A voice of reason on democracy and development, By Toyin Falola
On Thursday, October 23rd, 2025, Yaba College of Technology will host a major event to honor Comrade Hassan Sunmonu. It is not just a case of honoring a great alumnus but of honoring a preeminent labor leader who contributed significantly to the making of modern Nigeria. A truly iconic figure, his name should be on one of the country’s stamps. The outcome of this initiative is the empowerment of the Hassan Sunmonu Center for Leadership and Governance, where his models will be studied, extended, reformed, and used by the current and next generations of Nigerian youth. It is a blessing that he is alive, and a pleasure that we will all gather to celebrate him.
Comrade Sunmonu is an individual whose activism can only be appreciated by understanding the crises of African decolonization. His youth coincided with the euphoric period of independence, which masked the enduring colonial structures in postcolonial African governance. The emerging African states favored features of domination of power, exploitation of labor, and extraction of resources. He had no choice but to confront the colonization of power and the marginalities it produced.
It was in this sort of environment that Adebayo Sunmonu found himself after joining the Federal Ministry of Works and Survey as a staff member in 1961. The ministry, just like the colonial government, exhibited hierarchical alienation and detachment of the typical worker. The prior experience he had gained as a technical officer and as a General Secretary of the Association of Technical Officers provided him with a template that governance had only evolved in form, not in character. Therefore, he was able to understand that the African elites only replaced the colonial masters whilst sustaining and operating their system of inequality. He must now face the monstrous power of the postcolonial state.
When Sunmonu led the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), his demands were better wages and democratization of development. He had a clear ideology that the entrenchment of poverty through the implementation of colonial hierarchies diminishes the purpose of democracy. Building on this, he achieved several feats, including the National Minimum Wage Act of 1981 and the recognition of May Day as a national holiday for workers. Feats like these signify how he has helped to localize the democratization of rights in the Nigerian economy. He faced the militarization of the postcolonial.
He understood the connection between the battle for democracy and economic justice. Therefore, when the regime of Olusegun Obasanjo dissolved four labour centers to form the Nigerian Labor Congress in 1978 as a body to repress the rise of radicalism amongst workers, partly, he was elected as its first President. Sunmonu’s election to this position witnessed the refusal of co-optation by workers. It also saw the launch of his “Workers’ Charter of Demands” in 1980, where he stated that equal access to national wealth must be included in democracy.
His leadership of the NLC became a moral force that insisted that workers are the backbone of national productivity; hence, they should not be the last beneficiaries of development. However, after several decades, corruption, elite dominance, and poor governance continue to feature in African societies, suggesting that democracy in African states remains in the captivity of the few over the many. Therefore, elections have become a substitute for accountability, and administrative power has become a means of siphoning resources rather than distributing them. This situation begs the rhetoric, “Does democracy in Africa promote inclusive development or does it serve only as protection for elite interests?”
As the General Secretary of the Organization of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU), Sunmonu’s tenure coincided with a period where African states were plagued by strict policies embedded in economic reforms from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These economic reforms imposed austerity measures, privatization, and currency devaluation on African states, while repressing labour movements. Sunmonu and his colleagues recognized these programs as a form of economic recolonization. Although African societies had attained political independence, they were economically tied to the aprons of international financial institutions. Therefore, the dictates of neoliberal economics betrayed the promise of democracy in this context. This raises another rhetoric, “Can economic freedom exist without genuine political democratization?”
Through Sunmonu’s advocacy in the OATUU, he tried to reassert Africa’s voice in global economic discourse. He understood that political democracy remained a façade if countries had no control over production, trade, and finance.Going further, he understood the gimmicks of the institutions that claim to promote democracy, like the IMF and World Bank, and how their policies often erode it by tacitly imposing national policies on African states, thereby promoting neoliberal reforms and restructuring African economies to benefit global rather than domestic well-being. Sunmonu and his pan-African labour diplomacy thus became part of a larger intellectual and moral struggle to reclaim Africa’s right to chart its own economic and political course. His stance was rooted in a vision of democracy grounded in self-reliance, human dignity, and social justice.
A contradiction in African development is that its abundant resources often undermine its democracy rather than strengthen it. Naturally, a society’s mineral resources should fund its growth, but in reality, it breeds corruption, elite capture, and state violence. A good example of this can be cited from Nigeria’s oil industry. The struggles of Sunmonu’s trade union during the oil boom era of the late 1970s and early 1980s are connected to this contradiction. Having witnessed firsthand how the prosperity from the oil business disrupted the relationship between the state and its citizens, how accountability declined as the government relied more on petrol revenue and less on taxation. He understood that dependence on natural resources weakened democratic accountability, and that administrative powers prioritized international oil interests over domestic welfare.
Sunmonu often referred to the outcome of this situation as “democracy without development” – a setting in which elections coexist with underdevelopment, unemployment, and poor infrastructure. In societies of this setting, labor remains the last pillar of morality, with the ability to demand accountability from the government through collective bargaining and strikes, which serve as tools to remind the government that democracy’s effectiveness lies in redistribution.In the late twentieth century, as global capitalism penetrated African societies under the guise of democracy promotion, it deepened the already widening gaps in inequality. Privatization policies enriched a handful, deregulation weakened public services, and the free market displaced social justice. Several African intellectuals, including Sunmonu, rightly called this development a neoliberal betrayal of democracy.
Sunmonu’s perspective is that democracy easily becomes a dictatorship when justice is absent in the system. Thus, his activism thrived on the ideology that citizens must feel social democracy in their day-to-day activities. In some of his later reflections, he noted that Nigeria’s federalism was as central as it was expensive, thereby bearing profound similarities to a colonial dictatorship in the guise of democracy. To this end, he called for a restructuring that returned power to regional autonomy and incorporated participatory governance. This call was made from his ideology that for democracy to be genuine, it must be locally embedded, economically viable, and socially accountable.
Comrade Sunmonu’s legacy offers a profound reflection on the moral and institutional directions of African democracy. It also pushes the notion that democracy is a process of constant negotiation between power and people, justice and privilege. Sunmonu and his generation fought for the realization of a democracy that would liberate the African worker from poverty. Several years later, however, postcolonial African societies remain plagued by inequality, foreign dependency, elite domination, and corruption. Therefore, the current challenge is to decolonize democracy and make it favor the masses over the elites.
Comrade Sunmonu embodies integrity, collectivism, and Pan-Africanism. These values should be embedded in African democracy to make it a catalyst for development. African democracy must allow free access to production and distribution, restore the moral purpose of governance, and base progress on human dignity. Sunmonu sees the urgency of repeatedly demanding that Africa’s development must be embedded in economic justice and ethical leadership. We must all be his followers in fighting for an African democracy that is meaningful only when developed around the welfare of Africans.
Toyin Falola, a professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at The University of Texas at Austin, is the Bobapitan of Ibadanland.