The 1964 Federal Election Crisis

Abstract

If the General Strike had deflected politics from the running ethnic and regional conflict to a fresh line of cleavage, this effect was shortlived. As the campaign for the Federal Election heated up during the second half of 1964, all of the energy of Nigerian politics was sucked into the vortex of ethnoregional conflict. Historic tensions between North and South and between the Igbos and their ethnic rivals now reasserted themselves with a vengeance. Vituperative rhetoric was joined by widespread violence and repression, as the main political parties — now polarised into two competing alliances — clashed head-on in a momentous ‘struggle for supremacy’ that would produce the worst political crisis in Nigerian history. Several elements of this crisis were foreshadowed in the Mid-West Regional Election of February 1964.

‘I have one advice to give to our politicians: If they have decided to destroy our national unity, then they should summon a round-table conference to decide how our national assets should be divided, before they seal their doom by satisfying their lust for office…. Should the politicians fail to heed this warning, I will venture the prediction that the experience of the Democratic Republic of the Congo will be child’s play, if it ever comes to our turn to play such a tragic role.’-President Nnamdi Azikiwe, 10 December 1964, in a ‘Dawn Address’ to the nation (Mackintosh, 1966: 581).