Nigeria And The Threat Of A One-Party State

 By Dan Amor

Aside from the usual historical rendition that Nigeria became a political reality following the fusion of the Northern and Southern protectorates of the River Niger area in the interior coast of West Africa in 1914 by Lord Fredrick Lugard, a British military administrator, Nigeria actually adopted a Federal form of government in 1954. Even though still under colonial rule, party politics thrived in the country. 

*Buhari

The leading parties were: the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) which stood for political democracy in its classical, individualistic form; the Action Group of Nigeria (AG) which stood for federalist democracy; the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), which exemplified the modernization of traditional political authority; and its radical opponent, the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), which espoused egalitarian democracy. As a strictly regional party, the NPC did not threaten the Southern parties in their home regions. Since the Northern Region was said to have contained an absolute majority of the national population, (though a myth of the 1959 population census), the NPC could control the Federal government by monopolizing electoral power in the North. 

Nigeria: July 29, 1966 In Retrospect: 52 Years After

By Dan Amor

"Life is terribly deficient in form.
Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way.
There is a grotesque horror about its comedies.
And its tragedies seem to culminate in farce."

– Oscar Wilde

The January 15, 1966 military coup and the concomitant tragic death, fifty-two years ago, of Major-General Johnson Thomas Ummunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi on July 29, 1966 in the hands of young Majors from Northern Nigeria extraction manifest the historical sense that creates a difference between mere politics and constructive statesmanship in Nigeria's turbulent history.

*Gen Aguiyi-Ironsi 

Aguiyi-Ironsi was a victim of our collective failure to appreciate the fact that, in any given society, personality is not a welter of primitive impulses but an achievement of the conscious will. Nigeria began its seemingly long and tenuous political walk towards self-rule and democracy in 1960. Vividly divided between the predominantly Muslim North and substantially Christian South, there is always a marked ethnic and religious tension in the polity with the Muslim in the North often hinting to their right to federal power.