Joseph Tarka

Tarka trained as a teacher and entered the federal House of Representatives in 1954 while still in his early twenties. He took over the leadership of the United Middle Belt Congress, which argued that the peoples of the middle belt — Tiv, Idoma, Birom, Jukun and others — should not be governed as part of a Northern Region dominated by the emirates.

The campaign brought him into direct conflict with the Northern People's Congress and with the regional government of Ahmadu Bello. He was detained more than once, and the Tiv riots of the early 1960s took place against the background of that dispute. He allied with the Action Group at federal level, served as federal commissioner for transport under the military government in the early 1970s, and was elected to the Senate in the Second Republic. He died in 1980.

Tarka is remembered as the politician who put minority self-determination in the north on the national agenda, and the later creation of Benue and Plateau states is often linked to that campaign. His time in federal office was contested at the time and remains so.