Colonial Rule

Colonial administration was expected to pay for itself. That principle explains much of what followed: taxation of the rural population, investment concentrated on railways and ports that moved exports to the coast, and a small European staff working through local authorities.

British policy also assumed that different societies should be governed through their own institutions. Where centralised authority existed it was retained and strengthened; where it did not, officials created offices and appointed holders, often without local legitimacy.

Indirect rule was fullest in the north, where emirs administered taxation, courts and local government under British residents. In the west, existing Yoruba obas were incorporated into the system. In the east, the warrant chief system imposed individual authority on Igbo and neighbouring communities that had governed through assemblies, and it was resented from the start.

Export agriculture defined the colonial economy: groundnuts and cotton in the north, cocoa in the west, palm produce in the east and delta, rubber and timber in parts of the south, and tin mining on the Plateau. Railways from Lagos and Port Harcourt in present-day Rivers ran inland to Kano and the coalfields at Enugu in present-day Enugu, and marketing boards later controlled the purchase and export of major crops.

Resistance and protest continued throughout. The Aba Women's War of 1929, in which women in the east organised against taxation and the warrant chief system, led to inquiries and administrative changes. Trade unions grew from the 1930s and a general strike took place in 1945. Newspapers, professional associations and improvement unions became forums for criticism of colonial policy.

Constitutional change came in stages. Elected seats appeared on the Legislative Council in the 1920s. The Richards Constitution of 1946 introduced regional councils, the Macpherson Constitution of 1951 widened elected representation, and the Lyttelton Constitution of 1954 established a federation of three regions with substantial regional self-government.

Colonial rule left the institutional skeleton of the modern state: a civil service, a legal system layered over customary and Islamic courts, an export-oriented economy, and a rail and port network built to move goods outward rather than to link regions to each other.

It also left the three-region federal structure of the 1950s, in which each region had a dominant population and its own governing party. That arrangement shaped the politics of independence and is a recurring reference point in later debates about how power and revenue should be shared.