The Anatomy of a Nation: Nigeria from Independence to the Present
PART 1
BY EUGENE NANVEN
At midnight on October 1, 1960, the Union Jack came down in Lagos and the green-white-green flag went up. The ceremony was conducted with the confidence of a country that had already begun imagining itself as a nation. Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria’s first prime minister, spoke of a new responsibility. Princess Alexandra, representing Queen Elizabeth II, handed over the constitutional instruments of independence. Crowds gathered in Lagos. Across the country, people listened to the radio.
The moment carried the clean symbolism that independence ceremonies are supposed to carry. A colonial state had become a sovereign state. The future appeared to have acquired a date.
But the Nigeria that became independent that morning was older than the flag and younger than the history of the peoples living within its borders. The political territory called Nigeria had been assembled through conquest, treaties, administrative decisions and economic calculations over several decades. In 1914, the British colonial administration amalgamated the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria with the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. The decision created a single colonial administration over territories whose political economies, social structures and relationships with British rule differed considerably. The constitutional reforms that followed gradually introduced representation, elections and legislative institutions, but these were developed within a system designed principally for colonial administration rather than democratic nation-building.
That inheritance mattered. The British did not create the peoples of Nigeria, their languages, kingdoms, emirates, trading networks or religious traditions. They did, however, create a political framework in which those different societies were increasingly administered as one territorial unit. Colonial rule also developed unevenly. The north was governed through a system that relied heavily on existing emirate structures, while the south experienced different forms of indirect and direct administration, missionary education and commercial development. The result was a country entering independence with enormous internal diversity and with political competition already entangled with questions of region, education, religion, access to the state and the distribution of economic opportunity. The first Nigerian politicians therefore inherited an unusual problem. They had to construct a nation while simultaneously inheriting a state whose boundaries and administrative architecture had preceded the nation itself.
This is one of the facts that becomes clearer when Nigeria’s later history is read backwards.
At independence, the country was still overwhelmingly agricultural. Cocoa was important in the west. Groundnuts dominated parts of the north. Palm products were central to the eastern economy. Agriculture generated the bulk of export earnings, and the regional economies had distinct productive identities. In the 1960s, agricultural exports provided the bulk of Nigeria’s foreign-exchange earnings.
There was no reason, in 1960, to assume that petroleum would eventually become the country’s economic bloodstream.
Politics initially reflected the same regional structure. The Northern People’s Congress was deeply rooted in the north. The Action Group was strongest in the west. The National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons, led by Nnamdi Azikiwe, had its strongest base in the east. These were national parties in a constitutional sense, but their political strength was inseparable from the regional societies in which they had developed.
The federal arrangement was an attempt to make this diversity governable. Federalism allowed different regions considerable political space while preserving a common national government. Yet federalism also turned the regions into powerful political arenas. Control of a region meant control over its administration, its resources and its political machinery.
The first great test came before the republic had properly settled into itself. The Western Region crisis of the early 1960s exposed the fragility of political competition when institutions were unable to contain disputes among political elites. The 1962 crisis in the Action Group, the declaration of a state of emergency in the Western Region, the disputed census of 1962-63 and the bitter federal and regional elections of 1964 and 1965 deepened distrust. The 1965 Western Region election, remembered for the violence that followed it, became one of the immediate circumstances surrounding the first military coup.
The young republic had discovered something that would return repeatedly in its history: institutions do not become strong simply because a constitution gives them names.
On January 15, 1966, a group of young army officers overthrew the First Republic. Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa was killed. Northern Premier Ahmadu Bello was killed. Western Premier Samuel Ladoke Akintola was killed. Prime Minister Balewa’s body was later found along a roadside.
The coup did not unfold according to the simple ethnic explanation that later became attached to it. But its geography, the identities of many of its victims and the decision by Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi to assume power made regional suspicion unavoidable. Ironsi abolished the federal system of government and moved towards a unitary administrative structure. For many northerners, this appeared to confirm fears that the federation itself was under threat.
The counter-coup of July 1966 made the rupture deeper. Ironsi was killed. Yakubu Gowon emerged as head of state. Violence against easterners living in parts of the north followed, and hundreds of thousands of people fled towards the east. The country that had been trying to learn federal politics was now learning the geography of fear.
Federalism, which had initially been a constitutional arrangement for managing diversity, was becoming a question of survival. The military responded partly through another institutional transformation. In 1967, Gowon created twelve states out of the existing regions. The move weakened the old regional structures and strengthened the federal centre. Then the Eastern Region’s military governor, Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, declared the independent Republic of Biafra. War followed.
The Nigerian Civil War lasted from 1967 to 1970. It was fought over secession, political authority, territory and the future shape of the federation, but its consequences were human before they were constitutional. Millions were affected by displacement, hunger, blockade and violence.
When Biafra surrendered in January 1970, Nigeria remained one country. But it was no longer the federation that had existed in 1960.
The war had demonstrated the destructive possibilities of a weak centre and the dangers of a federation in which competing political communities could imagine the federal state as an instrument of another group. It also strengthened the federal government’s authority. State creation continued after the war. Lagos, once the colonial capital, remained the political centre until the eventual transfer of the federal capital to Abuja in 1991.
The country had acquired a stronger centre. Then oil made that centre enormously richer.
Petroleum had been discovered in commercial quantities at Oloibiri in the Niger Delta in 1956. By the early 1970s, Nigeria’s economic structure was changing rapidly. Agriculture had been the backbone of the young nation, but oil had become the country’s dominant export. Following the oil-price increases of the 1970s, petroleum revenues transformed public finance and public expenditure.
This was the moment when the Nigerian state’s anatomy changed. A government that had once depended heavily on taxing and facilitating productive regional economies increasingly received revenue from petroleum extracted from the ground and sold abroad. The connection between the citizen’s economic activity and the state’s revenue weakened. The state could collect enormous sums without building the same fiscal relationship with citizens that taxation creates.
That distinction would become one of the most consequential facts in modern Nigerian history. Oil also altered the political meaning of federal power. If control of the federal government meant access to an expanding pool of petroleum revenue, political office became increasingly valuable. State creation brought federal resources closer to more communities, but it also made the allocation of public money a central political question. The federal government became the main distributor of resources that originated in a relatively concentrated petroleum economy.
Agriculture, meanwhile, began to lose the political importance it once possessed. The country did not suddenly stop farming, and millions of Nigerians continued to depend on agriculture. But agriculture no longer occupied the same place in the national economic imagination. The government could spend oil revenue on roads, universities, industries, public buildings and ambitious infrastructure projects without first having to generate equivalent export earnings from farms.
The oil boom created the possibility of development while weakening some of the economic disciplines that had previously constrained government.
The contradiction would take years to reveal itself.
Military government had already become normalised. Gowon was overthrown in 1975 by General Murtala Mohammed. Mohammed was assassinated in February 1976, and Olusegun Obasanjo succeeded him. The military government undertook major reforms, including the creation of additional states and the movement towards a new federal capital at Abuja. It also began the transition that produced the Second Republic.
In 1979, Obasanjo handed power to an elected civilian government led by Shehu Shagari. It was an important moment because the military voluntarily transferred power to civilians after thirteen years of military dominance.
The new republic operated under the 1979 Constitution, which replaced the parliamentary Westminster system inherited at independence with a presidential system. The constitutional design sought to prevent some of the regional concentration that had contributed to the First Republic’s instability. Political parties were expected to demonstrate broad national support, and the principle of federal character was incorporated into the political system.
Yet the new political order inherited the oil economy and the habits of centralised resource distribution. The 1983 election returned Shagari and the National Party of Nigeria to power, amid allegations of widespread electoral malpractice and violence. The economy had meanwhile become increasingly vulnerable to falling oil prices and the consequences of the spending patterns of the boom years. On December 31, 1983, the military returned.
Major General Muhammadu Buhari became head of state.
The cycle had completed itself with disturbing speed. Civilian politics had failed to establish sufficient confidence in its institutions, the military had again presented itself as the corrective force, and the constitution was once more suspended.
Buhari’s government introduced severe measures against corruption and indiscipline, but the broader economic crisis proved difficult to resolve. In August 1985, Ibrahim Babangida removed Buhari.
Babangida inherited a country facing a problem that was partly Nigerian and partly global. Oil prices had fallen. Foreign exchange was scarce. Imported goods had become difficult to obtain. Debt pressures were rising. The state had expanded during the oil years, while the productive economy had not expanded enough to support it.
In 1986, Babangida’s government adopted the Structural Adjustment Programme. The policy was intended to change the structure of the economy by reducing distortions, liberalising foreign exchange, encouraging market forces and diversifying production away from oil. The naira was sharply devalued. The programme was controversial from the beginning. It was also unavoidable in the sense that Nigeria’s previous economic model had become increasingly difficult to sustain.
For ordinary Nigerians, however, structural adjustment was experienced less as an economic theory than as a change in the price of living. The currency lost value. Imports became more expensive. Public services came under pressure. Businesses adapted or disappeared. A generation learned the vocabulary of devaluation, foreign exchange, austerity and scarcity.
Nigeria’s economic problem was now revealing another layer of its political problem. When a government is the principal distributor of scarce foreign exchange, import licences, contracts and public employment, economic adjustment becomes political. The ability to allocate resources becomes an instrument of influence.
This was where corruption began to look less like the misconduct of isolated officials and more like a system of incentives.
Corruption had existed long before oil. Colonial Nigeria had experienced bribery, patronage and abuses of office. The First Republic had its own scandals. Military rule did not invent corruption.
But the scale and structure of the state changed the possibilities.
A government controlling petroleum revenue, licences, contracts, foreign exchange, public enterprises and increasingly large bureaucracies possessed opportunities for rent-seeking on a scale that earlier administrations had not known. Political patronage could operate through appointments. Public contracts could become instruments of political finance. State-owned enterprises could become channels of influence. Procurement could become opaque. The distinction between public resources and political resources could gradually become blurred.
The most important transformation was therefore cultural and institutional: the expectation that political power could provide access to material resources began to become embedded in the machinery of government.
Babangida’s years also produced another paradox. He opened political space at certain moments, encouraged economic reform and presided over a long transition programme, but he also prolonged military rule and repeatedly altered the rules under which political competition was supposed to occur.
Then came June 12. The presidential election of June 12, 1993 was widely regarded as having been won by Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, although the military government never formally declared a final result. Babangida annulled the election. The decision provoked protests, strikes and a profound crisis of legitimacy.
June 12 became something larger than an election, as my father will tell me in his own words. “Nigerians had to accept the reality that their decisions can be turned down.” He said, as I sat with him under a tree in Plateau state, many years ago.
The significance of that memory would become apparent years later. Nigerians who had seen an election interrupted learned that a vote could be cast and still not determine who governed. The constitutional process could exist and still be overridden by force.
Babangida eventually stepped “aside” in August 1993 and handed power to Ernest Shonekan’s Interim National Government. It lasted only a few months. In November, General Sani Abacha took power.
Abacha’s government dismantled the remaining democratic structures. Legislatures were dissolved. Political activity was restricted. Political opponents, activists and journalists were detained. The government continued to announce transition programmes while retaining military control.
The Abacha years also revealed the international consequences of domestic governance. Nigeria faced diplomatic isolation, sanctions and deep criticism over human rights abuses. The execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists in 1995 became one of the defining symbols of the era, particularly because the case connected environmental damage, oil extraction, minority rights and state power. Saro-Wiwa could be seen in a video clip I saw recently, in a state of shock, saying that he don’t think Abacha will order his execution, while at the same time, trying to accept the reality as it unfolds.
Once again, oil had returned to the story. The resource that had made the federal government powerful was also at the centre of one of the most serious conflicts over the meaning of citizenship and environmental justice in the country.
Abacha died in June 1998. For the first time in years, the possibility of a genuine political opening appeared within reach.
General Abdulsalami Abubakar became head of state and accelerated the transition to civilian rule. Nigeria was about to enter another phase of its history, carrying with it the memories of everything that had come before.
Where and where then has all these events affected Nigeria, and how do we think the future will unfold at this time of fragile political Armageddon? Well, we will find out in the next part.
*_This is an excerpt from my unpublished book: The Paradigm of the sky_*
