Politics and Nationalism I - The Founding Generation

Nigerian party politics was invented in Lagos in 1923 and matured in the Western Region in the 1950s, and both phases were led overwhelmingly by Yoruba men. Herbert Macaulay founded the first Nigerian political party; Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ built the first mass party with a delivered programme, ran the Western Region for six years and became the most argued-about Nigerian of the century; Samuel Ládòkè Akíntọ́lá split from him and took the region into the crisis that ended the First Republic; and Adégòkè Adélabú showed that Ìbàdàn's commoner majority was a political force in its own right. This file covers those four. The June 12 crisis and the figures after 1966 are in the two files that follow.

A word on how this corpus treats them. Awólọ́wọ̀ and Akíntọ́lá are still live arguments in Yoruba households sixty years on, and this file names the positions rather than settling them. Where a claim is disputed, it is marked disputed.

Herbert Ọláyínká Badmus Macaulay (1864 to 1946)

Macaulay founded the first political party in Nigerian history and is conventionally called the father of Nigerian nationalism, a title that overstates the reach of his politics and understates the novelty of his method.

He was born in Lagos on 14 November 1864 to the Reverend Thomas Babington Macaulay, founder of the CMS Grammar School, and Abigail Crowther, daughter of Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, the first African Anglican bishop 1. This is the recaptive Sàró elite in one family line: liberated Africans returned from Sierra Leone, mission-educated, English-named, and by the 1890s increasingly hostile to the colonial order their parents had helped build. He attended the CMS Grammar School, worked as a clerk in the Lagos Department of Public Works, and studied civil engineering at Plymouth from 1891 to 1894, returning as one of the first Nigerian professional engineers and taking a post as a colonial land inspector 12.

He left government service and moved into surveying, architecture and then journalism, co-founding the Lagos Daily News 1. Two cases made him. The first was the Apapa land case of 1913, in which he took the claims of dispossessed Lagos landholders against colonial compulsory acquisition to the Privy Council in London and won a substantially increased award, a result that established for the Lagos public that the colonial state could be beaten on its own legal ground. The second was the Ẹlẹ́kò affair. When the colonial government deposed Ẹṣùgbàyí Ẹlẹ́kò, the Ọba of Lagos, in 1925, Macaulay pursued the case until the Privy Council ruled the deposition unlawful and the Ọba was restored in 1931. The point of both campaigns was the same: the authority of Lagos institutions was a legal fact, not a colonial concession.

On 24 June 1923 he founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party, the first Nigerian political party, formed to contest the three elective Lagos seats created by the Clifford constitution of 1922 13. The party won those seats in 1923, 1928 and 1933 1. The franchise was tiny, restricted to adult male residents with an income qualification, and the NNDP was a Lagos machine rather than a national movement, but it established the practices that later parties inherited: a newspaper, a ward organisation, a slate, and a permanent campaign.

Macaulay's later career was overtaken by a younger and more radical generation. In 1944 he co-founded the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons with Nnamdi Azikiwe and became its first president 1. He fell ill on an NCNC tour in Kano and died in Lagos on 7 May 1946, fourteen years before independence 12. He appeared on the one naira note from 1979 to 1991 1.

Ọbáfẹ́mi Ọlátúnjí Awólọ́wọ̀ (1909 to 1987)

Awólọ́wọ̀ is the most consequential Nigerian politician never to lead Nigeria, and the argument about him is not really about his record, which is well documented, but about what his politics meant for the country as a whole.

Origins and formation

He was born on 6 March 1909 at Ìkẹnnẹ́ in Rẹ́mọ, in what is now Ògùn State, to a farmer, and was orphaned young 4. He attended Baptist Boys' High School in Abẹ́òkúta and Wesley College, Ìbàdàn, then worked as a teacher, a shorthand typist, a newspaper reporter, a produce buyer and a transport operator 4. He took a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of London as an external student, went to London to read law, and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple on 19 November 1946 4. The self-made trajectory matters to how he was read: he was not from the Lagos Sàró elite and he never spoke as though he were.

His political apprenticeship was in the Nigerian Youth Movement, where he became Western Provincial Secretary 4. In London in 1945 he founded Ẹgbẹ́ Ọmọ Odùduwà, a Yoruba cultural association intended to bring traditional rulers and the Western-educated together, and in 1947 he published Path to Nigerian Freedom, the first sustained Nigerian argument for a federal constitution 4. The federal argument was his signature and he never abandoned it: that Nigeria's constituent nationalities were real, that a unitary state over them would be unstable, and that a federation of ethnically coherent units was the only durable form.

The Action Group and the Western Region

He founded the Action Group at Ìbàdàn in 1951, built on the Ẹgbẹ́'s networks, and became Leader of Government Business and then, from 1 October 1954 to 1 October 1960, the first Premier of the Western Region 4.

The record of that government is the strongest case for him. Free and compulsory universal primary education was introduced across the Western Region in January 1955, ahead of every other region and of the federal government 4. Enrolment in the region rose from 381,000 in 1952 to 811,432 in 1955. Free health care was provided for children, the first television service in Africa, WNTV Ìbàdàn, went on air in 1959, and the region built Liberty Stadium, the Cocoa House and a substantial rural electrification and road programme 4. The educational lead the Yoruba region still holds in Nigeria is measurably a product of this decade.

The funding deserves to be stated plainly, because admirers usually leave it out. It came from cocoa, taken through a marketing board that bought from farmers at a controlled price below the world price and retained the difference. That is a transfer from rural producers to the regional state, and it was a real burden on the farmers who bore it. The Agbẹkọ̀ya revolt of 1968 to 1969, when farmers across the west rose against produce prices and taxation, is part of the same story.

The 1962 crisis and the treason trial

Awólọ́wọ̀ left the region for federal politics in 1959, becoming Leader of the Opposition in the federal parliament from 12 December 1959 4. The Action Group then split. His deputy Akíntọ́lá, whom he had installed as Premier, moved towards accommodation with the northern-led federal government; Awólọ́wọ̀ moved left, towards democratic socialism. In May 1962 the party's crisis reached the floor of the Western House of Assembly in a brawl, the federal government declared a state of emergency in the region and suspended its government, and a commission of inquiry into the region's development corporation followed.

In November 1962 Awólọ́wọ̀ and others were charged with conspiring to overthrow the federal government by force. On 11 September 1963 he was convicted of treasonable felony and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment 45. He served in Calabar prison and was released and pardoned by the Gowon government in August 1966 4.

The trial is disputed and the dispute is real. The prosecution produced evidence of arms purchases and of training abroad by a group associated with the party's youth wing. The defence and most later Yoruba opinion held that the charge was a political instrument used to remove the most effective opposition leader in the country, that the proceedings were irregular, and that the sentence was disproportionate. Both positions can be held on the public record; this corpus does not adjudicate between them.

Later career and the argument about him

Released in 1966, he was appointed Federal Commissioner for Finance and Vice-Chairman of the Federal Executive Council under Yakubu Gowon from 1967 to 1971, through the civil war 4. He financed the war without significant external borrowing and is credited with naming the naira 4. Two decisions from that period remain contested. The first was the currency change of 1968, which rendered Biafran holdings of the old Nigerian pound worthless. The second was the post-war ex gratia payment of twenty pounds to Biafran account holders regardless of prior balance. Awólọ́wọ̀ defended both as measures against a rebel war economy; critics, including many Igbo commentators, describe them as deliberate impoverishment. He also defended the blockade of Biafra in terms he did not soften, saying that starvation was a legitimate weapon of war. That statement is on the record and is central to how he is remembered outside the west.

He founded the Unity Party of Nigeria in 1978 and contested the presidency in 1979 and 1983, losing both to Shehu Shagari 4. The 1979 result turned on the interpretation of the requirement to win a quarter of the votes in two-thirds of the nineteen states, a dispute the Supreme Court resolved in Shagari's favour on reasoning it declared should not be treated as precedent.

He died at Ìkẹnnẹ́ on 9 May 1987 4. His published works include Path to Nigerian Freedom (1947), Awo: The Autobiography of Chief Obafemi Awolowo (1960), Thoughts on Nigerian Constitution (1966), The People's Republic (1968) and The Strategy and Tactics of the People's Republic of Nigeria (1970).

The lasting argument has three parts. Whether his federalism was a principled constitutional theory or an ethnic strategy given constitutional dress. Whether the Western Region's achievements justify the extractive fiscal method that paid for them. And whether his conduct of federal finance during the civil war was legitimate wartime policy or ethnic punishment. There is a fourth question that the first three usually obscure: he is the only Nigerian politician of his generation whose promises can be checked against schools that were actually built, and that is why the argument has lasted.

Samuel Ládòkè Akíntọ́lá (1910 to 1966)

Akíntọ́lá is the counter-case to Awólọ́wọ̀ inside Yoruba politics, and in most Yoruba accounts he is the villain of the First Republic. The judgement is not universal and the reasoning behind his position deserves to be stated.

He was born on 10 July 1910 at Ògbómọ̀ṣọ́ 6. He trained as a teacher, worked as a clerk and then as a journalist, editing the Daily Service, studied law in England and was called to the bar, returning in 1949 6. He was among the founders of the Action Group, served as the party's deputy leader, was Leader of the Opposition in the federal House of Representatives during the 1950s and held federal ministerial posts including Minister of Health and Minister of Communications and Aviation 6. He held the traditional title of Aare Ọ̀nà Kakanfò XIII, the Yoruba generalissimo title 6.

When Awólọ́wọ̀ moved to the federal parliament in 1959, Akíntọ́lá became Premier of the Western Region. The break came over strategy. Akíntọ́lá's position was that the Western Region could not develop while permanently in opposition at the centre, that the north would hold federal power for the foreseeable future, and that the west should join the federal coalition and take a share of it. Awólọ́wọ̀'s position was that opposition on a national programme was the only way to change the terms of the federation, and that a party which joined the northern coalition would be absorbed by it. The dispute was over political strategy before it was over anything else, and it is a genuine strategic disagreement rather than simple treachery, whatever its consequences turned out to be.

The party removed Akíntọ́lá as deputy leader in 1962 and the Regional Governor dismissed him as Premier. The Assembly session called to confirm his removal collapsed into a fight, the federal government declared a state of emergency on 29 May 1962, and after the emergency Akíntọ́lá was restored as Premier 6. He formed the United People's Party and then the Nigerian National Democratic Party, which allied with the northern NPC.

The regional election of October 1965 broke the region. The result declared for Akíntọ́lá's NNDP was rejected as fraudulent by the opposition and by most observers 6. What followed is remembered as Wétìé, from the Yoruba rendering of "wet him", the practice of dousing political opponents in petrol and setting them alight. The region became ungovernable through late 1965 and into January 1966. Akíntọ́lá was killed at his Ìbàdàn residence on 15 January 1966 in the first military coup 6. The coup's collapse and the counter-coup of July 1966 led directly to the pogroms against Igbo in the north and to the civil war.

Adégòkè Adélabú (1915 to 1958)

Adélabú matters because he is the one major Yoruba politician of the era who was not from the professional class and did not build his base on it.

He was born at Ìbàdàn on 3 September 1915 7. He was educated at Government College Ìbàdàn and at Yaba Higher College, worked as a produce inspector and a cooperative officer, and entered politics through the Ìbàdàn Peoples Party, which won regional assembly seats in 1951 7. He then took the Ìbàdàn organisation into the NCNC and became secretary of the party's Western Working Committee, making Ìbàdàn the one place in the Western Region where the Action Group could not win comfortably 7.

His base was the Ìbàdàn commoner majority against the resident Ìjẹ̀bú and Ẹ̀gbá trading and professional class and against the chiefly establishment, a class and city politics rather than an ethnic one. He served as Federal Minister of Natural Resources and Social Services from 1955 to 1956 and as leader of the opposition in the Western Regional Assembly 7. He published Africa in Ebullition in 1952, a manifesto of radical nationalism and socialism written in his own idiosyncratic and highly ornamented English 7.

The nickname Pẹnkẹlẹmẹ́sì is the best-known thing about him. He described a political situation as a "peculiar mess", and his Yoruba-speaking audience took the unfamiliar English phrase into Yoruba phonology as pẹnkẹlẹmẹ́sì, where it stuck to him and then entered the language as a general word for a confused uproar 7. The transformation is a small case study in how Yoruba absorbs English.

He died on 25 March 1958 in a road accident while returning from Lagos 7. His death set off days of rioting in Ìbàdàn in which his supporters attacked Action Group members and property and a number of people were killed, an indication of how directly personal his following was.