“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” – Ian Fleming (1908-1964)
60 years ago, on June 17, 1964 a Briton, Victor Lenard Allen (1923-2014) was arrested after an eventful pursuit from Lagos at Idi-Oroko by crack detectives attached to the Special Branch of Nigerian Police Force before the suspect disguised as a Tuareg was attempting to cross the border post into Dahomey (now Benin Republic) in a bid to escape the long but slow arm of the law.
The following day, Allen was charged before a Chief Magistrate Court in Lagos “under Section 63 of the Nigerian Criminal Code, for managing and assisting of an unlawful society.” He was also accused for “plotting with Nigerian labour leaders to overthrow the government during a 14-day general strike.”
He was charged alongside 3 Nigerians belonging to the Joint Action Committee.
In his defence, Dr Allen, a radical academic at University of Leeds and member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) stated he had come into Nigeria under the auspices of the International Labour Organization (ILO) where he was on sabbatical to understudy “trade union organizations in sub-Saharan Africa.”
The ramble rouser would eventually spend 6 months in a Jos prison before he was deported back to the United Kingdom.
He maintained his innocence throughout his incarceration in Nigeria.
Fast forward to the present-day when another British radical is romancing the Nigerian labour movement, thereby invoking the ire of the Nigerian Police. Again.
But as far as Andrew Wynne aka Andrew Povich or Drew Povey, is concerned, he is just a bookshop owner at the Labour House in Abuja.
The Nigeria Police are, however, not impressed and have since declared him wanted alongside a Nigerian accomplice accusing them for complicity in a bid “to topple the government and plunge the nation into chaos.”
Interestingly, IGP Kayode Egbetokun and NLC leader Joe Ajaero were both born in 1964 when Dr. Allen was carrying out his mischief in Nigeria.
Graduating variously in 1990 and as the top cop enlisted as a cadet officer at the Nigerian Police Academy in Kano, the labour leader was rounding off his service year at 1st Division of the Nigerian Army in Kaduna.
Today, they are both located between a rock and hard place in political power struggle.
Egbetokun as a dutiful cop is expectedly loyal to his principal’s interests that are apparently polar opposite to that of Ajaero.
Any labour leader in Nigeria is by extension, a member of the opposition Labour Party set up by the NLC now, the platform of a capitalist politician and neoliberal billionaire not unlike Mr. President in free market orientation.
Against the background of 1964, are our labour leaders immune to foreign manipulation?
The need to define a useful idiot is very important;
“A pejorative description of a person, suggesting that the person thinks they are fighting for a cause without fully comprehending the consequences of their actions, and who does not realize they are being cynically manipulated by the cause's leaders or by other political players.” - Wikipedia
Too many questions, too few answers:
1. Dr. V. L. Allen in 1999 was eventually revealed to have been working for the now rested KGB through the defunct East German Secret Police (Stasi) when a prominent Soviet era spy defected to Britain from Russia.
Confronted by BBC on camera, Allen confessed about his mission in Nigeria to transform a general strike into a revolution to topple the Balewa government;
“I have no shame. I feel no regrets about that at all. My only regret is that we didn’t succeed.”
2. Ahead of the 2023 presidential election as a PDP hopeful, Mr. Peter Obi was ushered into the seat of the British government at 10 Downing Street on May 23, 2022. Upon his return to Nigeria he promptly crossed the carpet, and by May 30 at Asaba, he emerged as the Labour Party presidential candidate.
3. On May 23, 2015, then President-elect Muhammadu Buhari was received at 10 Downing Street less than a week to his swearing-in at Abuja.
He had previously appeared at Chatham House on February 26 before his election. President Tinubu had had his Chatham outing on December 5, 2022. Meanwhile, that of Obi was on January 16, 2023.
While Asiwaju is still yet to visit Downing Street, he was visited by the former British PM Tony Blair at Abuja on May 23, 2023.
This was the third symbolic happenstance or is it coincidence of May 23 as the case may be.
4. Prof. Adekeye Adebajo writes;
“In 2020, Caroline Davis, a British scholar, now based at England’s University College London, published the book African Literature and the CIA: Networks of Authorship and Publishing (Cambridge University Press).
The author argued that the United States Central Intelligence Agency had embarked on a covert operation from 1961 to fund the publication and dissemination of specific books abroad in a bid to extend American influence, using publishers, literary agents and, where possible, co-opted authors...
A chapter in Davis’s book entitled ‘Wole Soyinka, the Transcription Centre, and the CIA’ has caused a storm of controversy.
In it, Davis sets out to assess the extent to which CIA support had contributed to Soyinka’s ‘canonical status’. She alleges that Africa’s first Nobel Literature laureate was supported by three CIA-funded organisations: the US-centred CCF and the Farfield Foundation, and the London-based Transcription Centre. She further claims that this assistance aided Soyinka’s meteoric rise to international prominence.”
Although Adebajo was defending Prof. Soyinka affirms in his own response;
“All humanity is free to make inferences out of anything including the sculpture sitting next you; you can make a thousand inferences. That is freedom of expression, freedom of imagination, the analytic freedom of the academic world. But, when it comes to statement of fact, they will be put to the utmost rigour, if necessary, in an international court of law.”
5. According to Iliyasu Gadu;
"There is no need pretending about it; the EndSARS protests in some ways come from the same foreign-inspired template of destabilization as that of China in 1989.
The hallmarks are there; identify a restive segment of the population, choose a sensitive issue that agitates the mind of a good number of people, provide funding and logistics through local agents, prepare platforms for massive agitation propaganda locally and abroad and from embassies secretly coordinate the tempo and tenor of the protests.
Additionally, in Nigeria, the protests are driven through the fault lines of ethnicity and religion for maximum impact and effect.
All these elements are evident in the EndSARS protests.
And what is more, this is not a spontaneous happening as we are being made to believe."
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