“In such a case Allah is on our side. Our Lord Muhammad saith: ‘Those who break friendship, kill them like pagans. If you kill them perhaps they will repent.’ I have assisted the Resident with all that has been required, horses, donkeys, bullocks, carriers and corn, and everything that he asked for. The Resident told me that the King of England wanted them. I am the King of England’s servant. Why should I not help him?” The Sultan of Sokoto and Shehu of Borno were later awarded CBE in recognition of their loyal assistance during the Great War.
What was worse, in 1851, Oba Kosoko of Lagos was deposed because of his positive attitude to slave trade. With slavery outlawed everywhere in the British Empire, Lagos was eventually seized and occupied in 1861 and a colonial governor imposed because Dosumu, the reigning king, was powerless to stop the slave traffic. And yet when Lugard became the Governor of the North, he permitted slavery and other barbaric customs to persist under his nose. (Slavery was eventually outlawed in the North in 1937).
It was this Faustian pact between Lugard and the Northern leadership that provided the institutional context for North-South gridlock today. Once a practice however barbaric was justified as part of the ancient traditions or Islamic conventions, it was automatically accepted as morally valid and permissible in a modern society as well. Flogging women for adultery or cutting their right leg from the thigh or slicing off of hands for theft or child marriage, or sending children to Koranic schools only instead of modern schools were justified in the name tradition and religion. Then the total number of secondary schools in Ibadan alone was more than in the whole of the North.
Furthermore, despite the fact that the North represented the enduring power of a bad idea, Southern politicians, assured of their own imaginary insecurities flocked to seek political power and assurances from them. With the 1959 elections ending with no clear winner, an alliance had to be formed to determine who would rule. It was no brainer that AG and NCNC should form a coalition. Awolowo had already humbled himself to be a Deputy Prime Minister or Finance Minister in Zik’s government. Zik invited AG’s team to Asaba, West’s door to the East, to have coalition talks. The talks were a clever ruse to keep AG’s hopes high so that AG would be kept distracted from going upwards to the North for talks. Then the AG read in the news that Zik and Michael Okpara had gone up North and clinched the deal with the Sardauna on forming the government. Tafawa Balewa would be the Prime Minister for the new nation and Zik, the President. Even Nkrumah was shocked. He asked Zik why having spent so much energy fighting for colonial emancipation and then settling for a toothless bulldog role when Nigeria needed him the most? But it was a trap.
As he said in his autobiography, My Life, the first time Sardauna came to Lagos to participate in national politics was in 1947. Then with over £13,500 raised from all over Nigeria – a doctor’s annual salary then was a little over £200 – Zik had led other six prominent NCNC delegates to London to protest the “obnoxious laws” of Governor Arthur Richards. The trip ended in failure with backbiting, abuses and accusation of theft. Zik’s opponents at the NYM, accused him of squandering the money and trust of Nigerians. Zik replied insinuating that the Yoruba on the team, that is: Mrs. Fumilayo Ransome-Kuti, Prince Adeleke Adedoyin, Dr. A. B. Olorunnimbe, were the problem. There erupted a heated and prolonged press war between Zik’s Political Reminiscence in his West African Pilot and H.O. Davies’ Political Panorama in Daily Service. This led to Lagos Igbos rushing to buy machetes en masse thinking a tribal war was imminent. The Governor and his General Secretary, Hugh Foot, quickly called Zik and H.O. Davies to order at the Government House. In the middle of all this was the time Sardauna came to Lagos for the first time. As he wrote in his autobiography, he went away with the resolve that “the North must take politics seriously”. And later when the Daily Service published the speech of Zik about Igbos being destined by God to conquer and rule over others, Sardauna’s resolve went deeper. He had been reading Zik and the Igbos through that lens ever since. His way of neutralising Zik when the opportunity came in 1959 was to offer him a powerless post, which surprisingly Zik and Okpara dutifully accepted in place of being Nigeria’s first Prime Minister. It was this historic mistake that Nzeogwu, Ifeajuna and other coup plotters tried to undo in 1966.
All the attempts to partner with the North had always ended in disasters for everyone except the North. It takes an exceptional stupidity and wilful blindness on the part of Southern politicians not to see this. Yet without the South coming together as one, the North has no power. The fight between Akintola and Awolowo was over this quest for Northern alliance. Once Akintola became the Western premier, he said instead of the AG collaborating with Northern minority parties as was the strategy, they should partner with NPC itself. Amongst other things, Akintola argued, the West’s free education policy had created numerous school leavers which the economy of the West would soon be unable to absorb fast. And since the North was spending so much in keeping Indian, Pakistani and British expatriates in the schools, colleges and university, the West’s graduates and school leavers can be offered at cheaper rates just like in the 1920s and ‘30s. an in the next two elections cycles, the North and West would be indistinguishable from each other.
While Akintola was certain the new improved Northern alliance would be a tour de force, Awolowo reckoned it would be a tour de fraud. From 1952 to 1953, Northern legislators voted invariably for every bill the colonial government introduced but voted against every bill Western legislators introduced. Yet AG and NPC were in ‘strong’ partnership. When in 1952 the North was having problems with enrolling children in conventional schools, Awolowo offered them spaces in some western schools. NPC replied that the only help they wanted from the West was for Awolowo to pull out those numerous Western children in Northern schools to make way for Northern children. That was again when their partnership was ‘strong’.
Awolowo warned Akintola that the North had never been a reliable partner and there can never be any fruitful cohesion with them. Akintola went ahead. Barely a year into coalition with the NCNC, the NPC too became convinced that they were in a state of sustained eclipse and had been waiting on the moon; now they wanted to focus on the sun. When Balewa paid an official visit to Akintola, TOS Benson, the federal minister of information and the only NCNC politician on the team, was asked to step outside for a minute so that the Prime Minister and other members of his entourage could have a tête-à-tête with Akintola and his AG doyens. Part of the agreement then was to work Awolowo into the government as the Deputy Prime Minister, a post which Balewa adamantly refused then to give NCNC. This secret coalition agreement was to be finalised and announced on 2 February 1962 when Sardauna would come down to University of Ibadan to commission the Sultan Bello Hall named after his grandfather, Ali Abba bin Bello. Awolowo chose to out the dirty secret coalition talks during the National Convention of AG in Jos. He condemned Akintola, condemned the NPC, condemned the coalition talks and affirmed that AG would never have anything to do with NPC. The imbroglio set into motion the cascading events that landed Awolowo in prison and brought the First Republic down with a civil war in tow.
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