In December 2025, two developments in Nigeria unfolded almost simultaneously. The United States carried out direct military airstrikes against Islamic State–linked forces in the northwest, while the primary Nigerian trade union confederation announced nationwide protests and threatened a general strike in response to worsening living conditions. These events do not express opposing forces. They are two moments of the same process within the crisis of capitalism, where the mechanisms of imperialism and the national unions conspire together to contain and corral a potentially powerful working class movement.

On December 25–26, U.S. forces launched missile strikes against militant targets in Sokoto State, acting in coordination with the Nigerian government. The operation was publicly described as counterterrorism, and its justification framed as an operation to defend Christians. It has now become a typical casus beli for the U.S. capitalist to justify foreign intervention on grounds of defending religious minorities and whites. Yet the dominant imperialism intervenes where instability threatens strategic interests, not to resolve the social causes of violence but to regulate it. As is well known, the receding power of France in the area has led to the expansion of Russian influence and similar forces also threaten Nigeria who remains firmly tied to U.S. dominated finance capital. Nigeria, like many of the former colonial, sub-imperialisms within global capitalism has a population exposed to both insurgent violence and foreign military force without either offering a way out of misery.

The persistence of armed groups in northern Nigeria is the result of decades of rural impoverishment, unemployment, land dispossession, and state decay producing conditions in which violence becomes a livelihood and a means of survival. Military force, domestic or foreign, does not resolve these conditions. It manages their symptoms while reproducing their causes.

At the same time, workers across Nigeria face falling real wages, inflation, insecurity, and the collapse of public services. In response, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) called for protests and threatened strike action, declaring a “National Day of Protest and Mourning”. The grievances invoked are real. Workers are killed or kidnapped on their way to work. They cannot reproduce their labour power under present conditions. Their anger is justified and the masses of workers faced with deepening economic crisis are moved to mass action; however, the established unions, masquerading as leaders instead as ever act as the saboteurs of the movement, containing and corralling in the Nigerian proletarian just as they do across the world.

The NLC and its allied unions do not organize workers as an independent class force. They organize discontent in order to contain it. Protest days, fixed-term strikes, and rapid suspensions in exchange for negotiations are not means of struggle but methods of regulation. They allow pressure to be released without threatening the continuity of capitalist production or the authority of the state.

In Nigeria as elsewhere, the unions are legally recognized, financially dependent on dues-checkoff, and integrated into state-managed bargaining systems. Their function is to mediate between labour and capital, not to abolish that relation. When they threaten escalation, it is to strengthen their position at the negotiating table, not to place power in the hands of the workers themselves.

The events of 2024 illustrate this clearly. During the general strike over the cost-of-living crisis, production and infrastructure were briefly disrupted. The objective conditions for broader struggle existed. Yet the strike was quickly suspended once negotiations began, and workers were sent back with concessions that did not restore lost living standards. The state regained stability; capital resumed accumulation. The workers’ conditions remained essentially unchanged.

Thus, while workers move toward struggle under the pressure of material necessity, the unions redirect that movement back into the framework of the bourgeois state. Even when the unions denounce insecurity, they appeal to the same state that invites imperialist intervention and enforces austerity. They ask that capitalism function better, not that it be confronted.

For Nigerian workers, the problem is not simply bad policy or corrupt leadership in the unions. It is the impossibility of life under a mode of production that reduces human labour to a cost and entire regions to strategic zones to be sacrificed or slaughtered. As long as workers remain organized within regime unions, their struggles will be limited to demands compatible with the survival of capital.

Workers must organize themselves in class unions, independent of the bourgeois state and hostile to all forms of class collaboration. Such organizations cannot be instruments of negotiation but organs of struggle. They must reject nationalism, siding with this or that imperialist intrigue, and the illusion that reforms can resolve a crisis rooted in capitalist production itself.

This task cannot be accomplished through spontaneity alone. It requires political clarity and continuity with the historical communist movement. The lessons defended by the International Communist Party, that of the rejection of all alliances with bourgeois power remain indispensable.