Herbert Macaulay & the NNDP (1923) — Nigeria's First Political Party

On 24 June 1923, eight months after the Clifford Constitution (1922) granted Lagos and Calabar four elective seats on the Legislative Council — the first elective seats in any British African colony — Herbert Samuel Heelas Macaulay founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) at his Kirsten Hall residence on Bamgbose Street, Lagos. It was Nigeria's first political party. Within six months it had swept all three Lagos seats. It held them for the next fifteen years.

The man. Macaulay was the grandson of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the recaptured-slave Yoruba boy who became the first African Anglican bishop. His father, Thomas Babington Macaulay, founded CMS Grammar School Lagos in 1859 — the oldest secondary school in Nigeria. Herbert trained in England as a civil engineer (Plymouth, 1890–1893), returned to Lagos in 1893, worked briefly for the Crown Lands Department, resigned in 1898 over corruption, and spent the next forty years as the most relentless thorn in the side of the colonial administration.

The road to the party. Before the NNDP, Macaulay had spent two decades inventing the techniques of mass politics in Lagos:

• The Apapa Land Case (1912–1921) — Macaulay represented Chief Amodu Tijani Oluwa of Lagos against the Crown's compulsory acquisition of communal land at Apapa for £22 per acre. He carried the case to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London (1921) and won — establishing that the Crown could not extinguish customary land title by mere proclamation. The judgment is the foundation of every later Nigerian land law, including the 1978 Land Use Act.
• The Eleko affair (1920–1931) — Macaulay championed Eshugbayi Eleko, the deposed Oba of Lagos, against successive colonial governors. The case went to the Privy Council twice; Eleko was restored in 1931.
• The Lagos Daily News (1925) — Macaulay's newspaper, the first Lagos daily edited by an African, ran for over two decades as the NNDP's organ.

The NNDP's programme. The 1923 founding manifesto demanded: full municipal self-government for Lagos; compulsory primary education up to age 16; the higher Africanisation of the civil service; non-discrimination in trade and industry; and the abolition of the colonial water-rate (the 'Assessment Ordinance' that had triggered the 1908 Lagos riots). It was a Lagos-focused programme — the franchise extended only to adult male British subjects in Lagos and Calabar with a £100-a-year income — but its rhetoric was already national.

The electoral record. In the 1923, 1928, 1933 and 1938 Legislative Council elections in Lagos, the NNDP won all three Lagos seats every time. Its candidates included Egerton Shyngle, J. Egerton-Shyngle, C.C. Adeniyi-Jones and Macaulay's longtime ally Dr J. Akinwande Savage. The party's organisational machinery — the Lagos Market Women's Association under Madam Alimotu Pelewura (allied to the NNDP from 1926), the ward branches, the *Lagos Daily News* — was the blueprint every later Nigerian party copied.

The succession to the NCNC. By 1937 the new Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) — Ernest Ikoli, H.O. Davies, Samuel Akinsanya, Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe — broke the NNDP's monopoly in Lagos by winning the 1938 election. The NYM then split in 1941 over the 'Akinsanya crisis' (Ikoli, a minority Ijaw, was preferred over the Ijebu Akinsanya for a vacant Legislative Council seat). Azikiwe walked out, and in August 1944 he and Macaulay co-founded the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) at Glover Memorial Hall, Lagos. Macaulay was the founding president. He died on a 1946 NCNC tour of the country, in Kano on 7 May 1946, aged 81; Azikiwe inherited the party.

What it changed. The NNDP did not 'win' independence. It governed a small franchise in two cities. But it established four facts that no later party could undo:

1. Africans could form, finance, run and win elections to colonial legislatures.
2. A Lagos-based party press could shape opinion on a national scale.
3. Constitutional and judicial victories — the Apapa case, the Eleko case — were as politically powerful as street agitation.
4. The line from NNDP (1923) to NCNC (1944) to NPN (1978) to PDP (1998) runs through a single Lagos household.

Herbert Macaulay's portrait is on the front of the ₦1 note of the 1973 currency series — and his great-grandson Babatunde Macaulay carried the family name into the Lagos legal profession. The Tinubu Square (formerly Independence Square) at Lagos Island is two streets from where the NNDP was founded.