Nigeria since Independence: Republics and Rule

What you need to know

• Nigeria became independent on 1 October 1960, with a parliamentary system, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as Prime Minister and the British monarch as head of state represented by a Governor-General. Nnamdi Azikiwe held that representative office before becoming President when Nigeria became a republic on 1 October 1963.
• The First Republic rested on three regions and three regionally based parties, which meant that every national contest became a contest between regions. A Mid-Western Region was later created out of the Western Region, the first change to the regional map after independence.
• The First Republic collapsed under a combination of pressures: the controversy over the census figures on which representation depended, the disputed federal election of 1964, the crisis in the Western Region following its own contested election, widespread violence, and the weakness of a federation in which one region was larger than the other two together.
• The military intervened in January 1966, ending the First Republic. Senior politicians including the Prime Minister and the Premiers of the Northern and Western Regions were killed. General Aguiyi-Ironsi took power and attempted to replace the federal structure with a unitary one, a move that was widely resented in the North as an attempt at domination.
• A counter-coup in July 1966 brought Yakubu Gowon to power. Communal killings, the breakdown of negotiations and the failure to implement the Aburi agreement led to the declaration of the Republic of Biafra by the Eastern Region and to civil war, which lasted from 1967 to 1970 and ended with the surrender of Biafra and the policy of reconciliation, rehabilitation and reconstruction.
• The twelve-state structure created in 1967 replaced the four regions, breaking the dominance of large regions and giving minorities their own units. The number of states has grown in stages since then to the present thirty-six plus the Federal Capital Territory, usually in response to minority agitation for self-determination and access to revenue.
• Gowon was removed in a coup in 1975 and succeeded by Murtala Mohammed, whose brief administration purged the public service, began the transition programme to civilian rule, carried out the 1976 local government reform and took the decision to move the federal capital from Lagos to Abuja. He was killed in an attempted coup in 1976 and Olusegun Obasanjo completed the transition.
• The Second Republic began on 1 October 1979 under a new constitution that abandoned the parliamentary system for an American-style presidential system, with a directly elected executive President, a bicameral National Assembly and the requirement that a winning presidential candidate obtain both a plurality of votes and a spread of support across the states.
• Shehu Shagari of the National Party of Nigeria was President of the Second Republic. It was brought down by a military coup at the end of December 1983, against a background of a collapse in oil revenue, severe economic difficulty, allegations of large-scale corruption and the bitter controversy over the 1983 general elections.
• Muhammadu Buhari led the government that followed, with a strong emphasis on discipline and the War Against Indiscipline, and was himself removed in 1985 by Ibrahim Babangida, who ruled through the Armed Forces Ruling Council, adopted the Structural Adjustment Programme and ran a long and repeatedly extended transition to civilian rule, including a government-created two-party system.
• The presidential election of 12 June 1993, widely regarded as free and fair and generally believed to have been won by Moshood Abiola, was annulled by the Babangida administration before a final result was declared. The annulment produced a legitimacy crisis, mass protest and the collapse of the transition.
• An Interim National Government headed by Ernest Shonekan was installed and lasted only a few months before Sani Abacha took power in November 1993. His years in office were marked by severe repression, the detention of opponents, international isolation including suspension from the Commonwealth after the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni activists in 1995, and a transition programme that never produced a handover.
• Abacha died in June 1998 and Abdulsalami Abubakar succeeded him, released political detainees, and ran a short, credible transition that produced the 1999 constitution and elections. Abiola died in detention in 1998 before the transition was completed.
• The Fourth Republic began on 29 May 1999 with Olusegun Obasanjo as President. Since then power has changed hands by election and by constitutional succession, including the succession of Goodluck Jonathan after the death of Umaru Musa Yar'Adua in 2010, the defeat of an incumbent president by the opposition in 2015, and further civilian handovers after that. The run of uninterrupted civilian rule since 1999 is the longest in Nigeria's history.