The Presidency — By Prince Emeka Obasi
Business Hallmark Newspaper, April 19–25, 2010

The much anticipated battle for the soul of Nigeria has finally been joined and for those who are still waiting for the bugle to sound, they may wait in vain. The combatants are already in the field of battle with guns blazing. Actually, keen students of Nigeria’s chequered history can argue that the war has been ongoing for decades. In a sense, they are right.

It started in 1960 or just before. Yea, maybe a few years earlier when the founding fathers of the Nigerian State — Zik, Awo and Ahmadu Bello — squared off against each other for the right to lead what was then and still is, Africa’s most populous State.

In the 1959 Federal elections, the Ahmadu Bello-led Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) won and was trailed by Azikiwe’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) and Awo’s Action Group (AG).

Chief Awolowo had desperately wanted to win the election and form the government. Unfortunately, he could not and even when he made overtures to Zik for a coalition government, the latter declined. Instead, Zik entered an alliance with the NPC which enabled it to form the government. Tafawa Balewa became Prime Minister while Dr. Azikiwe became President.

Awo became leader of the opposition and positioned his Action Group (AG) as the alternative choice and indeed the alternative government. That development laid the foundation for the character of Nigerian politics and informed the dynamics of the quest for power in Nigeria. For those seeking to understand the socio-political development in Nigeria since 1960, that 1959 Federal election and its aftermath, including the alliances, explains everything.

The Northern Peoples Congress adopted a conservative and even insular political character which pitted it against the decidedly progressive world-view of the AG. Interestingly, Azikiwe’s alliance with the NPC signposted the flip-flop tendency which has characterized the Igbo political world-view, that has been, with all due respect, vacuous, nebulous and amorphous.

So, it can be argued that in 1959, Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa stood for a gradualist, conservative approach to national socio-economic and political development. Their basic tendency was to allow each part of the country to develop at its own pace, short of allowing each region its own autonomy and even independence. That much was reflected in the name of the political party — Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), with its self-explaining motto, One North: One People! I will not even bother here to explain how Ahmadu Bello’s Northern irredentism conditioned his world view and informed his politics.

Chief Awolowo, as Premier of the Western Region, had pursued an exhilarating policy of progressive politics and socio-economic and intellectual liberalism, which transformed the region and made it a pace setter in national development. He sought to establish a progressive tendency as a national political ethos, by reaching out across the country to connect with all progressive-minded politicians in different parts of the country. Thus he was the first among the big three to recognize the plight of the minorities in the North, the Midwest and the East, and he leveraged on their discontent.

But in the end, a permissive perception that he was merely an ethnic jingoist and more crucially the alliance of Dr. Azikiwe with Ahmadu Bello and Balewa undercut Awo and ensured that he never won the chance to rule Nigeria, neither in 1960, 1965 nor in 1979 and 1983. Even in 1979, Zik took the NPP into yet another accord with the descendant of Ahmadu Bello, Shehu Shagari, and once again effectively shut out Awo from Federal power.

Zik positioned himself in 1959 as a father figure, nationalist and statesman. He sought for a united Nigeria; big and prosperous, and did not share Ahmadu Bello’s nonchalance to the sanctity of Nigeria’s unity. Tragically, he did not on the other hand share Awo’s progressive world view, or perhaps he was not convinced of Awo’s genuine commitment to his (Zik’s) vision of Nigeria’s unity. So, in the historic face-off between the two contending visions — Ahmadu Bello and Awo — he plumped for Ahmadu Bello.

That action had three consequences. The first one was rather obvious: it ensured that the NPC formed the government, of course with Zik as ceremonial President, thereby keeping the North in the country and ensuring that Zik’s vision of unity was preserved. But then, not only Awo as a person, but his progressive world view was shut out, allowing the dominance of the conservative, even reactionary perspective of the North.

Thirdly, it consigned the Igbo, Zik’s political base, to socio-political wasteland, reducing them to mere fringe players or theatrical props in the epic struggle between two dominant political visions and classes. By aligning with Ahmadu Bello, Zik did not promote an alternative vision, a third way. Rather, he subsumed his nationalism within the former’s parochialism and lost his political identity and more catastrophically, lost the identity of his political base and ethnic nationality, the Igbo.