For those interested in Nigerian history, please find below the final part
of Mr. Darah's article on "Forward To A Millennium Past".

Cheers,
         Madiba.
----------------

GUARDIAN

Foreward To A Millennium Past (3)

G. G. Darah examines Nigeria's tortuous journey to nationhood in the first
six decades of the 20th century

ACCORDING to Eurocentric historiography of world progress, three
technological revolutions have sprouted from the womb of the past one
millennium. The first was the industrial one which set off with the
Renaissance, coursed through the "age of European discovery" of the world
and triumphed in the transformation of handicraft or manufacture (Latin
words for manus (hand) and facto (to make) into machine or mass production
of goods and services. The next revolutionary leap originated from James
Watts' steam engine, resulting in the railways and other mass transit
systems of movement. Both processes ended up with Africa being colonised and
turned into a vineyard of raw materials (first slave labour and later
agricultural produce). Nigeria had not come into being then. The third
revolutionary bang is that of Information Technology which sprouted from the
ruins of the Second World War and is currently manifested in tools such as
the computer, electronic mail and the Internet. All three revolutionary
movements have left Nigeria stranded and bewildered.

Thus, Nigeria the largest concentration of black people on earth, is
entering the 21st century as a technologically non-existent entity. The
political predators who rule over our land have so betrayed the historical
mission of the elite that the country is too manacled to even copy the
scientific and technical accomplishments of other nations. The countries now
referred to as the "Asian Tigers" were similarly overtaken by the capitalist
booms of the past 150 years. But after the Second World War, their elite
(led mostly by military generals) vowed to modernise (Westernize) their
societies and make them competitive in global affairs. By 1996, two of them,
Japan and South Korea, had joined the exclusive club of the Organisation of
Economic Development and Cooperation (OEDC). By that year, two African
rulers - Field Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko and General Sani Abacha - were
ranked among the richest individuals in the world. The UNDP World Report
classifies Nigeria as the 174th poorest country and Transparency
International says ours is the second most corrupt on planet Earth. Now, how
did Nigeria miss the train of development?

The Roaring Forties

In our concluding paragraph in the second part of this series, it was
observed that the years after the Second World War fired the colonised
countries to rise up to be counted among the civilised, that is to be
democratic and free from imperial yoke. That ideological storm wrought
wonders in Africa and Nigeria. With Michael Imoudu's (his name means "strong
heart" in Ora language) leadership of the labour movement, the country was
aglow with the desire for change. The militant youths merged forces with the
proletarian movement. Nnamdi Azikiwe's newspapers gave unstinted publicity
to their every action. In 1943, the British arrested Imoudu and gaoled him
in Benin prison. He organised a prisoners' revolt over poor conditions. He
was transferred to the palace of the Otaru of Auchi for surveillance.
Indomitable Imoudu mobilised the peasants in the district to strike against
low prices for their agricultural produce. Azikiwe's West African Pilot was
proscribed by the colonial authorities for supporting the workers.

In June 1994, the students of King's College revolted over the take-over of
their school to quarter soldiers. Among the students at the time was Emeka
Odumegwu Ojukwu. The late Comrade Ola Oni was in the second year. The
British suppressed the revolt, dismissed the ring-leaders and conscripted
them to go fight in Burma. The national elite rose in opposition. To advance
the struggle for self-government, all political movements and ethnic
organisations met in August 1944 to found the National Council of Nigeria
and the Cameroons (NCNC). Stormy petrel Herbert Macualy of Lagos was the
first president and Azikiwe the general secretary. With the NCNC, Nigeria
never looked back on the thorny path to freedom. The slogan was
"Self-Government Now" (SGN).

Another radical bang happened in 1945. Lagos, the industrial and commercial
hub, was astir with demands for Imoudu's release, which took place on June
2, 1945. Imoudu's triumphal return to Lagos closed the city with festivities
and street marches. At the Oke Awo grounds (near Epetedo where Chief M. K. O
Abiola declared himself president about 50 years later), the workers put
Imoudu in a Volkswagon car and carried it on their heads in a dance of
victory. Thenceforth, Imoudu became known as Labour Leader One. On June 21,
19 days after Imoudu's release, he rallied the workers and urban poor to
begin a 52-day general strike that paralysed economic and government
business throughout the country. (A dress rehearsal for this had taken place
in 1942 when police killed two UAC workers in Burutu, now in Delta State).
The general strike sounded the death knell of British colonial reign. They
began to adumbrate the constitutional arrangements for granting
independence, with neocolonial strings attached.

The Zikist Interlude

But more troubles lay ahead. In 1946, the year Macaulay died, militant
youth, finding the pace of Zik and others too slow, grouped under the Zikist
Movement. The founding members included Kola Balogun, Mokwugo Okoye, Raji
Abdallah, M. C. K. Ajuluchukwu, Ikenna Nzimiro, Marshal Kebby (Smart Ebi)
and others. Employing the popular platforms of public lectures, debates,
rallies and their newspaper (ZIMO), they roused the people to head for a
revolutionary overthrow of British imperialism. In spite of arrests, court
trials and jail terms, the starry-eyed youths nearly made a Nigeria
Bolshevik intervention. In April 1950, the movement was banned. Its leaders
went to various jail houses along with their clamour and charter. Earlier in
1947, mighty India broke the yoke of British control after several
centuries. Being the first to do so, the Indian example resonated across the
British empire. The ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and later Pandit Nehru flowed in
to mix with those of socialism in an alchemy of a radical fervent.

After the clamp-down on the Zikists and other reformers, the British felt
the Nigerian political environment was now pacified enough for moderates and
compromised compradors to take centre stage. Up sprang parties with regional
and sectional agendas. The Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) and the Action
Group (AG) were offsprings of this dissonance. Appropriate constitutional
reforms were forged to canalize this decline. The Richards and Macpherson
constitution's grew from those deliberate diversions. The various tribal and
regional warlords now had secure space to occupy to engage themselves in
gladiatorial fights, with the British as umpires. And, thus, Nigeria marched
into the independence years with the ideology of disunity in diversity.

Resurgent Utopia

Nonetheless, a tornado of agitational ideas and radical intellectual
exchanges had been unleased on the land. Its roots reach far back to the
19th century when the likes of Ghana's Casely Hayford involved Ethiopianism
to assert an Afrocentric entry into world history. The tendency was
fertilised with ideas from the New World, especially as expoused by Marcus
Garvey. These years of ideological and political self-discovery produced
themes and rhetoric for the articulation of a Nigerian-African utopia.
Momentous events were happening elsewhere. The socialist alternative
engendered in Russia spread to China with the overthrow of Japanese
imperialism in 1949 under Mao Tse Tung. Colonial Asia had furnished another
inspiring case of the long walk to freedom, besides India. In 1952, radical
military officers struck in Egypt and Col. Abdel Nasser became leader. Two
years later (1954), communists and the peasant guerrillas of Vietnam
humiliated the mighty French at Die Ben Fu. The effect of these events
reached Nigeria. In 1956, "tiny" Ghana became the first British colony in
Africa to win independence through the mass party option. Nigerian
nationalists were stung.

However, in 1953, Anthony Enahoro (now Chief) moved the famous motion in
parliament in Lagos, calling for self-government by 1956. The NCNC and other
progressive parties supported the motion. But the Northern conservatives in
NPC, fearing an independent Nigeria that could be dominated by southern
elites, opposed the idea and staged a walkout. The indecent treatment they
got from the Lagos press and along the railway route to Kaduna infuriated
them enough to encourage riots against Southern residents in major towns
like Kano, where some people died. The seeds of distrust were already being
sown. The full harvest of death came with the Civil War of 1967-70.

The fervour of the times animated artistic and literary creativity. Writers,
artists and musicians poured out fires from their souls in expectation of
the paradise to come. The tradition began in the market town of Onitsha
around 1947 with the likes of Cyrian Ekwensi. By 1060 it involved over 200
authors, printers, booksellers and allied trades. Indigenous writing was one
vent for this creative energy. And the Yoruba who had had the example of
Bishop Ajayi Crowther led the way. The pantheon included eminent writers
like Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, Isaac Delano, F. Odunjo,
Adebayo Babalola and Hubert Ogunde, the first to put his theatrical fare
behind the nationalist struggle. In the north, Abubakar Imam, Aminu Kano and
Sa'ad Zungur blazed a similar trial. English language literature was to join
the current with the emergence of writers such as Chinua Achebe, Wole
Soyinka, J. P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo and Gabriel Okara. Most of the
writings, paintings and music celebrated the freedom to come, the great
utopia of a land were, though tongues and tribes would differ, in
brotherhood we would stand, as the national anthem captured it later.

Sunset At Dawn

By the time independence came in October 1960, the British had so
manipulated the process that what emerged was a caricature of the giant
nation that the nationalists dreamed, fought and died for. The seeds had
been sown in the constitutional manoeuvres of the 1940s. The radical
generation had been crushed or dispersed or displaced. Their successors were
largely those the British could trust. The bulk of them came from
conservatives in the Northern Region.

Herbert Macaulay was dead. Imoudu, Nduka Nze, Gogo Chu Nzeribe, Adebola,
Wahab Goodluck, S. U. Bassey and other leading lights of labour had only a
fringe party. The emphasis on regionalism and ethnicity favoured by the
Richards and Macpherson constitutions had weeded away true nationalists. The
NCNC party which was the most national in spread and ideology had suffered
setbacks, especially with the Western Regional election of 1953. Azikwe
himself had retreated to the East to become the premier in 1957, along with
Obafemi Awolowo for Western Nigeria. Aminu Kano's Northern Element
Progression Union (NEPU), Joseph S. Tarka's United Middle Belt Congress, the
Mobolaje party of Ibadan and the Dappa Biriye's Niger Delta Congress were
short-changed in this dispensation. The conservative Northern People's
Congress of Ahmadu Bello and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa opposed independence,
but after the compromise at the London Constitutional Conference, they
accepted to come along, with assurance from the British. Thus the North
became independent in 1959.

The favoured party was NPC. A dubious population figure assured it of
numerical advantage at the federal legislature. In 1957, the party formed
the first national government and Tafawa Balewa from Bauchi became Prime
Minister. In 1960, the "Zik of Africa" became Governor-General and Obafemi
Awolowo was leader of opposition at the centre. A structure of tripodal
inequity was established. With the grievances of the minorities unattended
to, massive election rigging and repression of opposition, it took only six
years for the roof of independent Nigeria to come down with the January 15
coup of 1966.

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