In the discussion of this topic, I intend to put in perspective, the history of democracy and its important component of elections in clear perspective by having a cursory view of its development in Great Britain and the United States usually agreed as the home of representative democracy. I will end up with the discussion of the violence, disunity and politics on the edge of the precipice which has become a recurring decimal in the question of survival of Nigeria. To survive, Nigeria must do a critical analysis of inter group relations based on what is on the ground rather than what is ideal. This therefore is what I intend to do in this article.
Democracy is simply defined as government of the people by the people and central to this concept in the modern era is representative democracy. This is unlike Athenian democracy which was direct democracy in which every citizen had the right to vote and be voted for. Citizenship was restricted to adult male who was not a slave. Citizens were sometimes forced to vote as part of their responsibilities. Part of this responsibilities included defending the democratic state. This concept was further elaborated in the French revolutionary creed of the levee en masse (citizen army) which swept through Europe in the last decade of the 18th and early decade of the 19th centuries. The idea of democracy was not readily accepted by the ruling class in 19th century Europe despite the fact that a slave-holding society in the United States had, in 1776, declared a democratic revolution against the king of England and declared itself an independent republic. The idea of democratic republicanism was followed in 1789 by France which got rid of its Bourbon monarchy through the guillotine.
Yet, democracy was not a settled form of government and not even in France itself which went through monarchical restoration twice and a second Napoleonic empire before its collapse in 1870 after its defeat by Otto Von Bismarck, the German chancellor. The point I want to make is that democracy even in Europe and America was introduced incrementally. Until the Great Reform Bill of 1832 in England, electoral boroughs could be sold and bought by the highest bidder. Even though the practice of what was called ‘rotten boroughs’ was gotten rid off, the electorate was restricted to those who had property. It was not until 1918 that universal suffrage was extended to all men and women in the United Kingdom on the grounds that services deserve its rewards in connection with the role of British women during the First World War.
Universal suffrage among white men in the United States dates back to 1856 but it was not until 1920s that it was extended to white men and women after a bitter struggle especially by the suffragettes. The right to vote which blacks briefly enjoyed after the American civil war of 1860-1865 was again withdrawn until 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson granted this as part of their civil rights.
In Nigeria, which completely came under the British in August 1914 when Sir Fredrick Lugard the Governor-General militarily abrogated the independence of Egbaland within Colonial Nigeria, the question of democracy was a forlorn hope in the distant future. But after the First World War, when Sir Hugh Clifford, a civilian governor replaced the military regime of Lugard, the idea of democracy became a going proposition because the educated elite in Lagos demanded it and the governor was convinced that a limited form of democracy could be extended to the educated elite in Lagos and Calabar while the rest of the country continued to be ruled through administrative fiat of the British overlords. This limited form of democracy in 1923 brought a few Africans into the Legislative Council which for a long time remained dominated by provincial administrators known as residents and some members of the British administration and commercial interests. It was not until the end of the Second World War and its aftermath that the British began to seriously think about the dissolution of the British Empire despite opposition to its dissolution by no less an English nationalist and its war hero, Sir Winston Churchill.
Right from the conquest of Nigeria, the British knew that there was almost an unbridgeable gulf between the various peoples of Nigeria culturally and religiously. The British for their own national interest were openly partial to Muslim northern rulers in the way they treated Nigerians. They adopted the Beit el Mal system of Native Treasury which they found in existence in the north and tried to extend it to all parts of the north where it did not exist. They imposed it on the southwestern part of the country where they tried to equate the powers of the emirs to that of the Yoruba Oba not knowing that below the apparent power of the Oba lay an essentially democratic and constitutional underpinning.
In the East where there were no native rulers in an essentially republican and acephalous (headless) society, they created ‘warrant chiefs’ with dire consequences of rebellion. By the 1930s and the 1940s, the British were more than convinced that Nigeria could not be run on unitary basis and in reaction to the wishes of the leadership of the Action Group and the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC) under the leadership respectively of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Sir Ahmadu Bello and against the wish of Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe of the NCNC -National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (later citizens), the British by 1951 set up three legislative assemblies in Kaduna, Enugu and Ibadan to take care of the affairs of the people of the North, the East and the West thus decentralizing power and resources and taking out the sting in nationalist agitation for home rule and independence.
Up till that time, the ideological struggle for the soul of Nigeria was fought between the Igbo and the Yoruba. Nnamdi Azikiwe who had inherited the formally Yoruba-headed and led NCNC following the death of Herbert Macaulay in 1948, pursued aggressively through newspapers campaign, the idea of an independent unitary Nigeria presumably led by himself. Not only that, he said the Igbo people were uniquely created to lead black peoples out of bondage. His Yoruba contemporaries who felt they were way ahead of the Igbo in western education and African traditional culture resisted him. In their struggle, they ignored the north but the north had its own plan. In the negotiation towards a federal parliament, the North insisted that it must have 50 percent of the seats which the British easily conceded. The northern leadership must have been regularly amused by the cut-throat competition for a place in the political sun by the southerners and they knew they had the joker all things being equal.
Even the idea of regionalism was challenged by Azikiwe who in 1951 stood for election in Lagos into the Western House of Assembly in Ibadan and won; Lagos then was still part of the West. He insisted that he had the majority in the House and wanted the governor to call him to form the government. Awolowo on the other hand was able to convince the large group of Ibadan People’s Party, (IPP) to switch side to the Action Group which gave Awolowo the chance to form the Western Region’s government while a disappointed Azikiwe left the House and went to Enugu to become leader of government replacing Professor Eyo Ita who, though coming from the eastern minority had been put there as leader by Azikiwe.
One important thing came out of the Ibadan struggle. It marred the relations between Awolowo and Azikiwe perhaps forever because when, in 1959 on the eve of independence and after a bitterly fought election, Awolowo offered to serve under Azikiwe as minister of finance while Azikiwe would take the position of prime minister, Azikiwe rejected it and became a ceremonial governor general with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa remaining prime minister. But taking a close look at what transpired in Ibadan, Azikiwe could not have realistically expected to rule the West while his appointee ruled the East in a federal Nigeria made up of three regions standing on a tripod of three competing ethnic groups: the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. But the Igbo branded Awolowo a tribalist and from that time onwards, the Igbo planned on how to neutralize him in the politics of Nigeria.
Awolowo may have unwittingly played into the hands of his enemies when he was not able to manage internal party problems of his party which allowed the northerners and the Igbo to destroy the unity of the West which eventually led to crisis and chaos and incarceration of Awolowo for treasonable felony and eventual military putsch and civil war. The civil war accentuated the division in the country and exacerbated Igbo-Yoruba distrust if not hatred. Awolowo was released from prison and made vice chairman of the federal executive council by General Yakubu Gowon who had replaced General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi who was killed in July 1967 by a coup d’état by northern troops in retaliation for the coup of January 15, 1966 which eliminated the military and civilian northern leadership.