“Don’t you wonder,” asks Marx in Howard Zinn’s play, Marx In Soho, “why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again?” Twenty years ago, at the fall of the Berlin Wall, the capitalists and their spokespersons felt triumphant. Not content with proclaiming the end of Communism, the end of Socialism, they also proclaimed the end of history. “in the argument, between capitalism and Marxism,” wrote Reuben Abati, “ it is the free market intellectuals that have won the battle.”

And now in their search for a way out of the economic wreckage of their system, the capitalists and their ‘intellectual’ hangers-on are ‘resurrecting’ Marx. “… Hovering out there in the fog, unavoidably, is the towering specter of Karl Marx, the grandfather of political economists, whose damning critique of capitalism’s inadequacies played an outsized role in world history for a century after his death in 1883,” writes TIME’s Peter Gumbel. It is this article, Rethinking Marx that furnishes the platform for an ongoing debate.

As a rule, people do not like change, particularly sharp and sudden change that upsets their preconceived notions and beliefs. This persistence of belief is quite evident in the article A Crisis Marx Could Not Have Foretold by Ijeoma Nwogwugwu. After a long period of relative prosperity in which “unbridled capitalism and market forces, deregulation, liberalization and privatization” gave the writer “access to relatively fast and reliable internet service” where she was able to search for previous TIME magazine cover stories on Karl Marx, it is no wonder that the natural reaction to the current economic crisis is one of shock and disbelief.

Slump in Oil Prices: Tinubu and his Utopian Way Out

The former governor of Lagos State and Chieftain of the bourgeois opposition party All Progressives Congress (APC) Bola Ahmed Tinubu wrote an article which appeared in many national dailies with the tittle : " Slump in Oil Prices: A Progressive Way Out". The two main lines of arguement of the article were criticism of fiscal austerity and monetary tightening and a prescription of fiscal and monetary expansion, which in Nigeria means decoupling fiscal spending from dollar receipts.

Before going into critique of Tinubu's letter, it is important to give some background against which the bourgeois politician wrote. Nigeria, as a monocommodity economy, depends on oil exports for 90% of her foreign exchange earnings and 80% of government revenues. Over the last four months, crude oil has lost more than 30% of its price; from the June peak of $115 per barrel to less than $78 per barrel, below the benchmark price for Nigeria's 2015 budget. Nigeria's excess crude account balance fell by twice as much, losing more than 60% of its value; from $4.1 billion to $1.4 billion at the moment. Naira lost more than 7% of its value so far this year. The fate of Nigeria's economy will not be decided internally; events on global level are the decisive factors.

Insecurity in Kano and the Recent Kaduna Bombings

by Musa Atiku

In the last four years, suicide bombing has become one of the avowed weapons of the right wing Boko Haram insurgency campaign in Nigeria, especially in the northern part of Nigeria. In the past, we have had suicide bombers detonating strapped bomb in the Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory, Niger, Bornu, Adamawa, Yobe, Plateau, Kaduna and Kano States killing hundreds of innocent people in the process. Whereas in most of the instances where bombs were sporadically detonated, the political colouration and perceived intents were vague in contents as per those targeted, the July 23, 2014 twin-suicide bombings in Kaduna state and the July 27 & 28, 2014 Kano carnages appeared to have a different colouration from the usual suicide bombings. Musa Atiku places the two events into proper perspectives.