By Peter Oshun
It’s a safe bet that in any of the regular ethnic gbas-gbos between Yorubas and Igbos affording a fresh opportunity to trade accusations of communal treachery or arrogance, some warrior is likely to swoop in with a non sequitur charge of ”Awolowo robbed Zik of the Western House elections with tribalistic jrjfhhfhhkfkkfjjf”, with the air of recounting the original sin of Awo and the Yorubas for which they can never do right in their relations with the other ethnic groupings in the federation, particularly the Igbo. The allure is understandable in Awo’s case; make the charge stick by constant repetition and confident bombast, and he is reduced to a cardboard villain, the polluted orisun of Nigerian tribalism whose nuances and philosophy, points of view and peculiar interests, can be dismissed without any further due consideration as the scheming and ranting of an ethnic irredentist.
It’s a pity more Yorubas aren’t clued in on their history, for the sake of national peace and quiet. Otherwise a simple and succinct riposte to this charge should be delivered every time it is uttered:
”L’Ori Iro!”
Sadly they are not. The first time I heard that Awo took the premiership of the Western Region from Zik by inducing all the elected Yoruba members of Zik’s NCNC to cross the carpet to Action Group right in the House, it was from a Yoruba man who I assumed knew what he was talking about. You may imagine the effect it had on my estimation of Awo for several years. With the benefit of corrective reading and an acquired cynicism about political dirty tricks, I recently read another savvy Facebook friend repeat roughly the same accusation against Awolowo. Again, she is Yoruba. I think it the highest pitch of excellence propaganda can attain when even the targeted victims of malicious falsehood are duped into repeating it as their true history.
Of course, what happened between Awo and Zik 70 years ago isn’t terribly relevant in today’s circumstances when East and West should rather be joining hands against a common enemy, however, that is defined. Except that hardened attitudes and grudges demand interrogation unless we are cool with them flaring up again, inevitably, after we are done with using each other. When an Islington shopkeeper tells two of his Yoruba customers and political sparring partners, ‘Yorubas are cowards/traitors’ with an air of finality that belies his awareness of the ethnicity of his hearers or the existence of hate speech laws in his country of residence, I am curious to know who did such a thorough number on his head.
When an affable Igbo friend with whom I schooled in Lagos for five years could face down a whole group of Yoruba classmates in Law School Enugu and say ‘Yorubas are slimyyyy/untrustworthy’ in one of our bull sessions as if this was something he really needed us to hear and make amends for, I knew there was a problem. People don’t get that way by accident. Nor do they forget their programming, unless they are consciously disabused of their notions. So if a well-read Igbo is reading this who has never harboured such contemptuous thoughts about the Yoruba or swallowed political propaganda concerning Awo, allow me to thank you for keeping your objectivity intact against all odds and assure you this has nothing to do with you. And to assure you that you have absolutely no right to be offended that such matters ordinarily unfit for polite conversation are being aired now as if all Igbo have it in for the Yoruba. We know they don’t; but it’s equally no use pretending such malicious sentiments are confined to IPOBians and the illiterate mob.
I mean Chinua Achebe is as high as one can go in calibrating the heights of literary achievement in Nigeria. And when a man like that, ordinarily brimming with insight and wisdom delivered in deceptively simple language, can over 30 years after the fact, deliver a barefaced lie in the capacity of an eyewitness, one should not pretend it is some fringe theory undeserving of our attention because of the offence it might cause. This is Achebe, in The Trouble with Nigeria:
“As a student in Ibadan I was an eye-witness to that momentous occasion when Chief Obafemi Awolowo “stole” the leadership of Western Nigeria from Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe in broad daylight on the floor of the Western House of Assembly and sent the great Zik scampering back to the Niger “whence [he] came.”
Someday when we shall have outgrown tribal politics, or when our children shall have done so, sober historians of the Nigerian nation will see that event as the abortion of a pan-Nigerian vision which, however ineptly, the NCNC tried to have and to hold. No matter how anyone attempts to explain away that event in retrospect it was the death of a dream-Nigeria in which a citizen could live and work in a place of his choice anywhere, and pursue any legitimate goal open to his fellows; a Nigeria in which an Easterner might aspire to be premier in the West and a Northerner become Mayor of Enugu. That dream-Nigeria suffered a death-blow from Awolowo’s “success” in the Western House of Assembly in 1951 . Perhaps it was an unrealistic dream at the best of times, but some young, educated men and women of my generation did dream it.”
So there you have it. Awolowo ‘stole’ the leadership of the West from Zik. Careful quotation marks regardless, the implication is that Awo sprung something underhanded, if not outrightly criminal, on Zik just for power, something so unethical even by the lax standards of rough-and-tumble partisan politics that it fully justified tarring Awolowo as the monster who introduced tribalism into Nigerian politics and destroyed the idea of One Nigeria.
He is equally careful not to go into too much detail as to how Awo perpetrated the theft. Who would doubt an eyewitness of Iroko’s stature? Besides, others in the NCNC had already done the spadework right from 1951 of drumming the nuts and bolts of the perfidy into the national consciousness. Dr Matthew Mbu’s narration goes: “Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe was betrayed by the Western Region of Nigeria, not by the electorate, but by the leaders. The NCNC won the election against the Action Group (led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo), but the Action Group introduced what was unknown to Nigerian history”, namely, “carpet crossing. They Action Group bought members of the NCNC to join the Action Group after these people had won election on the platform of the NCNC. Zik, the leader of a majority party in the Western Region became the Leader of Opposition overnight”.
Dr. Ozumba Mbadiwe: “But in pursuance of the policy of creating a political climate healthy enough to make one a citizen wherever he lived, Dr. Azikiwe contested and won the general elections in 1951 into the Western House of Assembly. To stultify this policy of one Nigeria in favour of his tribally-based philosophy, Chief Awolowo got some elected members to cross carpet from the NCNC to his AG side. Zik the victor lost. And Awolowo’s party was able to form the government of the Western Region.”
So from the combined narrative of these juggernauts of Igbo political and intellectual life, the full charge can now be made out:
1. Zik and the NCNC actually won the parliamentary election to the Western House of Assembly in September 1951, that is to say, his party won a clear majority in parliament, and was therefore entitled to form a government under parliamentary rules.
2. Awolowo, from purely tribal motives, bought, bribed or otherwise induced disloyal members of the NCNC to defect to his own party and thereby acquired a majority in parliament and deprived Zik of the chance to serve as Leader of Government Business.
It might have come as a surprise to these distinguished folklorists to learn that the matters of which they made so free with the facts were actually matters of documented public record, set down in the Hansard, the official record of parliamentary proceedings and still sitting pretty in the National Archives. Or perhaps they simply did not care, banking on the inherent gullibility of their mostly unlettered constituents when they told lies for immediate political advantage, only to find out that such lies which live beyond the purpose of their telling have to be constantly reaffirmed over an entire lifetime in order to protect the ‘credibility’ of the tale-tellers.
Here are a few things to bear in mind concerning that election:
1. The Western House of Assembly had 80 seats. In order to command a majority in the House and form a government, a party had to win at least 41 seats or go into a coalition with other parties or individual members to reach that target of 41 seats. This number will be very important.
2. In the September elections, however, only 72 seats were up for grabs. Because of the security situation in Lagos and Benin, elections there where the remaining 8 seats would be contested were postponed to November and December respectively. The elected members from the November/December elections would however also gather with the September set in the inaugural sitting of the House in January 1952.
3. NCNC and AG were not the only parties contesting in that election. There was also the Mabolaje Grand Alliance or IPP, led by Adisa Akinloye, Otu-Edo, based in the MidWest, Ondo Improvement League, and several independent candidates including three AG secretaries who stood for election but not on the party platform. Their names were J.O Osuntokun, D.S Adegbenro and S.O Hassan. I give their names here for a bit later when it is time to count and the size of the whoppers told become apparent.
According to Felix Adenaike’s rejoinder to Matthew Mbu (link to Bolaji Aluko’s thread posting it provided in comments below)Harold Cooper was at the time the Government PRO, and before the elections had written to all the political parties asking them to provide a list of the candidates it was putting up for election. Only the Action Group complied, providing a list of 68 candidates for the September election. 38 of the Action Group candidates won the seats they contested for. Remember, to form a government, a party needed a majority of 41, so AG was three seats short of a majority. Documented fact.
Testing our sense of right and wrong, can we agree that if the Action Group somehow managed to find three members among the independents or other rival parties to ally with, they would achieve the needed majority without having to poach a single NCNC member? And that if that was actually the case, any subsequent crossover by members from NCNC was NOT what caused NCNCs failure to achieve a majority or ZIK’s failure to lead the House? And that if that is the truth of the matter, the mere fact that AG won a majority in the House fair and square was a poor reason for accusing Awo of tribalism and stealing an election, unless we are saying that the mere act of challenging Zik in a democracy was an act of sacrilege in itself because only a one-party state would do?
Remember also that three Action Group secretaries had also run as independents. Close your eyes for a moment and try to guess who they would ally with if asked to form a coalition.
The Mabolaje Grand Alliance won six seats. In talks with the NCNC to form a coalition, negotiations broke down because of a disagreement over who would lead it, Zik or Akinloye. The membership forms the NCNC sent them were returned unsigned. 5 of the 6 members teamed up with AG while 1 went with NCNC. Check and checkmate. From then on AG just hoovered up seats from independents and smaller parties in focussed horse-trading till it ended up with 57 seats. The number of crossovers from NCNC? Three, none of whom were even Yoruba. Where the accusations of tribalism and inducement came from in the circumstances is a mystery. It seems a bad case of crybaby politics by a charismatic political leader stung at having been bested by an upstart party that had been formed only a few months before.
As Wale Adebanwi writes, “…the fact is that even Azikiwe’s West African pilot, in its report of the election which Achebe describes incorrectly, showed that Azikiwe did not win. Ofeimun’s explanation of what happened begs a long quotation. The NCNC lost, ‘in the cannibalisation of the seats won by independent candidates who had 33% of the seats. This was the position before the inaugural meeting of the Western House of Assembly where the carpet-crossing was supposed to have taken place. Incidentally, the Hansard shows that only three people crossed carpet on the floor of the Western House of Assembly in January 1952. None of them was Yoruba. The Yoruba and Otu-Edo candidates who voted against Azikiwe….belonged indeed to ethnic and tribal organisations but they certainly did not have to cross any carpet from Azikiwe’s party to vote against Azikiwe. The truly fictional account of that event which was sold by supposedly ‘enlightened Nigerians’ has helped ever since to dredge ethnic prejudice and hardened the animosity between those who peddled the fiction and those whom the fiction wronged.”
So that’s the story, the story of a seventy-year-old lie that refuses to die because Awo and his politics must not be engaged on their own terms, but denigrated and dismissed lest they, in turn, raise inconvenient questions about the inadequacies of his opponents. Once you establish the image of Awo the power-hungry tribalistic thief with this fiction, the other fictions about his involvement in the Civil War are easier to swallow. Debunk all the lies about his supposed pact with Ojukwu with evidence in hand, and these corrections are dismissed because even if what was said was inaccurate under scrutiny, it’s not as if Awo the tribalist doesn’t deserve to have bad things said about him. The most brilliant advocate of ethnic self-determination within a federal arrangement and the champion of minority rights everywhere only deserves to have his ‘regionalism’ contrasted with Azikiwe’s ‘Nationalism’, because of the fiction of 1951.
Still, the arbitration of history admits only the rigour of truth, not the dubious comforts of offensive mythologizing, and that it is possible to align with the facts about Awo as an Easterner without worrying about losing one’s Igboness is born out by Uchenna Nwankwo of the Ndigbo Council for National Coordination who put it straight: ”the famous carpet-crossing saga is usually over-stretched and has been used to foist inter-ethnic misunderstanding between the Igbo and the Yoruba. It is not true that Yoruba NCNC parliamentarians abandoned Zik on the floor of the Western House of Assembly and crossed over to Awolowo’s side as often painted. The truth is that five members of the six elected parliamentarians from the Ibadan People’s Party, IPP, led by Adisa Akinloye (and some other fringe groups) tilted the balance in Awolowo’s favour by teaming up with the Action Group, AG,; the sixth member, Adegoke Adelabu, joined forces with the NCNC to form the NCNC-Mabolaje Grand Alliance.’
No man speaks a lie to his son, or so Achebe told us in Arrow of God. A lie told to three generations of Ndigbo sons and daughters keeps poisoning the view many have of their political relations with their neighbours and rivals, limiting their options for creative political cooperation, and in this, they are as much the victims of this self-serving lie as the original target. But a paradigm shift is possible once we start interrogating the facts of history in search of truth rather than self-justification, and with as many Ndigbo as will pursue the facts for themselves, as well as Oodua children not susceptible to the xenophobic hysteria of sinister Yoruba Ronu calls, a rapprochement is possible, even vitally necessary.
