Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the dominant political parties that emerged in Nigeria before independence and played prominent roles in defining the direction of her future political evolution were largely regional parties. For instance, in northern Nigeria, the political landscape was dominated by the Northern People’s Congress (NPC), whose catchphrase “One North, One People,” accurately encapsulates its core agenda.
It was unabashedly a political organisation specifically set up to cater for the concerns of northern region alone, particularly the interests of the domineering feudalist conservative elite, to the extent that it refused to present candidates for elections in the south. Interestingly, NPC leaders were surprised that its gesture of separateness was not reciprocated by political parties in the south.
Consequently, they strongly resisted efforts by parties in southern Nigeria to field candidates in the north, which Balewa saw as appropriate to response to the “invasion” of northern region by southerners, and considered southern politicians campaigning in northern Nigeria an unwelcome challenge to north’s territorial sovereignty. Action Group (AG) was the major party in western Nigeria, whereas the first truly national political party was the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), although it eventually mutated into a regional party called the National Council of Nigerian Citizens dominated by the Igbo.
Given this tripartite regional political configuration, two scenarios were inevitable. One, although the NPC was dominant because of British preferential treatment and the north’s huge land mass compared to the other two regions in the south, none of the parties could govern Nigeria without forming a coalition with at least one other party. Two, because the three main parties were established along ethnic lines (except for NCNC which in its earlier stages was truly nationalistic in outlook) ethnic rivalries and mutual suspicion created a fertile soil for inter-ethnic conflicts.
The first indication that post-independent Nigeria would be problematic was in 1953 when, through Anthony Enahoro, the AG and NCNC tabled a motion in the federal House of Representatives calling for Nigeria’s independence in 1956. But the NPC led by Ahmadu Bello, for whom independence on that date was “an invitation [for the north] to commit suicide,” objected, claiming, correctly, that the north did not have adequate administrative machinery and educated personnel to run a modern democratic government independently of Britain.
That was why, when northerners who were majority in the House diluted Enahoro’s motion by recommending that independence should be attained when it is practicable to do so, they were heckled and jeered at by crowds in Lagos for foot-dragging on the independence issue. Some key members of the northern establishment and a broad section of northerners neither forgot nor forgave the south for that embarrassment.
Most Nigerians do not know that Britain had already made up her mind to hand over power to northerners by October 1, 1960, thereby laying the foundation for caliphate colonialism, despite the huge educational gap between the north and the south, the economic dependence of the former on the latter, and reluctance of prominent northern leaders to key into the quest for self governance.
That was why the British colonial office abruptly brought Sir James Robertson from Sudan as the last expatriate governor-general of Nigeria to conduct the 1959 elections, which he manipulated to favour the NPC. Ordinarily, in the interest of merit, fairness and justice, Sir Robertson and his cohorts ought to have worked hard to ensure that the first set of leaders for indepemdent Nigeria emerged from a free and fair election.
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