In comparative terms, British rule was relatively benign, especially in colonies like Nigeria where there were very few European settlers. Nonetheless, colonization had a devastating impact. As Basil Davidson put it:

In 1914, the British created a single Nigerian colony but administered the north and south separately until the very end of the colonial period. Thus began the often-conscious practice of deepening already existing divisions, thereby magnifying the problems the Africans would have to deal with once the country gained its independence. As one expert put it, "if the British 'created' Nigeria, British colonial policy largely contributed to its remaining a mere geographical expression."

In the north, the British relied purely on a system of indirect rule in which local leaders continued to rule subject only to the limited supervision of imperial agents. In the south, they established a traditional colonial regime in which expatriate British officials governed directly. Even there, the British had to depend on local officials since they were so vastly outnumbered. As late as 1938, there were no more than 1,500 officials in the entire colony.

Frederick Lugard, the first British governor of northern Nigeria (1900-1906), referred to Britain’s dual mandate. On the one hand, colonial administrators had to serve the interests of imperialists and industrialists back home. On the other hand, it had to promote member of the "native races" who sought to improve the lot of their paper (of course in ways determined by the British). The British chose to rule through traditional local leaders, the "kings" and "emirs" of the north and "chiefs" of the south. But, it cannot be stressed strongly enough that these local leaders had no role in determining colonial policies which were set by White men in London and Lagos.

There was one area in which colonial rule did benefit Nigerian society: education. Missionaries opened schools that were supported by grants from the British government. By 1926, there were about 4,000 elementary and 18 secondary schools. Of those, however, only 125 of the elementary and none of the secondary schools were in the north. In 1934, the first "higher college" that concentrated on technical education was opened, followed by the first university in Ibadan in 1948.

Only a tiny fraction of the colonial population was able to attend even the elementary school. Nonetheless, the establishment of this rudimentary system had two important and unintended side effects that were to hasten independence. First, it created a new elite separate from the traditional authorities through which the British governed that was not easily integrated into the colonial system and would form the core of the independence movement from the 1930s on. Second, the growing number of literate Nigerians made it possible for an active and often critical press to beg in operations.

Economically, the picture was decidedly less positive. The British assumed from the beginning that their colonies should pay for themselves and, preferably, turn a profit while aiding industrial development at home. That was not possible given the economic systems the British inherited with the consolidation of colonial rule.

Therefore, as in India, they embarked on a series of changes that "undeveloped" Nigeria. Up to that point, Nigeria produced enough food to feed all its people and had the systems of trade and manufacturing noted earlier.

The British destroyed almost all of that. They introduced cash crops that could be exported to help cover the costs of administering the colony. Each region specialized in a different crop: palm oil in the east, cocoa in the west, and peanuts in the north. As a result, Nigerian agriculture no longer produced enough for local consumption, and the colony had to begin importing food.

Moreover, the Royal Niger Company (a later incarnation of the UAC) gained a monopoly on trade and the profit that accrued from it. Similarly, the British seized the tin mines in the Jos plateau that Nigerians had worked for more than two thousand years. The British expanded the mining operations, introduced modem machinery, and by 1928 were employing upwards of forty thousand Nigerians, but now the Nigerians were poorly paid wage laborers, not independent producers. Taxes and customs duties were imposed on essential goods imported into the colony. All in all, economic policy made Nigeria dependent on Great Britain and at the same time heightened the regional differences within the colony. As that happened, people began to consciously define themselves as Yoruba or Igbo or northerners. That sense of self-identification was especially pronounced in the north where development lagged, and more and more people began to fear becoming permanently poorer than southerners who were also more fully integrated into British culture and administration.

However powerful and destructive it may have been, British colonialism began sowing the seeds of its own destruction virtually from the beginning in Nigeria as it had in India. The British may have conquered Nigeria, but they could not forever keep it in submission. If nothing else, there were too few British and too many Nigerians. The British had to educate Nigerians to help run and develop the colony. Moreover, the British "civilizing" mission also led Nigerians not just to read and write and pray to the Christian God, but to learn about what the British claimed to be their values, including freedom and democracy.

From the moment the unified colony of Nigeria was created, a series of events began to unfold that would lead to independence barely a half century later. The beginning of the drive toward independence came with World War I. The British imposed heavy taxes on Nigeria and the other African colonies to help pay for the war. Meanwhile, arguing for the need for enhanced national security, the British took over even more intra- and inter-colonial trade. Some Nigerians were drafted into the British army, where they served primarily as porters. The war and the reasons the British gave for fighting it do not seem to have had much of an impact on the Africans who served in the army. On the other hand, they did help a few members of that still tiny educated elite see the contradiction between the colonizers' democratic principles and the harsh realities of their colonial rule.

Meanwhile, the vastly outnumbered British found they had to rely on Africans more and more in governing Nigeria and the other colonies. No Africans occupied decision-making positions during the interwar period. Nonetheless, the colonial rulers had to employ thousands of interpreters, clerks, and police officers as well as the chiefs through whom they continued the system of indirect rule.

Colonial rule in the 1920s had an unintended side effect that did neither the British nor the Nigerians much good in the long run. As noted earlier, the British were convinced that Africans lived in tribes, though they did not have much of an idea of what that actually meant. That belief led the British to assume that indirect rule should be conducted through tribal chiefs and that if a chief did not exist, they had to create one. Gradually, the practice worked. Chiefs began to consolidate their authority over communities that came to see themselves as unified peoples.

In short, the British created tribes where no such organization had existed before. With time, those "tribes" became vehicles Africans could use to see and defend their common interests and, ultimately, the parties that were to steer the path to independence and the tumultuous politics afterward.

At about this time, organized opposition to colonial rule appeared. In the first years of this century, the American Marcus Garvey and others created a pan-African movement designed to bring Africans and African-Americans together to work for common goals, including independence for the colonies.

During the 1920s, pan-Africanism gradually gave way to the idea of a West African and then to Nigerian nationalism. In 1920, a National Congress of Black West Africa (NCBWA) was formed by representatives from all the British colonies in the region. As with the other early African efforts, the NCBWA advocated limited reforms, such as the granting of some African representation in the colonial assemblies the British had created by then.

At about the same time, the first purely Nigerian political movement emerged with the formation in 1923 of the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) by Herbert Macauley who is frequently seen as the founder of Nigerian nationalism. For the most part, the NNDP and groups like it gained their support from the still small group of Western-educated lawyers, teachers, and merchants in Lagos. Only a few members of the old elite like Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna (ruler) of Sokoto, supported these movements and thus helped build bridges between the new and traditional elites.

Although Macauley took a more militant line than earlier opponents of colonial rule, his movement stopped short of demanding independence. During the l930s, support for Nigerian political groups began to broaden with the formation; of the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM). Now critics went beyond attacking specific colonial policies such as the educational system that did not provide Africans with the skills that would allow them to become leaders and began talking about a united and free Nigeria.

In 1938, the NYM issued the Nigerian Youth Charter, which was the first actual call for self-government. The document was largely ignored by the British, but it heartened and radicalized the educated elite, which now included a growing number of young people living outside of Lagos. Perceptive British observers also realized that irreversible changes were occurring in Nigeria and many other colonies that, sooner or late, would lead to the end of colonial rule.

Dissatisfaction grew inside and outside of the intellectual community during the depression. Colonial rule had made Nigerians dependent on international markets. That was tolerable as long as the outside world was buying Nigerian goods and paying reasonable prices for them. But after the October 1929 stock market crash in New York, the demand for colonial goods evaporated. That left not just the Nigerian elite but Nigerian workers more painfully aware of what colonial rule was costing them. Nigerians paid nearly £1 million in taxes in 1934, but only about a quarter of the colonial budget went to social service, educational, or economic programs that would benefit Africans.

World War II probably made independence inevitable. This time, around one hundred thousand Nigerians served in the British army, and many actually saw combat. Unlike their parents in 1914, these soldiers returned with a heightened desire for independence, democracy, and equality--all those things they supposedly had been fighting for. Now, support for change was not just limited to the elite but included the thousands who had been mobilized for the war effort and the people they had come into contact with.

For Africans, the war that had begun as an antifascist struggle became an anti-colonial and antiracist one as well. In 1944, Macauley and Nnamdi Azikiwe formed the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, which went beyond the small steps advocated by earlier nationalists and demanded independence. As Azikiwe, who was to become the most important nationalist leader during the next generation, put it:

Meanwhile, the social changes that had begun before the war continued at an ever more rapid rate. The closure of many European and American markets disrupted rural life and deepened poverty in the countryside. The cities filled with un- and underemployed (and thus dissatisfied) young men. Hundreds of new schools and a few universities were opened. Trade unions were formed. All were to become fertile ground for nationalist organizers over the next fifteen years.

Events outside Nigeria also hastened independence. In 1941, American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, which declared that the Allies would "respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live" after the war. Shortly after the war, Britain granted a number of Asian colonies, including India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) their independence. Those landmark events gave the Nigerians new hope for their own future, especially because, as they pointed out, Nigeria was more developed than Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, the war had weakened the British, leading many Labour and Conservative politicians to the conclusion that they could no longer afford their colonies. In 1946, the new Labour government committed itself to reforms that would give colonies like Nigeria "responsible government" without either defining what that meant or establishing any kind of timetable for the transition to self-government.

Not surprisingly, Nigerians joined their fellow Africans in stepping up the pressure for independence sooner rather than later. Everywhere on the continent, nationalist movements garnered new support and radicalized their demands. Nigerian leaders raised the stakes, demanding meaningful political power immediately and independence in the not very distant future. More importantly, they recognized that if they were to build a mass movement that would truly extend beyond the urban intellectuals, it would be easiest to do so on a regional level. Regional parties were formed to replace the prewar organizations that had been so narrowly based in the Lagos intellectual community.

Nationalist leaders also were able to gather support among the "old boy" networks of school graduates and the ethnic associations that emerged, among the new urban migrants. Nationalist politicians also used a relatively free press to publicize their attacks on British policy and to claim that they would do a better job if they were in charge of an independent Nigeria.

The British did not reject the claims out of hand. As early as 1946, They began the transition to self-government by promulgating the Richards Constitution (named for the colonial governor at the time), which established elected assemblies in each region. In 1948, the British started the "Nigerianisation" of the civil service. By the early 1950s, the British had decided that they were going to have to speed up the move toward self-government if not grant out-right independence. That led to the MacPherson (1951) and the Lyttleton (1954) constitutions, which allowed each region to elect its own representatives and draft its own laws, gave them equal representation in the national legislature, and established a federal structure in which the national government shared power with the three regions.

Elsewhere, the drive toward freedom was moving even faster, culminating in Ghana's (formerly the Gold Coast) becoming sub-Saharan Africa's first independent state in 1957. Throughout this period, representatives of the British government and all the major Nigerian forces met in a series of sessions in London and Lagos to determine further constitutional reforms. By that time, electoral politics had already taken on a decidedly regional and ethnic tone. The National Council of Nigeria and the CameroonS (NCNC) organized the Igbo (including some in the neighboring French colony of the Cameroons). The relatively conservative Northern People's Congress (NPC) and more radical Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) did well among the Hausa-Fulani. The Action Group (AG) dominated among the Yoruba, while the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC) organized the various groups in the center of the country.

A federal election under universal suffrage (except for women in the Muslim north) was held in 1959. Final provisions for independence called for representation to be determined on the basis of population, which was to work to the benefit of the north that then accounted for about 40 percent to 45 percent of the total population. Nigeria finally became an independent country within the British Commonwealth of Nations on 1 October 1960 with Tafawa Balewa as prime minister and Azikiwe as governor-general and then the symbolic president when Nigeria declared itself a republic three years later.

But as independence neared, two of the problems that' were to plague the new country emerged as well. In their desire to spur development and to gain the support of voters, politicians began dispensing "favors," the first step toward the corruption that no Nigerian regime has yet been able to overcome. Similarly, the evolution of shared power within a largely regional framework intensified the already serious ethnic differences. Until it became clear that Nigeria was going to become independent, its people had a common enemy--the British. But once independence seemed assured, their internal differences began taking center stage, and by the time independence formally came, Nigeria was united in name only.

Since Independence

In most other chapters in Comparative Politics, the section on the evolution of the state ended with events that occurred years ago. That is not true of countries that are in the midst of major transitions from one regime to another. That is, of course, the case with Nigeria whose newest republic was created only a few weeks before these lines were written.

Like most former British colonies, Nigeria started out with a standard parliamentary system. It had a bicameral Parliament, but only the lower chamber, the House of Representatives, was directly elected and had any real power. Executive authority was vested in a cabinet and prime minister drawn from the ranks of the majority party in Parliament. The government remained in office until its five-year term ended as long as it maintained the support or confidence of that majority (see Table 2). There also was a ceremonial but powerless head of state, the governor-general until 1963 and the president thereafter.

The new Nigerian system only differed from classical parliamentary arrangements in one significant way. It was a federal system in which the national government shared power with three (later four) regional ones that roughly coincided with the territories in which the leading ethnic groups lived. These governments, too, were structured along classical parliamentary lines. The creation of a federal system marked the early recognition that this highly diverse country could not be governed exclusively from the center without fanning ethnic tensions that long antedated the arrival of the British in the nineteenth century.

Table 2
Nigerian Regimes Since lndependence

In retrospect, it is easy to see why that type of system did not work. In parliamentary regimes, politics is usually adversarial, pitting an essentially unified majority against an equally united opposition. It "works" in a country like Great Britain because everyone accepts the rules of the game and there are few major ideological differences between government and opposition. The opposition accepts the fact that it is not going to have much influence on the shaping of legislation and that its main role is to criticize the government as vociferously as possible as part of its attempt to turn the tables at the next election.

In Nigeria, those conditions were not met by any stretch of the imagination. Early public opinion polls showed considerable hope for the new regime. Subsequent events, however, showed that whatever legitimacy the regime started with evaporated quickly. And, as that happened, so did the capacity of the state to accomplish much of anything.

Instead, political life turned into a vicious circle. Politicians were convinced that every contest was a zero-sum game in which the likely costs of losing were catastrophic. The government feared losing to the opposition would entail far more than simply spending a few years out of office. The opposition, in turn, resented its powerlessness and grew ever more convinced that the incumbents would do everything possible to stay in control. The one thing they both did well was conduct the passionate debate common to all parliamentary systems. But, in this case, all the debate did was magnify already serious differences and raise the stakes even more.

As we saw above, it was clear that partisan politics was going to have a strong ethnic base. The main parties produced the four main leaders of those years-- Nnamdi Azikiwe (NCNC), Obafemi Awolowo (AG), Aminu Kano (NEPU), and Sir Ahmadu Bello (NPC). Although they all tried to gain support throughout the nation, they had next to no success beyond their own ethnic community (the very confusing material on parties and elections in the first two republics is summarized in Tables 3, 4, and 5). Each scored major victories in its "home" region. The Muslim-based NPC came in way ahead of the other parties but fell nineteen seats short of an absolute majority and therefore had to form a coalition with the Igbo-based NCNC with which it had had a loose alliance during the election campaign. In other words, the first government of the new Nigeria represented some of its groups, but only some of them. From the beginning, democracy was on shaky ground. The only real political competition occurred in national elections. At the regional level, Nigeria was a collection of one-party fiefdoms where leaders bullied their opponents, which only served to heighten ethnic conflict and raise the stakes of national politics.

The new state had a lot of responsibility and a lot of resources to distribute, including the aid money that poured in after independence. Each faction sought to control the government so that it could distribute the lion's share of those resources to itself and its clients. Meanwhile, politicians began making choices about where they were going to operate. The most powerful northern politician, Sir Ahmadu Bello, chose to stay home and serve as premier of the northern region, while his deputy, Alhaji Sir Abubaker Tafawa Balewa, became prime minister of the federal government. Awolowo, the AG's leader, decided to lead the opposition in Lagos, leaving Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola to head the regional government in the west. Azikiwe left the east to become the governor-general and then president.

Only one thing united these politicians: the pursuit of power. Leading politicians became enthralled with the wealth, status, and privileges holding office produced.

To make matters even more complicated, while the north dominated politically, it lagged way behind economically. Traditional Islamic rulers and values remained important, which led to limited educational development (only 2.5 percent of northern children were attending school), the exclusion of women from civil and economic life, and something approaching the rejection of "modern" society. Nonetheless, the south feared and resented the north's political power.

The first crisis occurred in the west. Chief Awolowo had gradually moved to the left politically and, among other things, began criticizing the fancy lifestyles politicians were beginning to lead. In the process he threatened and alienated both the national government and the regional one headed by his colleague and now rival Chief Akintola. Awolowo provoked a confrontation within the AG that culminated in the regional assembly's vote of no confidence in the Akintola government on 25 May. Four days later, the federal government declared a state of emergency in the region. Akintola was returned to office, and Awolowo was arrested on trumped-up treason charges and sentenced to serve ten years in prison. The AG was irrevocably split.

This crisis demonstrated two problems that were to plague the first republics. It has proved all but impossible to limit conflict to a single issue on which politicians could find a compromise. Instead, each incident seemed like all-or-nothing propositions to those involved. Also, the willingness of the federal leadership to employ emergency rule and arrest Awolowo on the flimsiest of both constitutional or legal pretexts suggests that politicians of all stripes never accepted democratic procedures, especially tolerance of one's opponents.

Those same problems burst back onto the political scene shortly thereafter when the government began conducting a new census in 1963. In most countries, the census is not a deeply divisive issue, with controversy normally limited to technical debates about the best way to compensate for certain types of people who are least likely to be counted, like the homeless in the United States. In Nigeria, the census was a major political trauma because the results would determine how many parliamentary seats would be allocated to each region and how government revenues and outside development aid would be distributed. Because the regions had become more politically homogeneous, census results would go a long way toward determining who would control the national government as well.

Each region's leadership doctored the results. Preliminary results showed that the populations of the east and west grew by 72.2 percent and 69.5 percent respectively in the ten years since the last census was conducted. Demographers easily showed that such growth was impossible given the rate at which women can physically bear children. Meanwhile, the north reported a more or less accurate increase of 33.6 percent, which meant it would see some of its political power eroded. Therefore, northern officials mysteriously "found" 8.5 million people who had been left out of the initial census, which "restored" them to the same share of the population they had had before the count began. The government threw out these figures and tried again the next year. The results were no different.

But because the northern-dominated leadership ultimately decided to use the 1964 census "results" in allocating seats for that year's parliamentary elections, the census struggle solidified north v. south antagonisms.

The census debacle led directly to the next crisis over the parliamentary and regional elections of 1964 and 1965. On the surface, the party system seemed to be realigning into two broad coalitions. On the one hand, the losers in the earlier crisis--the NCNC and Awolowo's wing of the old AG--came together with some minor groups to form the slightly left of center United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA). Meanwhile, the NPC allied with Akintola and others in the southern minority who themselves had created a slightly more conservative National Nigerian Democratic Party (NNDP).

In fact, the two were little more than collections of separate, ethnically based organizations, each of which was dominant in its own region. The politicians expressed all kinds of lofty goals during the campaign. In reality, the campaign was marked by fraud, intimidation, and outright violence, which made a mockery of the democratic process.

Even though a candidate only needed the support of two fellow citizens to get on the ballot, 61 seats in the north were uncontested as NPC operatives "convinced" their opponents to withdraw. Violence was so widespread in the west that Premier Michael Okpara called the election "a colossal farce" and declared that it should be postponed. When it became clear that the election would go forward, he called on westerners to boycott it.

The election was delayed in 59 constituencies. Contests in many others were rigged to such a degree that district-by-district results were never published and would not have been believed had they been. In the end, the NPC-led coalition swept to victory, winning 198 of the 253 seats contested in a first round of voting. Although it did poorly in later elections to fill the other 59, it still had an overwhelming majority.

The results confirmed the regionalization of Nigerian politics. The NPC won 162 of 167 seats in the north and none anywhere else. All the NNDP victories were in the west, where it won 36 of 57 seats. The opposition carried every seat in the east, the new mid-western state, and in Lagos. President Azikiwe called on his adversary, Prime Minister Balewa, to form a new government that actually included a slightly more balanced cabinet than his earlier one. Still, attacks on the extravagant salaries and lavish lifestyles of the politicians continued. Many intellectuals started condemning the competitive party system itself, advocating the kind of nonparty or single-party regime that was being tried in much of Africa at the time.

Regional elections in the West proved to be the last straw. It was the one region in which there was some competition, essentially between the Akintola and Awolowo wings of the old AG. The campaign was so violent that the federal government banned all public gatherings and sent half the federal police into the region. When results came in, they showed an overwhelming NNDP (Akintola) victory, even though most experts thought the UPGA (Awolowo) had actually won. Akintola returned to power and turned on his opponents, ordering the assassination of two popular UPGA organizers. The UPGA, in turn, decided that it had no legal way to redress its grievances, and it, too, turned to violence including "wetting" its opponents: drenching them with gasoline and setting them on fire.

On the night of 14 January 1966, Akintola met with Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa in a desperate attempt to try to restore order. By morning, the military had intervened, overthrown the republic, and killed all three of them.