Last week, we discussed the 1948 Igbo-Yoruba ‘Lagos Press War’ and its consequences for Nigeria’s socio-political landscape. Today, we’ll look at the events of 1951, which some scholars consider the official birth year of ‘ethnic politics’ in Nigeria. That year, the country got a new constitution, known as the Macpherson Constitution, which was historic in providing for the first Nigerian general election. It also vastly increased the powers of the three regional assemblies – western, eastern and northern – thus significantly upping the political stakes for the likes of Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Ahmadu Bello.
Considering his widespread popularity and charismatic appeal, anti-Azikiwe Yoruba elites now faced the realistic possibility of Zik leading the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) party to capture not just the eastern regional assembly but also the western one.
In March 1951, Awo and his mostly Yoruba supporters established the Action Group (AG) party to prevent Zik from winning the western election, and in effect becoming the most powerful political leader in the entire southern Nigeria. Accordingly, the main themes in AG’s campaign messaging that year were opposition to Zik, the idea the west should be for “Westerners”, and the threat of “Ibo domination.”
Awo’s Nigerian Tribune newspaper claimed Zik’s “political and social activities had this Ibo-domination inclination” for years. The paper also urged Zik, who was contesting a seat in the Yoruba-majority city of Lagos, to stay out of western politics since he did not belong to the region “by birth”. An editorial in Tribune stated it was “an insult to all westerners” for Zik, an Igbo, to be contesting in their region. Why could he not go and contest in his eastern “homeland”? Meanwhile, AG campaign posters urged “true born” western Nigerians to vote AG because it stood for “western solidarity”.
Clearly worried that AG’s tactics were proving particularly effective with Yoruba voters, Zik and his NCNC party insisted talk of Igbo-domination was absurd because their party “was founded in Yorubaland by the Yorubas” and “its first president Herbert Macaulay, was a Yoruba man.” NCNC also assured Yoruba voters that all its candidates standing in the Yoruba constituencies were Yorubas.
Thus, in response to AG claiming NCNC candidates couldn’t be trusted because NCNC was an Igbo-dominated party, NCNC argued its candidates in the west could in fact be trusted because they were Yorubas. In effect, Zik’s party’s response to AG’s rhetoric helped further entrench the hegemony of ethnicity in Nigerian political discourse by legitimising the idea of ethnicity as the key organising principle of Nigerian society. This was a classic example of ethnic discourses feeding off themselves.
Furthermore, in an attempt to discredit AG in the non-Yoruba areas of the west, Zik and his West African Pilot newspaper consistently accused Awo and his AG party of being “tribalists”, who sought Yoruba-domination of the western region. However, since he was running for a seat in the Yoruba-majority city of Lagos, Zik had to be savvy about suggestions of Yoruba-domination agendas so as not to offend Yoruba voters. He thus resorted to clever rhetorical insinuations that such plans existed. For instance, addressing a rally at Obalende Square in November 1951, Zik suggested AG’s support for Nigeria’s tri-regional structure resulted from its “tribalist” agenda.
He then argued thus: “In the West region, we have the following linguistic groups: Yoruba, Edo, Ibo, Ijaw, Urhobo, Isoko, Itsekiri. Certainly, the evangelists of the Action Group cannot tell us that the Western region belongs exclusively to one particular linguistic or ethnic group, and they cannot claim that because any group is numerically superior to the others, therefore it can dominate the rest.”
Without directly accusing AG of plans for Yoruba domination in the west, Azikiwe insinuated as such by drawing the attention of his audience to the prospect of domination by the numerically-superior Yorubas, cleverly placing the onus of proof on ‘tribalist’ AG politicians to persuade otherwise.
This is a classic example of how savvy politicians introduce ethnicity into the political arena via subterfuge. A politician (Azikiwe) suggests his political rivals (Action Group members) view politics in ethnic terms (they are “tribalists”) and thus their policies (support for regionalism) should be interpreted in terms of what they hoped to gain for their ethnic group (Yorubas) by supporting those policies. Ethnicity thus ends up being politicized via claims others view politics through a purely ethnic lens.
The 1951 election results revealed a country divided into regional party enclaves: the east dominated by Zik’s NCNC, the north by Ahmadu Bello’s NPC and the west by Awo’s AG. The western elections were, however, a close battle between NCNC and AG, and both claimed victory after voting-day. Most candidates had stood without party labels, resulting in a brief period of confusion regarding which party some elected members would represent. When it emerged AG had the majority, NCNC cried foul, claiming some members who pledged allegiance to it before the elections were lured by AG after the vote via corrupt methods. AG denied this, going on to form a regional government.
Additionally, AG embarked on a complicated political manoeuvre – clearly masterminded by Awo as a letter I uncovered in his personal archives revealed – to ensure Zik was not elected to the central House of Representatives from the western region’s House of Assembly, as used to be the practise at the time. This successful manoeuvring included turning some elected NCNC members against Zik with promises of well-paid political posts. In effect, Zik was forced to remain in the western assembly as an essentially powerless opposition leader, rather than head to the federal legislature to coordinate NCNC’s activities from there as his party had previously planned.
The bitter nature of the 1951 western elections and Awo’s subsequent scheming to ”sink Azikiwe in the Western House” as he described it, was bitterly remembered for years in NCNC and wider Igbo circles. Some point to this as the moment ethnic politics arrived Nigeria for good with the message for Zik being that he return to his eastern homeland and leave the west to be run by westerners. And indeed, in 1953, Nnamdi Azikiwe returned to the east, refocussing his political career in his home region.
When Awo ran for president almost three decades later in 1979 with a realistic chance of winning, it is said Zik, knowing he had no pathway to victory, decided to run anyway just to split the southern vote and make sure Awolowo never became Nigeria’s president. All in revenge for 1951. However, even before the 1979 election, the repercussions of 1951 would be felt in Nigerian politics as we shall discuss in this series.
Perhaps we shall stop there for today. Next time, we will discuss the 1953 self-government motion which almost led to the break-up of this country and examine why Ahmadu Bello described the creation of Nigeria as a “mistake.” Till then, take care folks!
REMI ADEKOYA
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