Ghosts of Empire (49 page)

The 1950s had witnessed an intensification of the mutual suspicions and jealousies which characterized the relations between Nigeria's three regions. The original Richards constitution had given way to three more constitutions which all tried to address the same problem. Would Nigeria be a federation of independent regions, or would it be centrally administered under a strong unitary government?

Independence finally came on 1 October 1960. The new federal Prime Minister, responsible for the central government, was another northerner called Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, but everyone believed him to be a creature of the Sardauna, who had earlier told an American journalist that he would leave the job of being Nigeria's prime minister to ‘one of my lieutenants'.
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There had been elections in 1959 in which none of the three tribally based parties had secured an overall majority, but in which each had won handsome majorities in its home region. The Northern Region was the most populous of the three regions, with about 50 per cent of the country's population, so it was not surprising when the Northern People's Congress captured 134 out of 312 seats in the 1959 pre-independence parliament, all of which were in the north. In the east, the Igbos had won eighty-nine seats, while the Yoruba Action Group in the west won seventy-three.
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The next five years were ‘characterized by political crises' as each of the three main parties fought for ‘supremacy over the federal government'. That there were three regions, each with its own ethnically based party, was wildly destabilizing and the perfect recipe for ‘ethnic combat'.
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The
independence constitution had left the north strong. In this region, the Sardauna of Sokoto remained regional prime minister, and, so people said, the most powerful man in the country.

In the immediate period after independence, the Northern Party formed an alliance with the Igbos and allowed the Yorubas in effect to be an official opposition party. All parties were ‘locked in a ferocious competition for a larger share from the national treasury': ‘Tribalism became the ideology of politics.'
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As population would influence the allocation of seats, censuses became keenly contested, the figures were disputed and sometimes the actual findings were repressed. The 1962 census took place in a climate of political tension and mounting confusion. In 1952, before the final constitution had been settled on, people had been under-counted in the census taken that year, because it was believed that the census was an instrument by which the colonial government would collect more taxes. In 1962, after independence, the census was now believed to affect political representation and so figures increased dramatically in many regions. The 1962 census was said to have cost £1.5 million, but the figures were never published. The Sardauna of Sokoto was reputedly upset by the findings when he saw that the unofficial figures showed that, while the north's population had gone up 30 per cent from 16.8 million in 1952 to 22.5 million, some of the eastern areas claimed increases of 200 per cent. The western returns also gave an increase of 70 per cent.
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The implications of all this were clear: it was rumoured that the north no longer contained half the population and so could easily be dominated by a combination of the other two regions. When shown the results of the 1962 census, the Sardauna was said to have ‘torn up the figures in disgust' and to have ordered Tafawa Balewa, the federal Prime Minister, ‘to try again'.
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Balewa did try again. Another census was conducted in November 1963, in which the Northern Region managed to ‘find' another 7 million people more than the previous year and now, with a population of 29.8 million, there was no question of the north not having more than half of Nigeria's population of 55 million. Needless to say Dr Michael Okpara, Prime Minister of the Eastern Region, the Igbo-dominated area, rejected the census on the grounds that the ‘Northern figures were fraudulent'.
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Satisfied with the new figures, the Sardauna allowed the federal Prime
Minister to publish them, which he did without consulting the other regional premiers. Elections took place at the end of 1964 in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion and disillusionment. It was clear that the only issue at stake was whether the north would dominate Nigeria, or whether the two regions in the south could muster enough seats to counterbalance the northern bloc.

Outside purely electoral politics, there were other ethnic tensions. There was the problem of immigrants in the north, people who had come in search of work from the west and, in particular, from the east. The northern elites clearly resented these newcomers and managed to keep the immigrants in so-called strangers' communities, where, because of the difference of religion, schooling was segregated and two different societies existed side by side. As early as 1912, the British socialist E. D. Morel had observed that the ‘Southern Nigerian system is turning out every year hundreds of Europeanized Africans', but the ‘Northern Nigerian system aims at the establishment of an educational system based upon a totally different ideal'.
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Fifty years of colonial rule had failed to bridge this gap. As ethnic tensions flared, the position of southerners in the north became more precarious. It was not possible to become a northerner by simply settling in the north, since an individual had to be born into a northern tribe to be considered a true northerner. Southerners were being systematically eliminated from the regional civil service in the north, ‘and even Englishmen and other foreigners were preferred to them'.
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After the elections at the end of 1964, the easterners openly threatened secession and there was anarchy in the Western Region, while in the north the Sardauna was still trying to keep out southern influences in order to consolidate his power. It was obvious by 1964 that the Federation of Nigeria was falling apart. The mood of chaos deepened during 1965, as southerners became increasingly frustrated at being passed over in the civil service by northerners who, they believed, were less qualified than themselves. There were rumours of insurrection, even of a coup by disgruntled eastern officers in the army.

At the very beginning of 1966, the Sardauna of Sokoto planned to visit Saudi Arabia, where he hoped to spend a little more than a week, between
3 and 11 January, to pay his respects to the leaders of the Islamic faith. He had gone to Sokoto at the end of 1965 to say goodbye. Like a scene from a tragic play, there had been some grim forebodings and death threats, but the Sardauna's mood was composed and contemplative. He was in a fatalistic mood as he and his entourage of about twenty returned to Kano on the 11th after the successful visit to Mecca. The Sardauna went straight to Kaduna, the northern capital, where he was visited by Samuel Akintola, a distinguished Yoruba chief, who now served as the premier of the Western Region. Akintola had heard rumours of a coup, and was visiting his friend the Sardauna to discuss possible reactions to this new and alarming threat. On Friday 14 January the two regional premiers met at the Sardauna's house. Between 2.30 and 5.30 p.m., the two men discussed the plots and rumours they had heard. Akintola pointed out that he knew people in the army and that there were plans, now well advanced, to overthrow the federal government. Akintola, according to one source, argued with the Sardauna, saying, ‘If the Prime Minister does not intervene with troops, we are all going to die.'

Chief Akintola left Kaduna to return to Ibadan, the capital of the Western Region, at 6 p.m. on the Friday evening. ‘I will go back to Ibadan and face my death,' he declared. Once Akintola had gone, the Sardauna held a security meeting, then went out to play fives with some friends. Meanwhile the usual crowd of people came to the Sardauna's house between 8 and 10 p.m.–hangers-on, clients of the great feudal lord, who would petition for favours and money almost on a daily basis. Between 1.30 and 2 a.m. on the morning of Saturday the 15 th, shots were heard outside the Sardauna's palace.
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A twenty-nine-year-old Sandhurst-trained major, Patrick Nzeogwu, led his body of troops to the door of the palace and threw a hand grenade through the front gate as his men shot the gate itself from its hinges. The Sardauna was counting his prayer beads with his three wives. The Major, an Igbo by ethnic origin, educated in the north, had been holding night manoeuvres with his troops for six successive weeks. The city had become so used to the sound of gunfire during these manoeuvres that the police did not bother to investigate on the actual night of the rebellion. The men marched into the palace and dragged the Sardauna outside, propped him against a wall and shot him.

Similar scenes were enacted in Ibadan, the western capital, where Chief Akintola was shot and his house burned down. In the exclusive lagoon-front district of Lagos, a handful of men marched to the homes of the federal Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who was known to be a puppet of the Sardauna, and the Finance Minister Festus Okotie-Eboh, an Igbo man, known throughout Nigeria as the king of ‘dash', a word which was used in West Africa at the time for bribery. Balewa was summoned from his prayers and submitted with dignity. He emerged, with his hands held aloft, ready for handcuffs. The corrupt Finance Minister behaved with less decorum. Producing a thick wad of bills, he tried to buy off the soldiers and then, still in his pyjamas, he ran outside, screaming, ‘Don't kill me! Don't kill me!' Two soldiers knocked him down and jumped on him. His body was found three days later in a ditch thirty miles from Lagos. Near by lay the corpse of Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The army officers who had co-ordinated the successful coup were young men, largely educated at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. The organization they showed prompted one resident Englishman to remark, ‘Sandhurst training certainly leaves its mark.'
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The coup solved very little. Initially, it was welcomed, even in parts of the north, where the Sardauna had made too many enemies for his assassination to be widely mourned. The death of Tafawa Balewa, a well-respected figure, disturbed the north more deeply. In the south, by contrast, the coup was greeted with scenes of wild rejoicing.
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There was an initial calm, although there remained the fear that the north would react in some violent way, waging, some feared, a ‘Moslem holy war of reprisal'.
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The young majors were open about who they regarded as the enemy; they were opposed, in the words of one contemporary Igbo writer, to the prevailing system, especially the ‘hegemony which the Northern Region wielded at the behest of British neo-colonialism'. The northerners and the British were the particular culprits whose wickedness was frequently invoked to justify the coup.
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There was calm for the first few months after the coup, but this was largely deceptive as events moved swiftly after the new President, General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, abolished the federation in May 1966 and proclaimed Nigeria to be a unitary state. He also announced that the
regional civil services would be unified. From that point, Igbo immigrants in the north began to be victimized. The abolition of the federal constitution prompted calls for the north to secede. Crowds in Northern Nigeria began to shout ‘Araba! Araba!' (Let us part). Almost inevitably, at the end of July, a group of northern army officers led a counter-coup. They killed General Ironsi, the man the majors had installed as president, and they also killed scores of eastern military officers. The motives of the northern officers in launching the counter-coup were simple: they wanted to reverse the unitary decree which had abolished the federation, and they wished to reassert northern dominance of the country. The time was ripe for yet more armed conflict. During the second half of 1966, hundreds of Igbo immigrants were slaughtered in a tide of violence which swept Northern Nigeria. The figures have been exaggerated over the years, and the ‘massacres' formed part of the myth of the Igbo resistance, with some accounts claiming that between 80,000 and 100,000 Igbo immigrants were killed.
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The truth was that not more than 7,000 had been killed between May and October. Sir David Hunt, the British High Commissioner at the time, writing in 1970, remembered that Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, the Igbo leader, had spoken to the Italian Ambassador in January 1967, only three months after the massacre, and had confided in him that the number killed was ‘as high as 7,000'. Hunt added that ‘whatever the figures, the massacre was a very great crime indeed'.
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By early 1967, it was clear that Nigeria, which had been independent for just over six years, was now in serious crisis. The new president whom the northern officers had installed was a thirty-one-year-old army officer, Yakubu Gowon, the son of a Methodist minister. A small, dapper man, Gowon hailed from the north, but from a minority tribe, so he had never really been part of the Muslim feudal aristocracy. The easterners remained unimpressed by his attempts to conciliate them. He immediately rescinded Decree no. 34 which had abolished the federation. In 1966 the government had installed a military governor in each of the regions of Nigeria and now there were four regions, as a new division named the Mid-Western Region had been created in July 1963. This new region did not change the overall weight of influence, since the Northern Region continued to have ‘more land and a few more people than the
rest of the country combined'.
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The military governors of each region were in a powerful position and their personalities began to shape the future of the country. As the British High Commissioner told the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs, in Africa ‘personalities generally speaking are more important than policies'.
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This statement may have been true, but its veracity extended far beyond Africa, right through the entire British Empire.