The First Republic

The federation inherited three, and from 1963 four, regions of very unequal size and population, each governed by a party with a regional base. Because seats in the federal parliament were allocated by population, census results carried direct political consequences, and because the regions controlled substantial revenue and patronage, control of a regional government was a major prize.

Parliamentary government also placed the federal coalition and the regional oppositions in constant tension, with courts, police powers and commissions of inquiry drawn into political disputes.

Development programmes expanded in these years: universities at Ibadan, Nsukka, Zaria, Ife and Lagos; a national development plan; road, port and industrial projects; and the beginning of commercial oil exports from the delta after the first discovery in commercial quantity at Oloibiri, in present-day Bayelsa, in 1956.

Political conflict grew in parallel. The 1962 and 1963 censuses were disputed between regions and the figures were contested. A crisis inside the Action Group split the party and led to the declaration of emergency rule in the Western Region in 1962, the trial and imprisonment of Obafemi Awolowo on treasonable felony charges, and the creation of the Mid-Western Region in 1963. In 1964 a general strike over wages closed much of the economy, and the federal election of December 1964 was boycotted in parts of the country. The Western Region election of October 1965 was widely disputed and followed by unrest.

On 15 January 1966 a group of army officers carried out a coup in which the Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the Premier of the Northern Region, Ahmadu Bello, the Premier of the Western Region, Samuel Akintola, the Federal Minister of Finance, Festus Okotie-Eboh, and a number of senior officers were killed. The coup did not install its planners in power; the surviving cabinet handed authority to the army commander, Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, and parliamentary government ended.

The end of the First Republic closed Nigeria's first experiment in parliamentary government and began three decades in which the military held power for most of the time.

Accounts of the period differ over how far the collapse is explained by the regional structure itself, by the conduct of particular parties and governments, or by the actions of the officers involved in January 1966. Contemporary sources and later scholarship disagree on motives and responsibility, and this page does not attempt to settle those questions. What is not disputed is that census, election and emergency-rule disputes between 1962 and 1965 left the federal institutions with little agreed authority by the end of 1965.