Political Situation Leading Up to Nigeria's First Republic

Nigeria has had a long hard struggle in keeping its democratic independence. The military has taken over numerous times, leaving democracy severely handicapped. Nigerians have clamored, conversed, fought and died over their democracy. But has Nigeria's democracy ever belonged to all Nigerians? In attempting to give background to this question and insight into the answer I have attempted to piece together the important events leading up to the 1959 election. I will touch on Britain's colonization of Nigeria. I will go into depth about the regionalism of the three major areas of Nigeria. I will also explore the three major ethnic groups who have charged forward to take political power for themselves in the guise of political parties in those same regions. The inherent weakness of the first republic can be attributed to the domination of ethnicity and regionalism amongst the three major political parties. Incompatibility between North and South Nigeria is a reflection of colonization by Britain. Nigeria has had to fight to be one country. But perhaps the fighting was not necessary. Perhaps if the British had left the two colonies as separate in the stead of bringing them together in the ‘mistake of 1914,' there could have been two benign countries as opposed to one divided nation.
The incompatibility begins with the North, who did not want to associate with the South on equal terms. The North viewed the South as a threat to its society. The North was a fundamental Islamic society whose leaders had ruled for over a hundred years. The conquering Fulani had eventually intermarried with the conquered Hausa and formed a stable society. Although in the South stable civilizations did exist, they were not based on the rigid Islamic culture of the Fulani. Trade relations existed between the North and the other regions but there was not substantial migration between the two. The peoples who existed in both territories existed in different