,

down to occupy wall street movement, and other movements. Citizens UK, for

instance, has been promoting community organising in the United Kingdom since

1989. It is a reputable alliance of community organisers and leaders. Citizens UK

recognises that communities can empower themselves when they come together


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to compel public authorities and businesses to respond to the needs of ordinary

people. The following are the objectives of Citizens UK:

To organise people through the places where they have regular contact with

their neighbours faith institutions and workplaces and educational

establishments. Our experience of practising broad based community

organising across the UK has confirmed for us that the threads that onceconnected the individual to the family, the family to their community and the

community to the wider society are fraying and in danger of breaking

altogether. We believe these strands, connections and alliances are vital for a

healthy democracy and should be the building blocks of any vibrant civil

society. We believe in building for power which is fundamentally reciprocal,

where both parties are influenced by each other and mutual respect develops.

The power and influence that we seek is tempered by our religious teachings

and moral values and is exercised in the fluid and ever-changing relationshipwith our fellow leaders, allies and adversaries. We value and seek to operate in

the public sphere. We believe that UK public life should be occupied not just by

a few celebrities and politicians but also by the people themselves seeking a

part of the action.

We gather on its website that Citizens UK has set up the Institute for Community

Organising as part of its Centre for Civil Society established in 2010 in response to

growing demands for training. In the same year it held a General Election Assembly

at the Methodist Central Hall Westminster with 2,500 people from member

institutions. The event was three days before the election. David Cameron, Nick

Clegg and Gordon Brown as the leaders of the three main political parties were

present at the event. Each candidate for Prime Minister was questioned on stage

concerning his willingness to work with Citizens UK if elected. Each agreed to work

with Citizens UK and come to future assemblies to give account of work achieved.

When London announced it would bid to be the host city for the Olympic Games in

2012, Citizens UK swung into action to ask for things of benefit to Londoners if thebid was successful. It demanded affordable homes for local people; that money

from the Olympic development should be set aside to improve local schools and

the health service; that at least 30% of jobs should be set aside for local people;

that the Olympic Delivery Authority, the London Organising Committee for the

Olympic Games and the Olympic Legacy Company work with Citizens UK to ensure

that these promises are delivered.


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Those who have read Barack Obamas carefully crafted memoirs, Dream From My

Father: A Story of Race and Inheritancewill recall that when the then 22-year old

Obama finished his first degree in Political Science and International Relations at

the Columbia University in New York, he worked as a community organiser in

Chicago. He worked with other organisers at Developing Communities Project

between June 1985 and May 1988. They helped to fix run-down schools, parks andblack housing estates. They also helped to stop gang wars by the black youths. It

was tough but they persisted. The experience would stand him in good stead as a

law student in Harvard University where he became the first African-American to

edit that university prestigious Law Reviewhe also was the first African-American

to become the president of the same Law journal. The experience helped him

during his campaigns for senatorial seat in Chicago. It helped immensely during the

campaigns for the presidency of America. Obama is still very proud of his

community organising experience. When some Republican candidates during the

presidential campaign for his first term in office mocked his community organising

days, his own campaign outfit retorted that Jesus Christ himself was a community

organiser! And they proved it. Obama was merely building on the great traditions

of community organising of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, among

others.

It is to the credit of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his Movement for the Survival of Ogoni

People that they drew on the inspiring examples of the non-violent community

organising strategies of some of the famous civil rights movements when they

launched their justified campaign against the maltreatments of Ogoni by the

Federal Government and the oil companies in the Niger Delta. With a very

articulate leadership whose robust arguments were unassailable, the cause of

Ogoni was immeasurably served. The Ogoni Bill of Rightswhich Saro-Wiwa wrote

was sent to the international community. All the accused in that bill of rights had to

explain themselves. The genocide that Saro-Wiwa and the Movement for the

Survival of Ogoni People pointed out may not have been completely redressed but

they managed to bring to the attention of the world the injustice of an oil bearing

community that gets nothing in return. The Cuban July 26 Movement which

overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista would not have had the audacity to

liberate Cubans from political oppression and economic exploitation if Fidel Castro,

Ernesto Guevara and other leaders and mobilisers had kept silent in the face of

tyranny. Will South Africa not have remained a killing field and a country of

apartheid minority rule if Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, AhmedKathrada, Govan Mbeki and a host of others had not energised the African National


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Congress to struggle for a multi-racial democracy? Are there, or are there not,

some useful lessons for us in all these? Leaders in communities ought to be

positive forces of history and agents of change.

There is no country without its own share of problems. The so-called civilised

countries of the world have their own uncivilised conducts. The difference

between those countries and our country is that while we generally spend our

energy agonising over our problems, they spend their own time, resources and

energy to find solution to their problems. While we tend to settle for make-shift

arrangement, they prefer lasting solutions. Most of the time, we plan for ten years,

while they plan for 100 years. In those societies, an older generation believes that

it owes the next generation a key to the future. Here the older generation stupidly

creates more problems for the new. If families and communities are raised on a

diet of vices, we should not expect the country at large to be virtuous. We should

not expect leaders thrown up by such communities to have any sense of obligation

to the country.

In our various communities, in our neighbourhoods, we experience many selfish,

greedy and incompetent leaders and followers; we experience insecurity, failed

infrastructure, epileptic power supply, bad schools, bad hospitals, kidnapping,

unemployment, and lack of faith in the country. We have laws but we obey them

selectively, if we are not outrightly breaching them. Our country must be the only

oil bearing country in the world where its people pay through the nose for fuel and

suffer periodically for its scarcity and hoarding. What is certain in our country is

uncertainty itself which puts a lot of people in a permanent state of anxiety. The

sanctity of human life in our country is constantly and recklessly violated. The

inequality in our country is so pronounced now as a tiny few have cornered the

wealth meant for the majority. So many citizens are now alienated, living like aliens

in their homeland. The roads in your neighbourhoods are bad. Instead of

organising to compel the government to fix them, you prefer to buy more sportsutility vehicles for yourself and family members to absorb the shocks on the roads.

People who have a sense of self-worth will not do that. Schools in your

communities are bad. Instead of joining others for mass action to fix them, you

prefer to steal to send your children to schools abroad. We are so good at

lamenting in this country. When light is taken in our neighbourhoods you hear the

shout NEPA! And it all ends there. When we cant complete the calls for which we

are charged, we will just say network failure as if that will put an end to the rip-off

by the GSM service providers. Avoidable tanker accidents occur on our expressway,


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burn down people and their vehicles, and the rest of us resign to fate and say, its

their destiny. Just like that! It ends there. We move on as if nothing has happened.

This rubbish must stop. With this kind of attitude, modernity will continue to elude

us. Barbarians will remain kings in our country. I can go on and on. One good way

of stopping this drift is to learn to build caring communities communities where

we will have concerns for one another.

For our country is underdeveloped not because we dont have brilliant people, not

because Nigeria does not have abundant material resources, but because of our

obsessive tolerance of foolish behaviours. We refuse to use the potent power of

the collective to call our rulers to order. Why cant we organise and demand for

welfare programmes for the army of unemployed youths and other vulnerable

people in our country? Why cant we organise effectively to demand for cheap and

affordable transportation system? Why cant we insist on proper accounting from

our leaders? If we dont take ourselves seriously, the rest of the world willcontinue

to treat us shabbily. To guide our steps as we rise to the challenge of community

and national responsibilities, we surely need leaders with courage, wisdom,

emotional intelligence, and core principle; leaders who will see the good in others,

who will quit when it is time for them to do so, who will know when to say no. In

Mandelas Way,Richard Stengel wrote that Nelson Mandela loved to listen, that he

loved to summarise and then sought to mould opinion and steer people towards

an action. The Mandelas model of leadership, in the words of Stengel, is better

expressed as ubuntu, the idea that people are empowered by other people, that

we become our best selves through unselfish interaction with others. That is the

kind of leadership we need.

Finally, let me reiterate the kernel of my argument: that we will not have a good

society if we dont wake up to our obligations as citizens by getting ourselves

organised in our communities for good causes. If you allow your inalienable

community power to be taken away, you have no right to complain that yourinterests are not well served by your enslavers. I believe that we can, in unison,

move mountain if we put our minds to it.

*The 1st

Adewale Adesanya Memorial Lecture delivered on 13 March, 2014 by Mr.

Kunle Ajibade, Executive Editor, TheNEWS/P.M.NEWS at NECA House, CBD, Alausa,

Ikeja, Lagos.


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Mr. Wale Adesanya loved his familyboth the immediate and the extended. He

cared for his friends. He loved his country. He was always very active in any

community where he found himself, believing that human capital was essential

to growth and development. Our gathering here this morning is therefore a

fitting tribute to him. And it is to his memory and spirit I dedicate this lecture.

Community Organising As Nation Building

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