by Guy Arnold
POLITICS
In his book Mr Prime Minister, published in 1960, the fiery Chief Awolowo said: ‘The defects in British administration have turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For if British rule had been less inept than it was, the opportunity for Nigerians to demonstrate that they are qualified to manage their own affairs would have been correspondingly reduced.’ This may have applied to the pre-independence period but it failed convincingly to cover the performance of Nigerian politicians after independence, including Awolowo himself. There was, perhaps, a year from October 1960 before there was a distinct downturn in the political scene. At the end of February 1961, addressing the Action Group Conference in the Mid-West, Chief Awolowo, ever determined to lessen British influence, argued that Nigeria should become a republic. He also criticized the Federal Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa, and called for the creation of more states. On 1 June that year Northern Cameroons, the former British Trusteeship territory with a population of 750,000, voted in a UN-supervised plebiscite to join Nigeria rather than the Francophone Cameroon Republic. In 1963 Awolowo got his wish when Nigeria changed its constitution so as to become a republic within the Commonwealth on 1 October.
Awolowo, the leader of the Action Group in the Western Region and often seen as a man in a hurry, got into serious political trouble in 1962 after he fell out with the Premier of the West, Chief Samuel Akintola, who sought a rapprochment with Northerners. There were in any case personality differences between the two men. On 2 November 1962 Chief Awolowo and 18 other members of the Action Group were charged with treasonable felony after the discovery of an ill-conceived plot against the Federal leadership. After an 11-month trial Awolowo was found guilty on 11 September 1963 and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. His appeal against the sentence was dismissed in 1964. In the same trial Chief Anthony Enahoro, the leader of the Action Group in the Mid-West, whose popularity there was as great as Awolowo’s in the West, was also sentenced, in his case to 15 years for treasonable felony, conspiracy and possession of firearms; he fled to Britain where he became the focus of attention in an extradition case. It was a pity that these two most able men should descend to conspiracy when they might have used their talents more constructively. In the event Awolowo spent only three years in prison where he wrote Thoughts on the Nigerian Constitution before he was released by General Gowon who told him, ‘We need you for the wealth of your experience’ to join the Federal Military Government during the civil war.
Part of the root problem in Nigeria was too many people pursuing too few jobs and each (they were known as applicants) looking to those in his own group or tribe to help him. ‘The real trouble is caused by the rivalry of the few large groups, especially the Hausa-Fulani of the North, the Yoruba of the West and the Ibo of the East. Each of these groups has a common origin, a common history, a common language and a common way of life. They are not only nations but big ones.’ This view recurs again and again over these years as both Nigerians and outsiders tried to find a way to bring the three groups into a working partnership rather than maintaining a permanent state of suspicion with one another. The same observer, quoted above, put the problem into the job perspective that counted most with the average Nigerian: ‘If an Ibo were appointed chairman of the railway corporation, it was automatically assumed that every possible stoker, linesman and railway clerk would be Ibo.’9
Nothing illustrated better the inter-tribal suspicions and rivalries than the Nigerian census. Both the census of 1963 and later ones became matters of acute controversy since the size of a regional population determined the number of seats it would be allocated for elections and the proportion of revenues it could claim from the Federal Government. Numbers, in other words, meant power and the regions constantly accused each other of inflating the size of their populations. A first post-independence census was attempted in May 1962, but abandoned after regional disputes in which North and South accused each other of inflating their numbers. On that occasion, after several months of counting, the North claimed a total population of 30 million against 23 million for the South. A new national census was completed on 8 November 1963. According to Clyde Sanger, writing for the Guardian, the census could become the greatest threat to Nigeria’s unity since independence: ‘Proportions are particularly crucial, since a new delimitation of seats in the federal legislature before next year’s elections depends on the population. In the 1959 elections on the basis of the old figures the North was given 174 out of 320 seats.’10 The 1963 census showed Nigeria to have a population of 55,653,821. Compared with the census of 1952–53, the North had increased its numbers by 76.8 per cent, the East by 71.6 per cent, the West (including the Mid-West) by 100 per cent, Lagos by just over 90 per cent. Much unease followed the publication of these results and Dr Michael Okpara, the premier of the Eastern Region, said the figures disclosed ‘inflations of astronomical proportions’. It was doubtful that any census results would be acceptable to all groups. The political significance of these 1963 figures was that the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), then the senior partner in the coalition government of Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, emerged in a very strong position that should make it possible to rule the Republic on its own. The controversy following the census results led to a realignment of the parties. The National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) governments in Eastern Nigeria and the Mid-West rejected the census results. The Northern Region accepted them, as did the Western Region, where the government was a coalition of the NCNC and the United People’s Party whose leader was Chief Akintola, the Western Region premier.
The atmosphere of suspicion created by the census was carried through to the Federal elections at the end of 1964. These were held on 30 December. There were disputes over the conduct of the election, frequent accusations of fraud and subsequent disputes over the results. The NCNC and its allies attempted to boycott the elections; and the Federal Prime Minister, Balewa, fell out with President Azikiwe. Eventually, a compromise was worked out though no one expected this to last. The country had been effectively divided on North-South lines. Of an electorate of 15 million only four million had voted. The NPC won 162 seats to give it a narrow absolute majority; its electoral ally, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), won 36 seats of 57 in the Western Region. A compromise solution of 7 January 1965 saw the creation of a new coalition government with Balewa continuing as Federal Prime Minister and Festus Okotie-Eboh as Finance Minister. A leader in The Times said the situation did not encourage the view that the crisis had been resolved rather than postponed.
In general, though with exceptions, the post-independence government pursued a conservative foreign policy. However, there was intellectual disaffection with the government, which was seen repeatedly to break African ranks and take stands congenial to the West. In November 1960 Nigeria signed a defence agreement with Britain; the Action Group denounced the agreement, accusing the government of being too pro-British. It was a familiar argument at the time and many Nigerians were more radical in their attitude towards the former colonial power than the government was. Little more than a year later, on 21 January 1962, the treaty was abrogated, mainly as a result of Nigerian apprehensions that the pact would inhibit its independence of action, although in real terms Nigeria was simply beginning to cut imperial ties that Britain would have preferred to maintain. As another Africa observer was to write of this short-lived defence pact: ‘What is not revealed, and indeed what the British Government is at some pains to conceal, is that a pet project of the Ministry of Defence has proved – as predicted – to be politically explosive, diplomatically embarrassing and, practically, useless. It may come as some kind of bitter satisfaction to wiser heads in Whitehall – the experts of the Colonial Office who advised against such a military pact at the time – that their predictions have come true, and sooner than they or anyone else expected.’11 On the other hand, Nigeria had taken a radical stand in December 1960 when France exploded its third atomic bomb in the Sahara. Then, alone of
African states, Nigeria broke diplomatic relations with France and said the test had shown ‘an utter disregard for the Africans, and constituted a grave insult to the Government and peoples of this country’.12 Relations with France were not resumed until 1966. Lack of African support for Nigeria’s lone stand against France rankled and undoubtedly influenced the Nigerian decision in 1965 not to break diplomatic relations with Britain over UDI in Rhodesia when the OAU was calling upon its members to do so. Even so, the last political act of the Balewa Government before its overthrow was to organize the special Commonwealth conference to consider UDI that met in Lagos in January 1966.
Following the flawed elections at the end of 1964, a sense of developing crisis was apparent all through 1965. The President, Dr Azikiwe, wrote an article in the US quarterly Foreign Affairs in which he advocated major changes to the Nigerian constitution that included judicial reform, unification of the local government system, enlargement of the scope of the Federal Government’s authority, diversification of the federal system, a change in the patterns of suffrage, including the enfranchisement of women in the North, the reinforcement of the constitution and the granting of specific powers to the president – in other words a virtual rewrite of the constitution. In particular, Dr Azikiwe urged the need to divide Nigeria into more regions. ‘In order to evolve into a near perfect union, the whole of Nigeria should be divided and so demarcated geographically and demographically that no one Region would be in a position to dominate the rest.’13 In response, the Nigerian Citizen, a newspaper sponsored by the Northern Nigerian Government, called for the President’s resignation, and said that if he refused a vote of ‘no confidence’ should be passed in Parliament. As crisis loomed most of the country’s oil, then being extracted at the rate of 200,000b/d, came from the Eastern Region although large new deposits had been discovered in the Mid-West and estimates then suggested oil revenues would reach £100 million by 1967. Writing shortly after the fall of the Balewa government Ali Mazrui would castigate its failures: ‘Nothing had helped the movement for a unitary state in Nigeria more dramatically than the mess in which the previous regime up to 1966 left the federal structure… Perhaps Nigeria is too pluralistic a country to be ruled on any basis other than that of quasi-federalism. But the very fact that there is now a quest for tighter integration was substantially attributable to the errors of the previous regime.’14
THE FIRST COUP 15 JANUARY 1966
By 15 January 1966, when the first coup was mounted, the political class in Nigeria had been deeply discredited. It was associated with corruption, nepotism, tribalism and inefficiency rather than good government so that the military takeover, when it came, was greeted with relief by a disenchanted population. The performance of the Balewa government had proved dismal rather than inspiring though it should not alone be blamed for what occurred: from its inception it had faced the near insurmountable regional demands that always threatened national unity. Several coups had been planned for January 1966 although the one that succeeded in overthrowing the government in the South did not bring its perpetrators to power. Five Ibo majors who sought to remove all the politicians of the leading parties and regions planned the coups. The leading coup-maker of 15 January was Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu who broadcast to the nation that the aim of the coup was ‘to establish a strong, unified and prosperous nation, free from corruption and internal strife’. The North, however, was the only region where the coup went as planned. On the afternoon of 15 January, Nzeogwu broadcast a proclamation ‘in the name of the Supreme Council of the Revolution’ and declared martial law over the ‘Northern Provinces of Nigeria’. He said the constitution was suspended, the regional government and assembly dissolved, the departments to be run by permanent secretaries for the time being. He also said: ‘Our enemies are the political profiteers, swindlers, the men in high and low places that seek bribes and demand 10 per cent, those that seek to keep the country permanently divided so that they can remain in office as Ministers and VIPs of waste, the tribalists, the nepotists, those that make the country look big for nothing before international circles.’
As Commonwealth leaders departed from Lagos, following the special conference to consider UDI in Rhodesia, some actually heard the gunfire that heralded the coup. Junior army officers assassinated the premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, the premier of the Western Region, Chief Akintola, the Federal Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, and the Federal Finance Minister, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh. Federal ministers then asked Maj.-Gen. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, the army commander, to take control of government. The new government he formed suspended the constitution. The young army officers responsible for the coup denied that they had been motivated by ethnic considerations and claimed they had only acted to bring an end to a corrupt regime, but the fact remained that they were virtually all Ibos and those they killed were not, thus greatly exacerbating fears in the North of Ibo dominance.
There was an immediate readiness to let Ironsi attempt to overcome the regional antagonisms that had bedevilled Nigeria since independence. He reassured the North when he chose Maj. Hassan Katsina, the son of a powerful Northern emir, as Northern Military Governor. Ironsi himself was non-political. He had worked his way up through the ranks to become a company sergeant major at 24 and had been appointed Equerry to the Queen on her 1956 visit. In February 1966 the Ironsi government released a statement: ‘It has become apparent to all Nigerians that rigid adherence to “regionalism” was the bane of the last regime and one of the main factors which contributed to its downfall. No doubt the country would welcome a clean break with the deficiencies of the system.’ However, the welcome that had greeted the Ironsi regime did not last long. As a fellow Nigerian soldier and later head of state, Olusegun Obasanjo said: ‘But in addition to his failure to take advantage of the initial favourable reaction to the coup, he did not know what to do with the ringleaders of the coup who had been arrested. He could not decide whether to treat them as heroes of the “revolution” or send them before a court-martial as mutineers and murderers.’15 Ironsi was handicapped by his own intellectual shortcomings.
In early May 1966, the diplomatic correspondent of the Financial Times could write ‘that Nigerians were still delighted with the ending of the Federal Government and the Army’s popularity remained high’. But this was not the same thing as governing. Optimistically, he wrote of the absence of tribal strife.16 At the time there was a kind of phoney peace as Nigerians waited for the next development. This came at the end of May. The overriding question was what kind of political structure should replace the Federal structure that had broken down. Returning to Kaduna from a Supreme Military Council meeting in Lagos, the Northern Governor Hassan Katsina said to reporters in late May: ‘Tell the nation that the egg will be broken on Tuesday.’ He was correct. Ironsi had tried hard in the appointments he made to be impartial and not favour the Ibos but such impartiality displeased the hard-liners on both sides of the divide. He was under pressure from the Yorubas to unify the country and abolish the old regional structure. On 24 May he broadcast to the nation details of a new constitution. The former regions were to be abolished and Nigeria was to be grouped into a number of territorial areas to be called provinces. The country would cease to be a federation and instead become simply the Republic of Nigeria. The public services were to be unified under a single Public Service Commission and civil servants were to function anywhere in Nigeria where they were needed. ‘For Nigeria it amounted to another coup – executed by the stroke of a pen. The country was no longer to be called a federation, simply “the Republic of Nigeria”, ruled by a “national” instead of a “Federal” military government; the regions were abolished and replaced by groups of provinces; the Federal and regional civil services were unified and to be administered from Lagos; political and tribal organizations were dissolved and political activities banned for the next two and a half years.’17 The reaction in the North was violent. Some of th
e changes were only cosmetic, such as the regions being turned into provinces that in any case coincided with the former regions, but the two-and-a-half-year ban on political activity was another matter entirely and raised the question of how long the military proposed to stay in power. It was Decree 34, the unification decree that amalgamated the federal and regional civil services, that was regarded as a major threat to the North since it was seen as the beginning of possible domination of the North by the South: with an ‘end’ of politicians, at least for the time being, civil servants would control both the administration and the distribution of jobs. Ironsi admitted that the change was a drastic one. In a broadcast to the nation, he said: ‘Every civil servant is now called upon to see his function in any part of Nigeria in which he is serving in the context of the whole country. The orientation should now be towards national unity and progress.’18
Between Tuesday 24 May and the following weekend hundreds of Ibos were killed in pogroms in the Northern cities of Kano, Kaduna and Zaria; some of these pogroms were spontaneous, others had been organized by civil servants, ex-politicians, local government officials and businessmen whom the change of regime deprived or threatened to deprive of their jobs. These pogroms were followed by calls for the North to secede and condemnations of Ironsi. He called the four regional governors to a conference in Lagos, which appointed a commission of inquiry into the killings. They backtracked on Decree 34 and announced there would be no change to the regions. Then, believing all had quietened down, a mistake he later regretted, Col. Ojukwu, the Governor of the Eastern Region, broadcast an appeal to Ibos who had fled from the North to return to their homes ‘as the situation is now under control’.