The Western Region Crisis — 'Operation Wetie'

The Western Region Crisis began as a leadership dispute between Chief Obafemi Awolowo, leader of the Action Group, and Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, the Premier of the Western Region, and escalated into a constitutional and security crisis that consumed the First Republic. Federal intervention in 1962, the declaration of a state of emergency, the treasonable-felony trial of Awolowo (1963), and the disputed Western Region election of October 1965 — widely held to have been rigged in favour of Akintola's Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) — produced a level of street violence captured in the Yoruba expression "operation wetie" ("wet him"), describing the petrol-and-match attacks on political opponents and their houses. The breakdown of order in the West was the immediate background against which a group of mostly Igbo majors launched the coup of 15 January 1966.