Daily Independent (Lagos)
Dan Amor
24 November 2008
opinion
That the party system has failed in Nigeria is no longer news. What is paramount is the fact that if nothing is done to alleviate the situation, this democracy will collapse again. Yet, without a painful historical analysis of the evolution of the party system in our country, we may not know where the rain started beating us.
Aside from the usual historical rendition that Nigeria became a political reality following the fusion of the Northern and Southern protectorates of the Niger River area in the interior coast of West Africa in 1914 by Lord Fredrick Lugard, a British military administrator, Nigeria actually adopted a federal form of government in 1954. Even though still under colonial rule, party politics thrived in the country. The leading parties were: the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) which stood for political democracy in its classical, individualistic form; the Action Group of Nigeria (AG) which stood for a federalist democracy; the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) which exemplified the modernization of traditional political authority; and its radical opponent, the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) which espoused egalitarian democracy. As a strictly regional party, the NPC did not threaten the southern parties in their home regions. Since the Northern Region was said to have contained an absolute majority of the national population, the NPC could control the federal government by monopolizing electoral power in the North.
As a conservative party, pledged to preserve a reformed traditional order, the NPC wished to collaborate with conservatives in the Southern regions. However, the Action Group and the NCNC were trans-regional parties with strong libertarian and egalitarian traditions. They could not come to terms with the NPC without repudiating many of their own political beliefs. The issue of regional versus trans-regional extension was the core of inter party relations in 1959. After the federal parliamentary election of 1959, the NCNC joined with the NPC to form a governmental coalition of convenience, while the AG assumed the burden of parliamentary opposition to the Federal Government. In opposition, the AG condemned both regionalism and social inequality, including capitalist and (in the North) quasi-feudal social relations. Inevitably, the Action Group split: its conservative wing, in control of the Western Regional Government, broke with the national leadership and embraced the NPC doctrine of political regionalism. Conservatives in all three southern regions, including some leaders of the NCNC, were prepared to live with Northern political supremacy at the centre on condition of political security within their own regions and a proportionate share of national power. The principle of "regional security", was, in effect, a political formula for socially conservative capitalist development.
In the aftermath of the Action Group crisis of 1962, a coalition of regionalist persuasion, including former members of the Action Group and the Western wing of the NCNC, gained control of the Western Regional government. By the last quarter of 1963, Nigeria's ill-fated First Republic had begun its fearful slide to disaster. In 1964, the federal coalition partners (NPC and NCNC) quarreled over the results of a census which preserved the Northern Region's edge in people counted over the rest of the country. Having tasted the fruit of regional power, most NCNC members of the Western Regional government refused to support their party on that explosive issue. They abandoned the NCNC for a new regionalist party that aligned with NPC in national politics. Belatedly, the NCNC closed ranks with the now battered Action Group. These parties and their Northern allies formed an anti regionalist United Progressive Grand Alliance in opposition to the Nigerian National Alliance of the NPC and its regionalist allies in the south.
Following a mismanaged parliamentary election at the end of 1964, one that was partially boycotted by the NCNC and its allies, the NPC resumed control of the Federal Government. But the legitimacy of the government was gravely impaired in the southern regions. Confidently and defiantly, anti regionalists anticipated an Action Group victory in the Western Regional election of October 1965. This, they believed, would redress the overall political imbalance and force the NPC to reappraise its regionalist policies. However, the party in control of the Western Regional government rigged the election. Three months of increasingly violent political unrest in the Western Region culminated in the coup d'etat of January 1966. At first, the Military Government was accepted with varying degrees of goodwill in all parts of the country. Hope turned into disillusionment and anger when the new regime, headed by an Igbo Major-General, threatened to impose a unitary form of government by decree. There followed an anti-Igbo army mutiny, the massacre of many persons of Eastern origin who were resident in the North, the Eastern (Biafran) secession of May 1967, and a 30-month civil war in which an estimated one million people lost their lives.
In anticipation of the Biafran secession, the Federal Military Government abolished the existing regions and reorganized Nigeria into twelve states. This action, comparable in its historic significance to the amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria in 1914 and the establishment of a federal form of government in 1954, had a dual purpose and effect. It was intended, first of all, to gain the loyalty of ethnic minorities in the secessionist East. It was also designed to project a national ideal that would help to rally Nigerians in all parts of the country to the cause of unity. Thus the civil war destroyed regionalism as a political force. In 1976, seven additional states, making a total of nineteen, were created. After a decade of "reconstruction" under the supervision of the military (1970 - 1979), a quasi-federalism had been preserved and strengthened; constitutional government, with freedom of association to compete for state power, had been restored. However, the right to compete in elections had been restricted to political parties that had demonstrably national, rather than ethnic, religious, or sectional, foundations. But political power was still seen as the exclusive preserve of a section of the country at the expense of others.
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