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How did this Lugardist state achieve this feat of social destruction and culturecide? The chief instruments were economic: principally, [1] the commoditization of land and the introduction of individualist land tenure a century ago, which slowly dissolved the communal holdings; [2] the emergence, with the discovery of oil, of a rentier state which dominates the economy with its huge rent revenues derived from foreign concessionaries– this has turned the economy upside down, and made everyone dependent on state favours instead of keeping the state dependent on taxing the economically active population for its revenues; [3] the Land Thief Decree, a.k.a. Land Use Decree, which robbed communities of their ancestral land, thereby quietly turning the population into a vast rootless proletariat with no landed communal interest to sustain their local structure and cohesion; [4] the ravages of SAP and other economic policies which have impoverished most people and left them without financial stamina; [5] a culturally alienating, white supremacist education system that inculcates possessive individualism and trains people for non-existent bureaucratic jobs, which makes its products unfit for self-employment in productive activities. By such measures, imposed in the course of a century, this Lugardist state destroyed the communitarian foundations of the African societies it trapped in its cage.
Chinweizu
