Students union and “campus cults”: youth African resistance to the Structural Adjustment Programs in the Nigeria of the 80’s

Abstract

This descriptive and analytical article contributes to the study of social dynamics in Nigerian universities and aims to focus on the importance of the civil society’s political agency in the historical process of the African continent. Using the theory of social movements, we will analyze different kinds of mobilizations carried out by students of the Nigerian university against the Structural Adjustment Programs of the 80’s.

In this way, we will examine two different models of student resistance which coexisted during this period: on the one hand, we have the major student’s union (NANS), based on inherited colonial structures and fighting against the adoption of neoliberal politics, and, on the other hand, we have the confraternities called “campus cults”, based on the uncertainty and the adoption of clientelism by the Nigerian state at that time. Two different and opposing youth groups radically different from each other, which met on a stage marked by the economic, political and social crisis that arose with the implementation of Structural Adjustment Programs in the tertiary institutions of Nigeria.