Category: Thursday

It increasingly became clear since 1957 when a federal system was adopted that there was a built-in advantage for the northern part of the country which made competition for power in the centre lopsidedly in favour of the much bigger northern Nigeria. In this way, the federation contradicted the long accepted principle of Professor Wheare stating that in a federation, no one single unit should dominate and overwhelm the combined weight of the others. The struggle to undo this structural imbalance dominated the politics of independent Nigeria.

This took the form of breaking the regions particularly the north into smaller units to align the new units with the ethnic and cultural fault lines as much as possible. Chief Obafemi Awolowo as part of his strategy for winning power at the centre championed state creation as a way of allaying the fear of domination of the minority ethnic groups by the majority Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. He favoured creating what was called the Middle Belt region in the north. This Middle Belt was to be an amorphous region incorporating the Kanuri, people of Adamawa, Plateau and Benue provinces thus leaving the mostly Hausa-speaking and the Islamic north as a new region. He also favoured creation of what was called Calabar /Ogoja/Rivers State out of the Eastern region. He sometimes never mentioned the minority area of the Midwest in his own region but the logic was clearly in favour of also splitting the west into core Yoruba west and the minority areas of the Midwest. This then was the outline for future restructuring of Nigeria. How this was to be done was the challenge. This challenge was to be overcome as a result of political crisis first in Western Nigeria in 1962. The Midwest region created in 1964 was a child of the circumstance of internal political division within the ruling Action Group party in the Western Region and external meddlesomeness by the federal coalition government which saw weakening of the west as the only way to remove the troublesome presence of a radical party like the Action Group whose leaders had become desperate in its quest for power. In spite of the incarceration of Chief Awolowo and his supporters for treasonable felony in 1963, the crisis in the western region continued. By 1965, law and order had broken down in the region following a flagrantly rigged election. This led to deployment of troops in the region thus exposing the underbelly of the post-independence government as being unable to function without military support. At the time of insurgency in the west, the military was also deployed in Tiv land where there had been rebellion against the government of northern Nigeria that was trying to force indirect rule on the acephalous Tivs who refused the centralizing orthodoxy of the political elite in the north. It was in this climate of political uncertainty and economic corruption that a group of middle level army officers decided to overthrow the federal government. In carrying out the coup d’état, northern and western Nigerian political and military leaders were killed. Furthermore the loss of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the scion of the Fulani dynasty in Sokoto and Premier of northern Nigeria was badly received in the north. When the head of the military government that emerged in the person of General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi decreed a Unification Decree abolishing the regions on which the carefully negotiated federal system in Nigeria was based, people read ethnic agenda of Ibo domination into his action. Ironsi surrounded himself with those whom he could trust and they naturally happened to be Ibos. The triumphalist posturing of some uneducated Igbo traders in the north did not help matters. It was in this environment that military officers staged a revenge coup d’état which led to the death of Ironsi and genocidal murders of southerners particularly Ibos in the north. The shock and ferocity of what some have described as pogrom against the Ibos led the then governor of the Eastern Region, Colonel Chukwuemeka  Odumegwu-Ojukwu to demand that Nigeria become a confederal state with a very weak centre to coordinate common services like post and telegraph, railways, ports and possibly currency but certainly not police, army, the economy and education. The fear that this was merely postponing dissolution of the federal republic forced the new federal government headed by Colonel Yakubu Gowon to refuse to accede to Ojukwu’s demand. It must however be noted that the northern officers who staged the revenge coup d’état originally wanted the north to secede until it dawned on them or they were persuaded by foreign interest that secession would be economically suicidal. War then became inevitable. It was bitterly fought for almost three years.  Foreign countries manifesting their own interest intervened one way or the other. The Soviet Union sold MIG fighters piloted by Egyptians to the federal government.  The British government, headed by Harold Wilson sold military hardware to Nigeria. France of General Charles de Gaulle was decidedly on the side of Biafra. So were the Portuguese, Zambians, Ivorians and Tanzanians. Some of these countries were driven by the desire to help suffering humanity or in the case of Portugal and France, to reduce the influence of an Anglophone country that was assisting liberation movements in Southern Africa and Portuguese Cape Verde Island and Guinea -Bissau.

In order to mobilize the rest of Nigerians, Chief Awolowo who had been in prison since 1963 was released and made vice chairman of the Federal Executive Council. He ran the war economy and apparently influenced the government to create states in the Eastern Region to weaken it and to satisfy age-long demand for the creation of states for the eastern minority. Thus Rivers and Cross Rivers were created with the Igbos given their own state of East Central State. The north was broken to Kano, North-Central, North-Eastern, Kwara, North-western and Benue-Plateau states while the western part remained as it was with some part of it ceded to Lagos State and the Midwest State remained as it was. Thus there were 12 states in the federation, six in the north and six in the south. States creation no doubt has satisfied pent-up demand for minorities’ aspiration and rapid development. But the question to ask is how many states are too many that they become a burden on national resources because of galloping administrative costs? The stupendous growth of the oil fuelled an oil-dependent economy and so did not permit for rational questions to be asked. Every new military government from Murtala Muhammed in 1976, Ibrahim Babangida 1985, to Sani Abacha 1993, created states just to ingratiate themselves to the people without much thought about viability. We now have a welter of unviable financially distressed 36-state structure including Abuja federal territory making the cost of administration very high in Nigeria. In spite of this multitude of states, people still demanded increasing the number to 52 during the National Conference on the constitution in 2014. It is of course clear that the present structure of Nigeria is not sustainable .

What is to be done?

Some people have suggested merging the present 36 states into six viable states, three in the north and three in the south. Others have advocated going back to the three or four regions before the advent of the military in power in January 1966. I will rather prefer going back to the Yakubu Gowon 12-state structure. To ensure fairness, the principle of fiscal federalism should also be brought into practice whereby each of the 12 states would survive on their own and contribute to fund the centre. This will remove the do or die struggle for the centre. Development activities will be at the state level while federal agencies like aviation, communication, currency, railways and defence and not police would be federally funded.   The army itself will be based on territorial structure and its personnel will be recruited on regional bases to prevent any future military promenade to power. This structure will be cast more or less in stone and would be constitutionally immutable. Democracy will be enshrined into the constitution and every device would be put in place to protect it such as citizen responsibility to defend it in times of danger or attempt to violate the democratic grundnorm on which the country is based. Once the democratic basis of our association is affirmed, we can expect under a competitive federalism to grow our economy and diversify our economy away from dependence on hydrocarbons. Each state will look inward to produce what it can produce based on comparative advantage.

When the British came under the rubric of the Royal Niger Company it was not too difficult for them to knit together the disparate and puny states under them into a viable large geographical area. British penetration of Nigeria came through the coast and the bombardment of Lagos in 1851 and eventual occupation of Lagos in 1861 presaged the eventual take-over of the country in detail sometimes through diplomacy but mostly by force. The exponent of the use of force was Colonel and later Sir Fredrick Lugard. It was not accidental that the British government called on him to consolidate into one, the two British colonial holdings of southern Nigeria with the colony of Lagos and the protectorate of northern Nigeria.

The amalgamation of the two Nigerias. Before the amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914 two separate colonial administrations existed in the Nigerian area. The northern administration was financially strapped because it depended on what was called “Native treasuries” or “Beit -el-Mal” comprising of poll tax and jangali “Cow tax” levied on inhabitants of the various Emirates in the north. It was built on existing traditional tax system that predated the coming of the British . The tax was collected in the name and authority of the emirs and divided into three parts two thirds of which went to the colonial government and the emirate councils kept the remaining one third. What was raised in this way was hardly sufficient for the work of administering the huge area under the British colonial government. Initially imperial subventions came from London but this was not sustainable. In any case the cardinal principle of British imperialism was for the mother country to benefit from its empire.

The colonial administration in the colony of Lagos and southern Nigeria was financially self-sufficient even though the local people paid no taxes. Revenue came from custom duties levied on cheap potato gin known as “trade gin “imported into the country from the Netherlands and Germany. To discourage wide consumption of alcohol, heavy custom duties were placed on it. Because of religious reasons, this “trade gin” was forbidden in northern Nigeria. Huge amount of money was raised in this way in the south. Christian missionaries unsuccessfully campaigned against the importation of any kind of alcohol but the colonial regime obviously liked the money that came through taxation on alcohol. Lugard saw a way out of the dilemma of the impecuniosity of the northern administration and the surplus of its southern neighbour by recommending merger of the two to the home government. This was also in tune with established British tradition of federating contiguous British administered territories whether in Canada, Australia or South Africa. The only difference in the case of Nigeria was that the people were not involved and their opinions were not sought. But in fairness it would have been logistically impossible to do this. There was not a body of knowledgeable men and women who could be consulted apart from the educated gentlemen of Lagos, many of whose political horizons did not extend beyond the Yoruba hinterland.  Sir Fredrick Lugard in any case was averse to dealing with them because of their acerbic criticism of his regime. The emirs, Obas and Chiefs which were the building blocks of Lugardian indirect rule system of administration were naturally only concerned with their immediate domains. The creation of a Nigerian council of colonial officials in which the Emir of Kano and the Alaafin of Oyo sat was a caricature of local representation. Amalgamation therefore came in form of British fiat and it is arguable whether in the long run this has been good for Nigeria. The important thing to note is that the boundaries of the two Nigerias were ill-defined because sometimes the same people straddled the borders. There were also no natural barriers separating the two administrations and the pre-colonial economic relations were obvious to the British to make unification the right thing to do.

Since 1914 Nigeria has tried to translate this administrative measure into political and economic reality. Ironically the British themselves sometimes made the journey difficult. Colonial administrators in the North such as Charles Temple, the lieutenant governor in the north and Richmond Palmer, one of the most influential Residents defended northern administrative interests against their counterparts in the south to such an extent that Sir Hugh Clifford, Lugard’s successor said there was a remote possibility of a civil war breaking out between British administrators in the north and in the south of Nigeria. Some of the northern administrators became so romantically involved with their Fulani emirs that they began to romanticize the Fulani as belonging to the same Caucasian race of the British conquistadors. This was the position of Charles Temple who wanted to preserve the north as the British met it and argued the north should be allowed to develop at its own pace. Perhaps there is nothing wrong in preserving a peoples’ culture but to attempt to freeze a people’s cultural development is unreasonable because culture is dynamic and not static. This policy was also the more inappropriate if the long term aim of the British was to help cement the ties that they themselves were trying to build was to be realized. Unfortunately for Nigeria, the development of separate northern identity was passed from one British colonial governor to the other from 1914 to the very end of British colonial administration of Nigeria in 1960. British aim in Nigeria was the protection of British interest and they methodically went about doing this.

Right from 1914, the western educated elite in Lagos had laid claim to leadership of Nigeria on the basis of their western education acquired through access to British missionary schools. Since the north was closed to missionaries for a long time, the educational chasm between the north and the south began to widen until it became almost unbridgeable. The wave of nationalism sweeping the colonized world of Asia and Africa, first after the First World War, but more after the Second World War had wide ramifications all over the world. Nigeria was also touched by this. Educated Nigerians began to demand participation in government and subsequent claim to national sovereignty became a strident call. Newspapers that had existed in Lagos in particular since the advent of colonial rule led the campaign for home rule. Students of various colleges and in particular the Yaba Higher College began to mobilize nationalist elements in the country. Educated people like Herbert Macaulay and later American educated Nnamdi Azikiwe joined the students to form the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons in 1944 to channel nationalist agitation towards a demand for independence. This new agitation was to sweep away previous leaders like Sir Kitoyi Ajasa, Dr Adeniyi Jones, Earnest Ikoli, and Dr Kofo Abayomi who were more like assimilationists who wanted to be accepted as British citizens rather than Nigerians. The nationalists spoke in the name of all Nigerians. There were pockets of their organization in the municipal areas of Nigeria and in places like Kano, Bauchi, Kaduna and Zaria. Northerners were largely prevailed upon to shun the nationalist movement because they were told it was not in their interest. There was a growing western educated elite in the north mostly graduates of Barewa Government College and teachers college in Bauchi. In most cases these educated northerners were sent to school and paid for by the emirate councils to which they remained largely loyal. In response to southern Nigerian led nationalist movement the jamiyar mutanen arewa (Northern People’s Congress) was formed in 1951. Before this time, there began series of constitutional conferences in Nigeria and in London spanning the years 1947 to 1959 to identify structural, political and economic architectural needed to weld the country together before serious consideration could be given to granting internal autonomy and eventual independence to the regions and eventually to the country.

The emergence of the NPC had its parallel equivalent in the South-west part of Nigeria dominated by the Yoruba people. In 1947, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and like minds had formed a cultural organization called the “Egbe Omo Oduduwa” that is, children of the eponymous ancestor of the Yoruba people. Before this organization, the Igbo, led by Nnamdi Azikiwe had formed the Ibo State Union as a cultural organization to promote and champion the cause of Igbo people. These cultural organizations in the north and south were manifestations of the differences that existed among Nigerian peoples which in spite of amalgamation continue to fester and to grow. The political dimension was the emergence of regional political parties, namely the NPC in the north, and the Action Group in the south-west while the original mass movement of the NCNC became increasingly identified and associated with the interest of the Igbo. With this came a tripartite struggle for power among the regional parties and leaders which every effort at political engineering before and since independence has been trying to resolve.