The Northern Perpetual-Power Promise — Act II: The First Republic, the Coups, the War (1960–1970)

When power was handed over on 1 October 1960, the Northern People's Congress under Sir Ahmadu Bello held a constitutional veto on the federation. Its parliamentary majority (134 of 312 federal seats) and its alliance with Azikiwe's NCNC (89 seats) commanded 223 of the 312-seat House of Representatives. The Premier of the Northern Region — Bello himself — chose to remain in Kaduna rather than move to Lagos, sending his deputy Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as Prime Minister of the federation. The signal was unmistakable: Lagos was the federal stage, Kaduna was the Northern capital, and the centre of political gravity was in Kaduna.

The operative effect of the 1954 Lyttleton seat distribution (described in Act I) was that no federal motion of constitutional significance could pass without Northern consent. The First Republic's six legislative sessions (1960–1966) provide the documentary record of what Northern consent did and did not extend to.

## What the North voted for

• The 1963 Republican Constitution (passed by simple majority with NPC support; required NPC concurrence in the regional houses).
• The 1962 Emergency Powers (Western Region) Act declaring a state of emergency in the West, the suspension of the AG Government, the appointment of Senator Dr Moses Majekodunmi as Administrator, and the consequent imprisonment of Awolowo on charges of treasonable felony. The Senate vote and the House vote both carried with NPC majorities.
• The 1963 census re-count (returning 53.5 per cent of the population as Northern), accepted by the federal cabinet over the formal protest of the Eastern and Mid-Western Regions.
• The 1964 Federal Election Tribunal report adopting the disputed federal election results that returned the Nigerian National Alliance (NPC + Akintola's NNDP) to government.

## What the North vetoed

• The creation of a Mid-Western Region before 1963 (NPC initially blocked the proposal; relented in 1962 after Awolowo's imprisonment had weakened the Action Group). Even then, no Northern Region division was contemplated.
• The creation of further regions out of the Northern Region demanded by the Middle Belt Congress under J.S. Tarka and by the Borno Youth Movement. The Willink Commission of 1957–58 had recommended against new regions on the ground of administrative cost; the NPC ratified that recommendation through every subsequent vote.
• The 1964 General Strike's demand for a federal minimum wage was settled by the Morgan Wage Commission at rates more generous than the NPC's preferred position, but the federal cabinet's eventual adoption preserved the regional wage-setting that protected the Northern fiscal position.
• Any electoral-reform legislation between 1964 and 1965 that would have addressed the manipulated federal election; all such bills were defeated on NPC majorities.

## The 1966 coups

The 15 January 1966 coup was led by majors who were predominantly Igbo (Nzeogwu, Ifeajuna, Ademoyega — though Ademoyega was Yoruba). It killed Prime Minister Balewa, the Premier of the Northern Region Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Premier of the Western Region Chief S.L. Akintola, the Federal Finance Minister Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, and senior Northern military officers including Brigadier Maimalari and Colonel Kur Mohammed. It did not kill the Eastern Premier Michael Okpara or the Mid-Western Premier Dennis Osadebay. The cabinet handover to Major-General Aguiyi-Ironsi (an Igbo officer who had not been part of the conspiracy) and Ironsi's 24 May 1966 Unification Decree No. 34 — abolishing the regions, the federal structure, and the Lyttleton seat distribution in one stroke — was read in the North as the political consummation of the January coup.

The counter-coup of 29 July 1966 killed General Ironsi and 43 other officers, the majority of them Igbo or Eastern Region. It installed Lt Col Yakubu Gowon, a Northern Christian, as Head of State. The counter-coup's stated demand on the morning of 29 July was the secession of the North from the federation — a demand abandoned within 48 hours on the intervention of the British High Commissioner Sir Francis Cumming-Bruce and the diplomatic missions of the United States and West Germany, on the calculation that a Northern secession would leave the South in possession of the oil and the ports while leaving the North with the desert and the military. The veto on Southern leadership was preserved; the federation was preserved; the unitary decree was reversed.

The 1967–70 Biafran War that followed was, on the Eastern side, a war to escape the post-counter-coup federation. On the federal side, it was a war to preserve the post-1954 settlement under new military management. Both objectives — Biafran secession, federal preservation — pointed at the same underlying constitutional question raised in Act I: what proportion of federal power was to be allocated to which region, and on what demographic and constitutional basis? The federal victory in January 1970 answered the question by force without altering the underlying allocation formula. The Northern majority survived the war.

## What the First Republic and the war established

The Lyttleton settlement, by 1970, had been tested by two coups, a counter-coup, an attempted secession, and a thirty-month civil war that killed between one and three million Nigerians. It had not been amended. The 1979 Constitution, drafted by a Constitution Drafting Committee chaired by Chief Rotimi Williams and adopted by the Murtala–Obasanjo SMC, would replace the three-region structure with 19 states and convert the parliamentary system to a presidential one. It preserved population-weighted seat distribution in the House of Representatives. The Northern majority survived the constitutional rewrite as it had survived the war.

That survival is the subject of Act III.