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The Ethnic Trap: Notes on the Nigerian Campaign and Elections, 1978–79

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

Richard A. Joseph
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Extract

In his opening address to the fifty members of the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC) on 18 October, 1975, the head of Nigeria’s new military government, General Murtala Ramat Muhammed, declared: “It is important that we avoid a reopening of the deep splits which caused trauma in the country.” Those splits, as was made known to the outside world during the civil war, were ethnic, regional, and, to a lesser extent, religious in nature. Of these three modes of overt division, Nigerians have always been most successful in controlling the religious aspect. General Murtala’s statement is instructive on the problem of regional splits: “The fear of the predominance of one Region over another has . . . been removed to a large extent by the simple Constitutional Act of creating more States.” Four months later, following the assassination of Murtala, the successor regime of General Obasanjo declared the creation of seven more states, bringing the number up to nineteen from the twelve established by General Gowon in May 1967. While it is evident that the existence of “regions” has not been obliterated by their subdivision into states, this development has reduced the immediate political visibility and at least some of the salience of regional boundaries.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 11 , Issue 1-2 , Spring/Summer 1981 , pp. 17 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1981 

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References

Notes

1. Federal Republic of Nigeria, Report of the Constitution Drafting Committee containing the Draft Constitution (Lagos, 1976), vol. 1, p. xli Google Scholar (hereafter referred to as CDC, vol. 1).

2. I have already dealt in a preliminary way with the issue of class divisions in “Political Parties and Ideology in Nigeria,” Review of African Political Economy 13 (1979). See also, in that volume, Osoba, Segun, “The Deepening Crisis of the Nigerian National Bourgeoisie,” and Williams, Gavin, ed., Nigeria: Economy and Society (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

3. CDC, vol. 1, p. xli.

4. Federal Republic of Nigeria, “Electoral Decree 1977,” Official Gazette 64, no. 61 (29 December 1977), and The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1979 (Lagos, 1979).

5. The parallel phrasing at the state level is “shall have regard to the diversity of the people within the State.” See 1979 Constitution, s. 157(5) and 188(4).

6. On the process of party registration see “Political Parties and Ideology in Nigeria.”

7. There was a prolonged struggle for the position of vice-presidential candidate. The hopeful non-Ibo from the East, Dr. Joseph Wayas, was rewarded following the elections with the plum post of president of the Senate. Observers present at the NPN Convention in December 1978, including myself, were able to notice the process by which state delegations gave their votes to the candidates endorsed by the party’s national organizers.

8. Alinakura defected from the UPN even before the elections were held, and lost heavily in the race for the Senate. These remarks about the UPN National Convention held in Lagos in September 1978 are based on my observations of the situation.

9. Based on interviews conducted with leading members of this group in the Constituent Assembly of 1977-78, notably Chief Olu Akinfosile, Dr. Obi Wali, and Dr. Omo Omoruyi.

10. CDC, vol. 1, p. xli.

11. I was present at both the first NPP Convention in November 1978, when the party leaders clashed on the floor of their assembly, and the second one in December, when Zik’s devoted supporters–Chiefs Ogunsanya and Akinfosile, M. T. Mbu, Solomon Lar, and Paul Unongo–literally danced around their restored leader, having dislodged the usurper, Waziri.

12. The alienation of the Ibos stemmed, of course, from their defeat in the civil war and their feeling of having fallen behind in the competition over access to state resources; while the Plateau peoples not only still feel politically and culturally dominated by the Hausa-Fulani but also that they have suffered discrimination since the overthrow of their fellow-man, Yakubu Gowon, and the failure of the counter-coup of February 1976 in which Gowon was allegedly implicated.

13. Many of the interpretative judgments made in this section are based on my close coverage of political developments between 1976 and 1979 and numerous interviews I conducted with knowledgeable persons during the final year of the transition. For the relevant information on Awolowo, see “The Crossroads of Politics” in B. J. Dudley’s Instability and Political Order: Politics and Crisis In Nigeria (Ibadan, 1973).

14. These points are fully treated in Richard Sklar’s Nigerian Political Parties (Princeton, 1964), and Post, K. W. J. and Vickers, Michael, Structure and Conflict in Nigeria 1960-66 (London, 1973)Google Scholar.

15. For Awolowo’s exact words, whose careful ambiguity was largely disregarded during the 1978-79 political campaign, see Stremlau, John J., The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-70 (Princeton, 1977), pp. 52–53 Google Scholar.

16. Other charges levied by Ibos against Awolowo during the campaign are that he was responsible for the financial changes that “robbed” Ibos of their accumulated savings, that he advocated starvation as a legitimate instrument of war, that he banned the importation of stock fish and used clothing (items highly valued by Ibos), and that he masterminded the indigenization program at a time when most Ibos could not participate in purchasing shares in foreign companies.

17. There is obviously some useful research to be undertaken by political scientists interested in psychosocial dimensions of politica behavior, regarding the contrasting reactions of many Ibos today toward the Hausa-Fulani on one hand and the Yoruba on the other. The greater willingness of many Ibos to cooperate with the former than with the latter seems not to have been significantly altered by the brutal pogroms unleashed against their people in 1966.

18. See “Political Parties and Ideology in Nigeria.”

19. For the relevant background see C. S. Whitaker’s thorough study, The Politics of Tradition: Continuity and Change in Northern Nigeria 1946-1966 (Princeton, 1970).

20. Many of the relevant details of the post-election problems have been summarized in my “Democratization under Military Tutelage: Crisis and Consensus in the 1979 Nigerian Elections,” Comparative Politics (forthcoming).

21. The Nigerian Military: A Sociological Analysis of Authority and Revolt 1960-67 (Cambridge, England: 1971), p. 222.

22. Personal interview. Yola, Gongola State, 17 June 1979.

23. See the tables in the Appendix and on page . . . (Whitaker Table4).

24. In addition to securing the largest number of votes, the winner in the first round had to obtain 25 percent of the vote in two-thirds of the states. The great controversy following the declaration of Shagari’s victory came over the interpretation of what should be considered two-thirds of nineteen states, a full thirteen or twelve states plus 0.67 of the vote in the thirteenth state.

25. The many ambiguities of Waziri Ibrahim’s political behavior deserve closer attention. In this case, although he rebelled against the primacy of the Hausa-Fulani in Northern politics, he left himself open to being accused of distributing his largesse every where in the Federation except within his home state among his fellow Kanuri.

26. A separate area of important inquiry suggested by these observations concerns the undermining of the political salience of regional identities as a consequence of the creation of new states.

27. These comments are based on several conversations with influential members of Awolowo’s campaign team conducted at different times during the campaign, as well as conversations with the Chief himself.

28. Unless the UPN and the GNPP continue their loose postelection alliance, it is hard to see how the UPN will retain its foothold in Gongola, with the GNPP in control of the governorship and the NPN hard at the letter’s heels with a third of the votes in the presidential contest.

29. Such a statement is made in the full knowledge that his most fervent supporters would contend that they voted for him because of all he promised to do for the people. The question such claims provoke is, why did these promises not generate more support among non-Yoruba peoples, even in the South, who were often in greater need of these reforms (e.g., in the provision of educational services) than were the Yoruba?

30. The way in which Zik encouraged the advances of both the NPN and NPP during the last quarter of 1978 provided fertile material for Nigeria’s political cartoonists.

31. For the details of these maneuvers see “Political Parties and Ideologies in Nigeria.”

32. An important exception to this observation is Bendai state, where the NPN was successful in blocking the NPP from regaining the level of support of the old NCNC, despite the significant population of Ibo-speaking Bendelites. The NPP obtained only 4 of 60 State Assembly seats and 8.6 percent of the presidential vote in Bendel.