Thread by @RemiAdekoya1

Morning All! It's Day 15, our final session discussing 1945-1967 #NigerianPoliticalHistory based on my thesis research.

Today, we'll be looking at the events of late 1966 and early 1967 directly preceding Nigeria's civil war.

As mentioned yesterday, in July 1966, a group of Northern officers organized Nigeria's second coup, killing Ironsi and appointing Lieutenant-Colonel Yakubu Gowon as military head of state. Gowon immediately repealed Ironsi's decree, reverting Nigeria back to a federal structure.

He also released Awo from prison in a goodwill gesture to the Yorubas who welcomed the former AG leader back as a hero.

While Awo had always had strong Yoruba opposition to his person during the 1950s from various sections of Yorubaland, his time in prison 1963-66 turned him

into a folk-hero among the general Yoruba populace. Seen as the victim of a Northern conspiracy to eliminate him from politics, when released from prison in 1966, Awo's popularity among the Yorubas was at its peak. In August 1966, the new military governor of the West, Colonel

Adeyinka Adebayo called a meeting of "Yoruba leaders of thought" in Ibadan; political, intellectual and traditional elites.

The idea was to rally Yoruba elites around a common agenda in what was clearly going to be a decisive moment in Nigerian history. At the meeting, Awo was

declared leader "Asiwaju" of the Yorubas and mandated to represent Yoruba interests in the new political reality. Gowon eventually appointed Awo federal commissioner for finance and deputy vice-president of the ruling Federal Executive Council.
Here a story on Awo's elevation:

However, Emeka Ojukwu, appointed military Governor of the Eastern Region after the first January coup, never accepted Gowon's leadership, insisting there were higher-ranking officers who should have been first in line. Meanwhile, between May 1966 when Ironsi abolished the federal

system and September 1966, consistent violence had been aimed at Igbos in the North with massacres conducted mainly by Northern soldiers.

Figures of Igbo casualties vary, but estimates run well into tens of thousands, perhaps even up to 100,000 Igbos killed during this period.

Revenge killings of thousands of Northerners followed in the East. The safety of Igbos outside the East became a big issue and Ojukwu questioned the ability or willingness of the military government to protect them. The atmosphere of fear and mistrust between the ethnic groups at

the time were perhaps best summed up in a candid memorandum submitted by the Northern delegation to the Ad Hoc Constitutional Conference that met in Lagos in September 1966 in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to resolve the on-going inter-ethnic crisis.

The Northern memorandum read:

"We have pretended for too long that there are no differences between the peoples of Nigeria.

The hard fact which we must all honestly accept as of paramount importance to the Nigerian experiment for the future is that we are different peoples

brought together by recent accidents of history. To pretend otherwise will be folly. We all have our fears of one another. Some fear that opportunities in their own areas are limited and they would therefore wish to expand, and venture unhampered in other parts. Some fear the

sheer weight of numbers of other parts which they feel could be used to the detriment of their own interest. Some fear the sheer weight of skills and the aggressive drive of other groups which they feel has to be regulated if they are not to be left as the economic, social and

possibly political underdogs in their own areas of origin in the very near future. These fears may be real or imagined; they may be reasonable or petty. Whether they are genuine or not, they have to be taken account of because they influence to a considerable degree the actions

of the groups towards one another, and more important perhaps, the daily actions of the individual in each group towards individuals from other groups."

The key theme from this text is fear: among the Igbos of not being able to live and work safely outside the Eastern Region,

amongst Yorubas they would be dominated by the numerically superior North and amongst many Northerners that they might be left behind in a free-market open-competition style scenario with members of the other ethnic groups, especially the Igbos. Plus, of course, minority fears.

Anxiety and fear of the Other were pervasive emotions in Nigeria at the time.

In West, Awo and Yoruba leaders demanded all non-Yoruba troops leave the region with Awo's Tribune newspaper describing them as "occupiers."

See articles demanding "non-Yoruba" troops leave West:

In early May 1967, Awo and Yoruba leaders adopted a 4-point stance on the crisis:

1) Only a peaceful solution must be found to arrest the present worsening stalemate and restore normalcy.

2) The Eastern Region must be encouraged to remain part of the federation.

3) If the Eastern Region is allowed by acts of ommission or commission to secede from or opt out of Nigeria, then the Western Region and Lagos must also stay out of the federation.

4) The people of Western Nigeria and Lagos should participate in the ad hoc committee or any

similar body only on the basis of absolute equality with the other regions of the federation.

Based on this, there have been debates for years over whether Awo "promised" the East, or not, that he would secede if they seceded and later sold them out.
Here is 1967 news report:

In May 1967, Awo wrote a series of articles in which he argued Nigeria consisted of "51 nations" and there was "no such thing as a Nigerian nation."

He said politicians had pretended unity in colonial era just to get British out and proposed a short-term confederal arrangement:

Gowon's decision in May 1967 to do away with the tri-regional structure and divide Nigeria into 12 states was likely a crucial moment in the lead-up to the war.

As Kirk-Greene observed, whether Gowon's decree "was designed to forestall secession -would-be Biafra was now to

consist of 3 states instead of the Eastern Region, 2 of them mischievously emphasizing the East's long-contained minorities problem of Ibibio/Efik discontent and Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers separatism and the third, a landlocked oil-less overpopulated Igbo enclave- or whether it pushed

Ojukwu into the final act of defiance declaring Biafra, remains a matter of argument.

What is clear is the unequalled point of no return Gowon's decision constituted.

After last-ditch negotiations between Ojukwu and Gowon failed, the former declared the secession of Biafra.

This thread will continue in a few minutes with some summarizing remarks of the 1945-67 period we have been discussing for the past 15 days

In the end, one cannot credibly point to any single isolated event that triggered Nigeria's civil war, the causes of which are to be found in the combined effects of Nigeria's political developments in the years 1945-1967. Starting from the late 1940s, Nigeria slowly but steadily

progressed on the path of ethnic nationalism and regionalism, developing along the way more or less coherent ethnic and/or sub-national groups with their own identifiable leaderships. Once federalism had been entrenched as the prevailing constitutional arrangement, leaders like

Awo, Zik and Bello focussed on ensuring their particular regions stayed under the political control of the parties they led. Other considerations became secondary.

This consolidation of power at the regional level and pursuit of maximum-possible regional autonomy, often at the

practical cost of weakening the Nigerian centre, served not only to weaken the Nigerian state as a whole, but to strengthen ethnic and regional identifications at the cost of identification with the Nigerian state.

Federal Nigeria became the opposite of the saying that the whole is as strong as the sum of its component parts; instead, it was as weak as the strength of those parts could ensure.

The fact Bello, leader of NPC, the majority party in parliament, chose to remain Premier of the

Northern Region while delegating his deputy, Balewa, to become PM of Nigeria, says a lot about where he believed real power resided and/or should reside.

The political debates during these two decades over state creation, the congruence of territorial divisions with ethnic

groupings, appropriate federal arrangements and political structuring, census figures and the appropriate timing for independence all reflected views about identity, bringing to the fore certain recurring themes such as fear, domination, imaginations of boundaries, essentialism.

In the analysis chapters of my thesis, which should be available soon, I investigated how Awo, Zik and Bello constructed boundaries, self-presented their ethnic and/or sub-national groups and how they justified fears of domination by the Other in their discourses spanning the

period 1945-1967.

I then wrote a conclusion chapter summarizing my findings which were focussed on these leaders' grand narratives and the linguistic strategies they deployed in group-identity construction and in trying to make their various arguments as convincing as possible.

My conclusion was thus focused on political communication and aspects of how identity is discussed till present-day in Nigeria with some recommendations.

Brothers and sisters, my plans include combining parts of my thesis with other material I've been working on into a book.

In the book, I would like to go beyond my focus on identity- construction and also offer some ideas I have been thinking about on how Nigeria could be reorganized and why I think this might work.

Then you guys can tell me whether you think my arguments make sense or not. Deal?😃

I'd like to thank you all for reading! Had a great time with these sessions and am so happy so many young people are interested in their history and in a better Nigeria.

You are the hope of the millions too busy hustling for basics like food to be here on Twitter.

I hail you.