The 1959 elections were the first (multi-party and national) elections to be held in Nigeria based on a Westminster-Parliamentary system of government, adopted without any adaptation to suit the Nigerian
cultural and political environment. For the first time, a special electoral management body, the Electoral Commission of Nigeria (ECN), was established by the colonial administration (Ogbeidi, 2010). The main registered political parties were regional or ethnic in composition, underscored by their regional identity-reflecting names:
Northern People's Congress (NPC), Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU), Borno Youth Movement (BYM), and the United Middle Belt Congress (UMBC) (Horowitz, 1985). The three most prominent parties in 1959 were the northern-based Northern People's Congress (NPC), led by Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Action Group (AG), led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo led and the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), under the leadership of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe. The elections were held on the 12th of December 1959, with three major ethnic affiliated regional political parties as the main contestants and “each of the parties proved its strength in its home region, particularly in the ethnic area of its leadership, and none was able to break into the national arena” (Ibodje and Dode, 2007, p131).
All these goes to prove the point made by numerous researchers that British intensions were not always in the interest of the Nigerian nation-state.
There were scattered pre-election clashes between supporters of rival political parties, but these did not mar the relatively peaceful state of the nation during the elections as Kenneth Post (1964), cited in Orji and Uzodi (2012, pp292, 345) noted in his assessment of the 1959 elections. The electorates were highly optimistic, but the campaigns were marked by a singular absence of serious electoral issue. Rather, the campaigns were characterised by “vituperative personal condemnations, hateful ethnic recriminations, official intimidation and obstruction, and physical violence by party thugs” (Diamond, 1983, p477), which completely drowned out the substance of party programs and proposals. According to Ojo (2012), “from about 1951, ethnicity became the hallmark of Nigerian politics” (p15).
Table 2.6: Voting patterns of the regions in the 1959 Federal Elections
PARTY NORTH WEST EAST LAGOS TOTAL
NPC 134 0 0 0 134
NCNC/NEPU 8 21 58 2 89
AG 25 33 14 1 73
OTHERS 7 8 1 - 16
TOTAL 174 62 73 3 312
Source: Ngou, C.M., (1989). The 1959 Elections and Formation of the Independence Government. In Ekeh, P., Cole, P.D., & Olusanya, G. (Eds.) Politics and Constitutions.
Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books (Nigeria) Limited, pp. 80 – 105
The 1959 election results in Table 1 reflect the ethnic strongholds of the regional parties even though the AG and the NCNC, through alliances, made inroads into the Northern Region.
Also commonly reported was widespread electoral fraud; in some parts of the country, there was the issue of women showing up in voting booths, “pregnant” with already marked ballot papers. The press election coverage focused on personalities, ethnicity, and region.
The newspapers, established by the politicians, avidly supported the ambitions of their owners. According to Fred Omu (1978)
old antagonisms were intensified and the atmosphere of politics and the press seethed with bitter rivalry and enmity… the newspapers were completely immersed in the vortex of partisan politics and were in no position to prepare the people for the challenges of independence and national unity.(p247)
In the elections results, all the parties won the majority of their seats in their respective regions, but the AG and the NCNC also recorded marginal victories outside their respective regions having formed alliances with minor parties in the regions outside their own.
“Generally, then no party emerged sufficiently strong in all the regions
to qualify as a national party. The ensuing government of 1960 thus had to be a coalition government” (Ngou, 1989, p100).
Figure 2.8: Distribution of majority votes in the 1959 Parliamentary elections by regions on the Nigerian map
2.8.1.1 A Significant British Coup
Following the elections, two Southern parties, the Action Group and NCNC were in negotiations to form a coalition government when the British Governor-General, Sir James Robertson invited Balewa of the NPC to form a government. The move pre-empted the coalition talks by other parties. According to Professor Itse Sagay’s commentary on Sir Olaniwun Ajayi’s book, Nigeria: Africa’s Failed Asset, Balewa’s NPC “was a minority…against…the other two parties. Immediately this happened, the NCNC party of the East abandoned negotiation with the Action Group to form a coalition with the Northern NPC” (Sagay, 2012, p10).
The British feared that the North would not agree to independence, “if they did not control the federal government, or were not, at the very least, part of it” (Osaghae, 2015, p33). According to Adebanwi (2008),
“The NPC, as the senior partner, and the NCNC, as the junior partner, entered into an alliance which subsequently formed the federal government under a parliamentary system at independence in 1960”
(p422).
For southern politicians, who were vastly read and knowledgeable about British colonial empire politics, they were distrustful of their colonial administrators. The Indian-Pakistan experience was common knowledge in the current affairs of the 1940s and 1950s. When the Colonial British administrators broke virtually all their own rules about electoral democracy, it was generally not a surprise among the Nigerian elite, given Britain’s reputation in Europe before the First World War, as Perfidious Albion, a phrase, which according to Keith Somerville (2006) was “much used to describe Britain’s reputation for bad faith, reneging on agreements and to back up accusations of outright treachery in her diplomacy and treaty-making” (par 2).