The Willink Minorities Commission was convened in September 1957 by the British colonial government under Secretary of State for the Colonies Alan Lennox-Boyd, in direct response to mounting minority agitation ahead of Nigerian independence. The Commission was chaired by Sir Henry Willink, a former British Cabinet minister and lawyer, and included three other members: Sir Stafford Foster-Sutton, Dr. Philip Mason, and Chief Jaja Wachuku. Its mandate was to ascertain the facts of minority fears in Nigeria's three regions—Northern, Eastern, and Western—and propose means of allaying those fears, including whether the creation of new states was advisable.
The Commission held public hearings across Nigeria from November 1957 through March 1958, receiving submissions from hundreds of communities including Ijaw, Tiv, Edo, Efik, Urhobo, and Middle Belt peoples. Its final report, submitted to the colonial government in July 1958 and published as a Command Paper (Cmnd. 505), ran to 346 pages. The Commission's central finding was that minority fears were genuine and substantial—particularly among the Ijaw, Tiv, and non-Hausa peoples of the North—but it nevertheless recommended against the creation of new states immediately before independence, arguing that new states would not in themselves resolve minority anxieties and might create instability. Instead, it proposed a special development board for the Niger Delta, fundamental rights provisions enshrined in the independence constitution, and a declaration of fundamental rights enforceable in court.
The Commission's special-area recommendation led to the creation of the Niger Delta Development Board in 1960, which proved chronically under-resourced. Its refusal to recommend new states was widely condemned by minorities as a betrayal. The fundamental rights provisions were incorporated into the 1960 Independence Constitution. The deeper structural question the Commission sidestepped—minority political self-determination—remained explosive: the Mid-West Region was carved out in 1963, and General Gowon created twelve states in 1967 partly in direct response to the failures the Willink Report declined to address. The report was formally published and remains accessible in British parliamentary archives.