The Action Group crisis of 1962 is the wound the First Republic never recovered from. It split the Western Region's ruling party, jailed the country's most capable opposition leader for treason, drew federal troops into a regional government for the first time, and produced the political vacuum that the January 1966 coup-makers walked into.
The split. The Action Group (AG), founded by Obafemi Awolowo in 1951, governed the Western Region from 1952. By 1959 Awolowo had stepped down as Premier to lead the federal opposition; his deputy Samuel Ladoke Akintola became Premier of the West. The two men disagreed on almost everything that followed: Awolowo wanted the AG to stay in federal opposition and build a national social-democratic platform; Akintola wanted to join the NPC-led federal coalition to share oil and tax revenue.
The quarrel went public at the AG's Jos congress on 2 February 1962. Awolowo's faction won a vote to discipline Akintola; Akintola's faction walked out and demanded his removal. By 20 May 1962, 65 AG legislators in the Western House of Assembly tabled a no-confidence motion in Akintola.
The riot in parliament. On 25 May 1962, when the Western House met in Ibadan to debate the motion, fighting broke out on the floor. Chairs were thrown. The Speaker, D.S. Adegbenro, was hit on the head with a mace. Tear gas was fired inside the chamber. Federal police cleared the building. The session was adjourned in chaos and reconvened the next day — with the same result.
The emergency. On 29 May 1962, federal Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa, on the recommendation of Governor-General Azikiwe, invoked Section 65 of the 1960 Constitution and declared a State of Emergency in the Western Region. The Western government was suspended. A federal Administrator — Senator Dr Moses Adekoyejo Majekodunmi, federal Minister of Health — was installed at Ibadan with extraordinary powers. The premiership was vacant. The legislature was prorogued. The emergency lasted six months.
During those six months Awolowo and his closest lieutenants — Anthony Enahoro, Lateef Jakande, J.S. Tarka (briefly), Bisi Onabanjo, Ayo Adebanjo and others — were placed under restriction orders. The federal police searched AG offices in Ibadan, Akure, Abeokuta and Lagos. Documents were seized that would become the prosecution exhibits in the treason trial later that year.
The treason trial (Nov 1962 – Sept 1963). On 2 November 1962 Awolowo, Enahoro, Samuel Ikoku and 27 others were charged with treasonable felony: conspiring to overthrow the federal government by force, training a militia at Camp Tartous in Ghana under Nkrumah's protection, and importing arms. The trial, in Lagos before Justice George Sodeinde Sowemimo, lasted eleven months. Enahoro fled to Britain; the UK extradited him after a House of Lords ruling.
On 11 September 1963 Justice Sowemimo convicted Awolowo and sentenced him to ten years' imprisonment at Calabar Prison. Enahoro received fifteen years. The judge said, famously: *'Chief Awolowo, your fall has been deep and very deep indeed.'* Awolowo replied: *'My lord, I have nothing to say.'*
The Akintola succession. Akintola, restored after the emergency, formed the United People's Party (UPP) with rump AG defectors, then in 1964 reorganised it as the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) — deliberately reviving Herbert Macaulay's old 1923 party name. The NNDP joined the NPC in the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) for the December 1964 federal election. The opposition — Awolowo's jailed AG, Azikiwe's NCNC, J.S. Tarka's UMBC — formed the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA). The election was widely boycotted in the East and parts of the West; the NNA claimed victory.
Operation Wetie (1965). When Akintola called a Western regional election in October 1965 and the federal government declared him the winner against the obvious popular vote for the AG-NCNC alliance, the West exploded. *'Wetie'* — Yoruba for 'wet him' — was the slang for setting political opponents on fire with petrol. Houses were burned. NNDP party agents and their families were lynched. Akintola governed from inside a shrinking ring of federal police protection. The chaos became the public justification for the 15 January 1966 coup, in which Akintola was shot dead in his Ibadan residence by Major Adewale Ademoyega and Captain Emmanuel Nwobosi.
The release. Awolowo was released from Calabar Prison on 2 August 1966 by Lt-Col Yakubu Gowon, three days after the July counter-coup brought Gowon to power. He emerged a national figure, became Vice-Chairman of the Federal Executive Council and Federal Commissioner for Finance through the civil war (1967–1971), and is widely credited with designing the wartime economy (the 'austerity budget', the £20 ex-gratia payment to Biafrans, the 1967 currency change). He never again won a national election — but he ran in 1979 (UPN, second), 1983 (UPN, second) and remained, until his death in 1987, the most consequential political thinker the Republic has produced.
What the crisis broke. Four things:
- The party system. The AG was the only mass party with a coherent ideology (the 'Awoist' welfarist programme — free primary education, free health, regional minimum wage, industrial development). Its destruction left Nigerian party politics ethnically organised and ideologically empty.
- The federal-regional balance. The 1962 emergency established that the federal government could suspend a regional executive when the centre disliked the politics. Every later 'state of emergency' (Plateau 2004, Borno 2013, Rivers 2025) traces to this precedent.
- The judiciary's standing. The Sowemimo trial — credible on the evidence but politically convenient — was the first sign that the courts could be used to remove a sitting federal opposition leader.
- The West's loyalty to the federation. The combination of the imposed Akintola government, the rigged 1965 election and Operation Wetie convinced a generation of young Western officers that the federation was a vehicle for Northern domination. The January 1966 coup was that conviction in uniform.
The road from the mace fight on 25 May 1962 to the gunfire of 15 January 1966 is a single road.