Conclusion: Why the First Republic Failed

Abstract

There are always many levels at which a complex social phenomenon can be explained and understood. To begin at the surface, the First Republic was overthrown because the people lost faith in it — not because some disaffected colonels were worried about their careers, not even because a disaffected ethnic group was worried about its position in the Federation. The former worry may have existed, and certainly the latter did. But they explain neither the success of the coup attempt nor the outpouring of joy and relief that greeted it across the country. The First Republic’s loss of popular legitimacy was a remarkably deep and broadly based — and, by the end of 1965, thorough — phenomenon.

‘In short, the rulers used power that they held constitutionally to do unconstitutional things. In the process they destroyed themselves. Nigeria had censuses that were not censuses, elections that were not elections, and finally governments that were not governments.’—Nigerian Opinion, February 1966: 16

Portions of this chapter are adapted from Diamond (1983a)