The hopes that Nigeria would serve as a stronghold of democracy in Africa came to an abrupt halt on 15 January 1966. In a series of coordinated actions, a group of young army officers wiped out the country’s top political leaders. In Lagos they seized the federal prime minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, took him outside the city and executed him by the side of the road, dumping his body in a ditch; in Kaduna, after a gun battle, they shot dead the premier of the Northern Region, the Sardauna of Sokoto. In Ibadan they killed the premier of the Western Region, Chief Ladoke Akintola. The wealthy federal finance minister, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, a notoriously corrupt politician, was dragged screaming from his house, flung into a car ‘like an old army sack’, and driven away to be murdered. Several senior army officers were also killed.
The aim of the young majors, as they came to be known, was not just to stage a military coup but to launch a revolution, overthrowing the entire old order. In a broadcast from Kaduna on 15 January, Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu, a Sandhurst-trained officer who had led the assault on the Sardauna’s residence, spoke in the name of the Supreme Council of the Revolution:
Our enemies are the political profiteers, the swindlers, the men in the high and low places that seek bribes and demand 10 per cent; those that seek to keep the country divided permanently so that they can remain in office as ministers and VIPs of waste; the tribalists, the nepotists; those that made the country look big-for-nothing before the international circles; those that have corrupted our society and put the Nigerian political calendar back by their words and deeds.
Declaring martial law over the Northern provinces of Nigeria, Nzeogwu issued a number of proclamations which decreed the death penalty for offences such as embezzlement, bribery, corruption, rape, homosexuality and ‘obstruction of the revolution’.
But then the revolution faltered and finally failed. In Lagos the army commander, Major-General John Aguiyi-Ironsi, alerted by the wife of one of his murdered officers, rallied loyal troops and began to consolidate his control over the army. Instead of revolution came army rule and the slide into civil war.
Despite the promising start made at independence in 1960, Nigeria was soon engulfed by an intense struggle between the country’s three main political parties for supremacy over the federal government. Control of the federal government determined the allocation of development resources. Because each region produced its own political party dominated by the major ethnic group based there, the struggle turned into ethnic combat. Politicians on all sides whipped up ethnic fear, suspicion and jealousy for their own advantage and to entrench themselves in power. Tribalism became the ideology of politics.
By nature, Nigerian politics tended to be mercenary and violent. Political debate was routinely conducted in acrimonious and abusive language; and ethnic loyalties were constantly exploited. The tactics employed were often those of the rough-house variety. But the reckless manner in which Nigerian politicians fought for control during six years of civilian rule was to lead ultimately to a tragedy of monumental proportions.
The independence constitution had left the North with powerful advantages. With three-quarters of the land area and more than half the population, it dominated the federation from the outset and intended to do so indefinitely. In the 1959 federal election the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), controlled by Hausa-Fulani, captured 134 of 312 seats, all of them in the North, making it the largest single party. The East’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), controlled by Igbo, together with its coalition partners, gained eighty-nine seats; and the West’s Action Group, controlled by Yoruba, gained seventy-three seats, spread across three regions. Initially, the NPC was content to run the federal government jointly with the East’s NCNC in a coalition that avoided the danger of either the North or the two regions of the South holding power exclusively. The West’s Action Group, for its part, settled for the role of parliamentary opposition in the federal parliament in the traditional British manner. At a regional level, each party controlled its own regional government: the NPC ran the North; the NCNC ran the East; and the Action Group ran the West. All were locked in ferocious competition for a larger share from the national treasury. Minority groups were embroiled in the struggle, taking sides against the major parties in their home region, in the hope of advancing the cause of setting up their own states.
In the quest for state resources, political allegiances began to shift. A faction within the Action Group led by Chief Akintola, the premier of the Western Region and the party’s deputy leader, argued that the party would do better to join the federal government as a partner rather than stand in opposition against it – a move favoured by the federal prime minister, Balewa. Many in Akintola’s faction believed that Yorubas were losing their pre-eminent position in business and the administration to Igbos as a result of the NCNC’s decision to participate in the ruling coalition. The opposing faction led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the party’s leader, argued that there was more to be gained by keeping the Action Group out of the coalition and working to win the next federal election with the aid of a programme of radical reform. In the split that occurred in the Action Group in 1962, Awolowo initially gained the upper hand. The party’s executive voted unanimously to remove Akintola as premier and to replace him with a loyal supporter.
But when parliament assembled to approve the change, Akintola’s supporters sought to disrupt the proceedings. One member flung a chair across the floor of the chamber; another seized the Mace, attempted to club the Speaker, but missed and smashed the Mace on a table; more chairs and tables were thrown; a minister, hit on the head, was rushed to hospital. Finally, police had to use teargas to clear the chamber. For several hours the Speaker suspended the sitting, hoping for an orderly resumption of business, but when members reassembled, similar scenes of uproar occurred and again the police intervened using teargas.
This crisis in parliament provided a golden opportunity for Balewa and the NPC-led federal government to strike a blow at the opposition and to consolidate their chances of holding on to federal power. Summoning the federal parliament, Balewa imposed a state of emergency in the Western Region, suspended the constitution and appointed a sole administrator to run the region on behalf of the federal government until the end of the year. Thereafter the federal government continued to harass and discredit the Action Group at every opportunity. Leading party members were served with restriction orders and the party’s business empire was put under official investigation, revealing to the public a vast web of corruption and malpractice. Awolowo and his senior colleagues were tried, convicted and imprisoned for treasonable felony. Akintola was installed as prime minister of a coalition government, leaving the Action Group in opposition in its former stronghold, shorn of most of its leaders and cut off from the spoils of power with which to maintain its support. As a final blow to its fortunes, the Western Region was carved up into two parts through the creation of a new Mid-West Region.
Yet the federal coalition itself was under stress and strain. The NCNC had joined the coalition in the hope of gaining better access to federal funds and benefits. The pay-offs came with the appointment of party stalwarts to plum positions as ministers, ambassadors and board members of federal institutions and parastatal organisations; Easterners also gained enhanced entry and promotion in the public service and armed forces. But the NCNC was disgruntled by the outcome of a six-year development plan which concentrated the bulk of federal capital expenditure in the North and by the accelerated appointments of less-qualified Northerners in place of Southerners to top political, military and civil service positions. There was also alarm at the increasingly assertive strategy that Balewa and his Northern colleagues were using to maintain their hold over federal affairs, as demonstrated by their handling of the Action Group opposition.
Northerners, for their part, were driven by an ingrained fear of a strong Southern coalition threatening their identity and independent way of life. The principal aim of the North’s powerful and autocratic premier, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, was to prevent the influence of skilled and enterprising Southerners from spreading to the North. Above all, Northerners were determined to keep a tight grip over the federal system.
The main hope of Southern politicians wanting a change in the power structure lay with the population census of 1962. Since the North had been able to dominate federal politics by virtue of its huge population, a change in the population balance in favour of the South meant the end of Northern hegemony. Population figures affected not only the distribution of electoral representation in the federal parliament but also the level of revenue allocation among the regions and the allocation of such vital matters as employment quotas. The census itself thus held the potential to determine Nigeria’s future.
When the figures were collected, the unofficial results suggested evidence of inflated returns, especially from some Eastern districts. While the North’s population was shown to have risen since 1952 from 16.8 million to 22.5 million, an increase amounting to 30 per cent, returns from some Eastern areas claimed increases as high as 200 per cent and rising by an average of 71 per cent; Western returns also gave an increase of more than 70 per cent.
The results were not made public, but what they meant was that the North no longer contained more than half the population in the federation and had thereby lost its position of supremacy in the federal structure. The reaction of Northern leaders was swift. They held a new count and discovered 8.5 million more people in their region, raising the increase since the last census from 30 per cent to 84 per cent and regaining their claim to more than half the population of the federation. In political terms, the census result was a clear victory for the North. All the latent antagonism between the North and the South, never far below the surface, now broke out in a wave of bitter wrangling which wrecked the government coalition.
The 1964 election thus became a battleground between two rival camps. One camp, consisting of the Northern People’s Congress, along with its allies like Akintola, was determined to maintain Northern hegemony. The other camp, consisting of a new alliance between the East’s NCNC and the West’s Action Group, was equally determined to break the Northern stranglehold.
No proper election was held. In scores of constituencies in the North, opposition candidates were prevented from filing nomination papers, enabling NPC candidates to be returned unopposed. In retaliation, the NCNC government in the Eastern Region cancelled the election there altogether. The outcome was a clear majority for the NPC alliance. But when Balewa called on President Nnamdi Azikiwe, a former NCNC leader, to reappoint him prime minister, Azikiwe refused to do so, precipitating a constitutional crisis. Both men vied for the support of the military. In the end a compromise was reached under which Balewa agreed to form another coalition government and the NCNC, preferring to remain close to power and the sources of patronage rather than join the Action Group in opposition, resumed its role as junior partner.
Once again, the South had suffered a severe defeat at the hands of the North, leaving many Southerners in a sullen and frustrated mood. But this time a new factor had been added: by appealing for military support in their struggle for power, Balewa and Azikiwe had given the military cause to consider playing a political role.
Another round of political warfare began in 1965 with elections for the Western Region. The campaign was fought by all sides with brutal tenacity; bribes, threats, assaults, arson, hired thugs and even murder became the daily routine. Akintola’s new party – the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) – used its position in government ruthlessly to rig the election at every stage – blocking the nomination of opposition candidates, kidnapping election officials, destroying ballot papers and falsifying results.
The official result was a victory for the NNDP and hence the Northern strategy. But once Akintola had been reinstated as prime minister, the Western Region descended into lawless turmoil in which hundreds died. Spreading from rural areas to the towns, a wave of riots, arson and political murders gradually engulfed the whole area, bringing administration to the verge of collapse.
Despite the breakdown in law and order, the federal government stood by impassively. Whereas Balewa had been only too ready to intervene in the Western Region in 1962 after a few unruly incidents in parliament in order to crush the Action Group government, when faced with a real emergency, he refused to take any measures that would harm his corrupt ally, Akintola. Both men were high on the death list drawn up by the young majors.
The army coup of 1966, sweeping away a corrupt and discredited regime, was greeted in the South by scenes of wild rejoicing. The coup leaders were acclaimed heroes; the politicians slunk out of sight. Almost overnight, the violence that had gripped the Western Region for three months subsided. By strange coincidence, a prophetic novel by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe was published in the same week as the coup, telling the story of the rise and fall of an African politician ending with an army takeover. ‘Overnight everyone began to shake their heads at the excess of the last regime, at its graft, oppression and corrupt government,’ wrote Achebe in A Man of the People. ‘Newspapers, the radio, hitherto silent intellectuals and civil servants – everybody said what a terrible lot; and it became public opinion the next morning.’
In the North, however, the reaction was more subdued. The former ruling party, the Northern People’s Congress, stated that it regarded the transfer of authority ‘as the only solution to the many recent problems facing this country’. Traditional emirs came forward with pledges of loyalty to General Ironsi’s regime. Radical Northerners and minority groups welcomed the downfall of the Sardauna’s autocratic rule. The Northern press too supported the call for an end to corruption and nepotism in Nigeria.
But as Northerners began to weigh up the full impact of what had happened, doubts and suspicions about the motives behind the coup began to take hold. All but one of the seven principal conspirators, it was noted, were Igbo officers. In the murders that they had organised, the North had lost its two most important leaders – Balewa and the Sardauna – and four of its most senior soldiers, and the West had lost one senior politician – Akintola – and two high-ranking officers. Yet no Igbo politicians had been killed. The Eastern Region had been left untouched by the conspirators; the Igbo premier there had been spared; so had the Igbo premier of the Mid-West Region. Only one Igbo officer, the quartermaster-general, had died and that had happened unintentionally, so it was said, because he had refused to hand over the keys of an armoury. Moreover, the result of the coup had been to wrest power away from the North and to install a military government led by an Igbo.
Brooding over their suspicions of these events, Northerners became ever more convinced that the majors’ coup, far from being an attempt to rid Nigeria of a corrupt regime, as they claimed, was in fact part of an Igbo conspiracy to gain control. The evidence which undermined this theory was of no account. As more myths and sinister rumours embellished the notion in the following months, fear and resentment in the North steadily mounted. The wound inflicted on Nigeria by the 1966 coup turned septic.
Thrust unexpectedly into a position of power, General Ironsi, a bluff 41-year-old officer who had risen from the ranks of the old colonial army, was ill-equipped to deal with such dangerous undercurrents. Lacking any kind of political instinct himself, accustomed only to military procedures, he set out to clear up the mess left by the politicians by ruling through administrative decree, imposing his own decisions. But one decision after another, taken in what he thought was in the interests of efficiency or sensible administration, served only to alienate Northerners further.
Some of the issues facing Ironsi were unavoidably contentious. Army promotions were needed to fill gaps left by the January events and, since the majority of senior officers were Igbos, Igbo officers benefited substantially from the new appointments, thus raising fears of a growing Igbo takeover among Northerners, already aggrieved by the loss of popular Northern commanders. Ironsi was also caught up in controversy over the fate of January conspirators who were being held in detention. Northerners, especially those in the rank and file of the army, demanded their trial for murder and mutiny. Southerners, regarding them as heroes, demanded their release. Ironsi’s answer, pleasing no one, was to prevaricate.
Most fateful of all was Ironsi’s decision to tamper with the federal system. Believing that ‘regionalism’ was the root cause of Nigeria’s problems, Ironsi proclaimed himself in favour of a united Nigeria and appointed commissions to inquire into the ‘unification’ of the regional civil services. Yet for Northerners, control over their own regional civil service was prized as a crucial safeguard against domination by more experienced Southerners. In a united Nigeria, they feared, Northerners would fare badly competing against the Igbo elite for government jobs, and risk losing administrative power.
Without waiting for official reports from his advisory commissions, Ironsi decided arbitrarily to promulgate a new constitution. By Decree no. 34 of 24 May 1966, he abolished the federation, proclaimed Nigeria to be a united state, and announced that the regional civil services were to be unified.
The reaction in the North came swiftly. Civil servants and students staged anti-government demonstrations which soon flared into popular riots against Igbos living in the sabon garis, the strangers’ quarters sited outside the walls of Northern towns. Several hundred Igbos were killed. ‘Araba!’ was the battlecry in the North – ‘Let us part!’
At the end of July a group of Northern officers led a counter-coup, killing Ironsi and scores of Eastern officers and other ranks, demanding that the North should secede. In the tense disputes that followed, the army chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, a 31-year-old Northerner from a minority tribe in the Middle Belt, opposed to the dissolution of the federation, gained the upper hand and took control as supreme commander. He swiftly rescinded Decree no. 34.
But while the Northerners’ coup succeeded in the North, in the West and in Lagos, in the Eastern Region the military governor, Lieutenant Colonel Emeka Ojukwu, refused to accept Gowon’s position as supreme commander. An ambitious and clever man, the son of a wealthy Igbo businessman, with an Oxford degree and training in Britain as an army officer, Ojukwu relished the opportunity to exercise political power independently. The July coup, he declared in a radio broadcast, had effectively divided Nigeria into two parts.
As if in confirmation, another upsurge of violence against Easterners erupted in the North on a far more terrible scale than before, and the purpose now was not simply to seek vengeance but to drive Easterners out of the North altogether. All the envy, resentment and mistrust that Northerners felt for the minority Eastern communities living in their midst burst out with explosive force into a pogrom that the authorities made no attempt to stop. Disgruntled local politicians, civil servants and students were active in getting the mobs on to the streets; Northern troops joined in the rampage. In the savage onslaught that followed, thousands of Easterners died or were maimed, and as others sought to escape the violence, a massive exodus to the East began. Abandoning all their possessions, hundreds of thousands of Easterners – traders, artisans, clerks and labourers – fled from their Northern homes. From other parts of Nigeria, too, as the climate of fear spread among Igbos living there, thousands more, including civil servants and academics, joined the exodus. By the end of the year, more than a million refugees, many of them wounded, exhausted and in a state of shock, sought safety in the East.
The fearful sequence of events that had occurred – the downfall of Ironsi, the return of Northerners to power, the murder of Eastern officers, the months of persecution and massacres in the North – produced a mood of anger and outrage that drove the East towards secession. To Ojukwu and his inner circle of Igbo advisers, many of them displaced civil servants and academics, secession seemed an eminently viable proposition. Nigeria’s rich oilfields, located in the East, were beginning to produce valuable revenues. Starting production in 1958, the oilfields by 1967 provided Nigeria with nearly 20 per cent of federal revenue; within a few years the figure was expected to double. On that basis alone, the East would prosper far more on its own than by remaining in the federation. To both sides, control of Nigeria’s oilfields became a key goal, propelling the country towards civil war.
To rally the population behind the idea of secession, Ojukwu constantly played on fears of genocide. The Eastern government’s radio and press were used to keep popular opinion at fever pitch with an unrelenting stream of propaganda, stressing details of the atrocities that had taken place and warning of far worse to come. As the stories were told and re-told, the numbers that had died in the North, once reliably estimated at about 7,000, were raised higher and higher, until in later years, Ojukwu asserted that 50,000 had perished. The effect of the propaganda, as well as binding Igbos together against the Northern threat, was to produce a momentum of its own towards secession.
Yet the East was far from being a united, homogenous area. Minority groups such as the Ibibio, Ijaw and Efik, which altogether represented more than one-third of the East’s 13 million population, resented the dominant role played by the Igbo; in the past they had campaigned for their own separate states. In the aftermath of the 1966 massacres in the North, when these minorities had been caught up in the waves of vengeance directed mainly at the Igbo, sympathy and support for the Eastern cause was strong, but this sense of solidarity soon dissipated. Among the minorities there was far less enthusiasm for the idea of an Eastern secession that would leave them permanently under Igbo control. Yet without the minority areas, secession was unviable, for it was in the minority areas that the rich oilfields, the seaports and half of the land lay.
Ojukwu and the Igbo nationalists around him, however, were intent on secession whatever the cost, spurning all attempts at compromise, rejecting concessions offered by Gowon and the federal government that would have given the Eastern Region virtual autonomy. Stage by stage, they severed the East’s links with the federation. Decrees were issued ordering the expulsion of all non-Easterners from the region; appropriating all federal revenues collected in the East; and giving the East control of federal corporations, railways, schools and courts. At the same time, they built up a full administration, trained their own armed forces, purchased arms supplies and acquired local sources of revenue. On 30 May 1967, a year after the first riots against Igbos in the North, Ojukwu proclaimed the independence of the new state of Biafra amid high jubilation.
The Nigerian civil war lasted for two and a half years and cost nearly a million lives. From an early stage, the prospect of Biafra surviving seemed doubtful. Within a few months it had become an encircled, embattled enclave, bombed and strafed daily by Nigeria’s air force and surrounded by an army of 100,000 men that grew ever larger. After a year of fighting it had lost half of its territory, all its major towns and airports, its seaports, its oil refinery and most of its oilfields. Crowded with refugees, short of food, running out of ammunition, its funds all but finished, it seemed on the point of defeat.
Yet despite the appalling suffering of Biafra’s population, Ojukwu doggedly held fast to the notion of independence, spurning all attempts at international mediation. A master of manipulation, fond of giving marathon speeches and interviews, he portrayed Biafra as a nation threatened by genocide. For the Igbos, gripped by memories of the Northern pogroms of 1966, the fear of genocide was real enough. In the Igbo heartland, an area of no more than 5,000 square miles, they fought on with extraordinary tenacity and determination, often poorly armed and equipped, believing that otherwise they would be wiped out. Such raw courage on its own, however, was not sufficient to keep Biafra alive, and what prevented imminent defeat, and therefore prolonged the war, was the growing intervention of foreign sympathisers.
The plight of Biafra during 1968 produced waves of alarm and anxiety in Europe and North America. The spectacle of mass starvation among refugees packed into fetid camps as the federal noose slowly tightened galvanised Western opinion. In Europe no other foreign issue aroused such deep emotion. Biafra became a symbol of suffering and persecution, deserving of foreign support. Its very determination to fight on under such terrible conditions lent credence to the fear of genocide.
What followed was the largest privately organised relief operation in history. Church agencies took the lead. At its height in 1969, more than forty relief flights every night made the hazardous journey to a makeshift runway in Biafra, using the same route as gun-runners. The relief operation was vital to Biafra not only in providing food and medical supplies, but also as an invaluable source of revenue for Ojukwu. By insisting that all the expenses of the relief operation incurred inside Biafra were paid for in foreign currency in Europe, Ojukwu was able to raise funds to buy military supplies and other foreign purchases and thereby stave off collapse. To this extent, the relief effort was used to finance the war and keep Biafra in the field. Ojukwu refused to agree to a supervised land corridor for relief supplies, for this would have rendered unnecessary the airlift that had come to dramatise to the outside world Biafra’s plight, as well as deprive the arms flights of their cover.
Foreign governments also assisted in keeping Biafra alive, meddling in the war for their own advantage. Portugal, the last colonial power in Africa, provided vital staging posts for air traffic in Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé, an island 300 miles south-east of the Nigerian coastline. France, partly in response to public opinion, partly because it suited French interests in Africa, authorised the clandestine supply of French arms for Biafra. Thus, for month after month, Biafra endured a terrible war of attrition.
Through it all, Ojukwu remained intransigent, determined to hold on even when there was nothing more to be gained but suffering, presenting himself as a heroic symbol of resistance. Two days before Biafra formally surrendered in January 1970, its people exhausted, demoralised and desperate for peace, Ojukwu fled into exile in Côte d’Ivoire, declaring that ‘whilst I live, Biafra lives’.
The aftermath of the war was notable for its compassion and mercy, and the way in which the memories of Biafra soon faded. Quoting Lincoln, Gowon talked of ‘binding up the nation’s wounds’. No medals for services in the war were awarded; no reparations were demanded. Biafran rebels were reabsorbed in the federal army; civil servants returned to their posts in the federal government; and property belonging to Igbos in the North and other federal areas was restored to them. In this war, said Gowon, there had been ‘no victors and no vanquished’.