The Coker Commission of Inquiry was established in 1962 by the Federal Government of Nigeria under Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, following the political and constitutional crisis in the Western Region that accompanied the Action Group split between Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Premier Samuel Ladoke Akintola. The Commission was chaired by Justice G.B.A. Coker of the Federal Supreme Court, and its mandate was to investigate the financial affairs of statutory corporations and public bodies in Western Nigeria—specifically the Western Nigeria Development Corporation (WNDC), the Western Nigeria Finance Corporation (WNFC), the Western Nigeria Housing Corporation (WNHC), the Western Nigeria Marketing Board (WNMB), and the National Investment and Properties Company Limited (NIPC).
The Commission sat through 1962 and published its report in four volumes between 1962 and 1963. Its findings were damning. It established that millions of pounds from the statutory corporations had been channelled to the Action Group party and affiliated private businesses under the management of Chief Awolowo's government between 1954 and 1959. The WNDC and WNMB in particular were found to have made investments and loans to companies in which political figures held undisclosed interests. The Commission found that Chief Awolowo, as Premier, had authorised or acquiesced in the diversion of public funds for party-political purposes. Figures for identified misapplication ran into several million pounds across the four volumes, though the precise aggregate was contested. Subsidiary figures included loans to the National Bank of Nigeria and the Agbekoya Farm Settlement scheme that lacked proper authorisation.
The Coker Report was formally published and served as evidentiary basis for the emergency administration imposed on the Western Region in May 1962 under Dr. Moses Majekodunmi. It also contributed to the federal treasonable felony charge brought against Awolowo in November 1962, for which he was convicted and sentenced to ten years' imprisonment in September 1963—though many Yoruba viewed the prosecution as politically motivated. Akintola, who had split from Awolowo and aligned with the NPC, remained Premier and benefited politically from the Commission's findings being deployed against his rival. The report thus functioned less as an instrument of dispassionate accountability than as a weapon in the First Republic's internecine regional conflicts, a paradigm that subsequent commissions of inquiry would replicate.