Olaotan, Birmingham Socialist Party
They say reading the bible eventually makes you an atheist. I could say the same about capitalism!
Living in a capitalist society, and experiencing its relentless assault on working people, coupled with its many contradictions, made me a socialist.
In Nigeria, I watched a land of breathtaking human and natural potential, systematically fail its people. We are a nation where the lights are perpetually off for the majority, where the wealth of our soil flows into the pockets of a tiny elite, and where the term ‘public good’ feels like a cruel joke.
‘Logic’ of capitalism
My political awakening began with the realisation that our suffering was not an accident, but by design. The so-called ‘corruption’ we decry is not a cultural flaw, it is the logical outcome of a capitalist system – creating a ruling class of billionaires and politicians who feast on the labour of the masses.
I went to the university, studied hard, and did everything society told me to do to have a good life – only to graduate into a non-existent job market.
I started to realise that my friends’ poverty was not a sign of their ‘laziness’, but the direct result of wealth being transferred from their pockets through exploitative wages, privatised public assets, and spurious bank charges, into the vaults of the already wealthy.
The oil we had became a curse for the people of the Niger Delta, as the environment got decimated with oil spills, while the largesse of the oil was siphoned off to elite pockets, both local and foreign.
Turbocharged problems
I travelled abroad, and expected to see the benefits of capitalism in the so called “saner climes”, according to Nigerian journalists, only to witness capitalism on steroids. The same issues in Nigeria, but turbocharged. I walked into a cost-of-living crisis in Britain, which coincided with record profits for energy companies, while citizens were choosing between heating and eating.
Seeing this machinery of extraction up close, I could no longer believe in the myth of the ‘self-made’ billionaire, or the fairness of the system that creates them.
I joined the Socialist Party, because it is the only political tradition that names this system for what it is, and offers a clear alternative – a society where the vast resources of nations are owned and controlled democratically by working people, who create all wealth.
For the sake of Nigeria’s children, and for the dignity of every person everywhere who works, we must build a world run not for profit, but for people. That is a future worth fighting for, and socialism is its name.
