Nigeria's Independence Movement & Coup Era w/ Max Siollun (AR&D Ep. 13)

Speaker 1: You remember Din-Din-Boo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rifle. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on them.

Henry Hakimaki: Hello and welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Hakimaki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello Adnan, how are you doing today? I'm doing well, Henry. It's great to be with you. Absolutely. Always nice to see you as well. We have a terrific topic and a terrific returning guest on the show again today. But before I introduce the topic and before I reintroduce this guest, I want to make two notes. One is that listeners, if you would like to help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this, you can go to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history.com. This show is 100% listener supported. That's why you'll never hear an advertisement on this show. I actually have to turn down a fair amount of people that try to do advertising through our show. But in any case, we're 100% listener supported. So if you would like to be one of our supporters, you can do that at Patreon. The second note is that this episode is going to fit within our ongoing African Revolutions and Decolonization series. It's been a little bit since the last episode of this series, but if you're relatively new to the show, we have an ongoing series. This is going to be around episode 20. 12 or 13, I think of this series where we go around the African continent and look at the processes of decolonization, look at the different movements that are taking place, look at individuals, thinkers, revolutionaries. We look at a lot of very interesting topics. So I highly recommend that you go back through our show catalog, wherever you get your podcasts and check out the previous episodes in the African revolutions and decolonization series. This episode is, is going to be, I guess, the second part of a series that we're doing with this guest, although the middle part of the story we're going to be having later. We have Max Siolun returning. Max is a historian who's written many books, and you may remember him from the previous discussion on our show, Pre-Colonial Nigeria, which was African Revolutions and Decolonization, episode 11. Hello, Max. How are you doing today? Nice to have you back on the show. Great to be here. I am doing very well. Thank you for asking. Absolutely. So as I said, there's kind of going to be a gap between that previous conversation and this one because the topic for today is actually the independence movement of Nigeria and the post-colonial era of Nigeria. And listeners, of course, will be thinking about that and thinking, well, why don't we talk about the colonial period first before going into the independence movement and the post-colonial period? Because that previous conversation was about the pre-colonial space first. And the reason is because, Max, you have more work coming out relatively soon on the colonial period of Nigeria. And we're going to save that conversation for when that work will be coming out. So we will have that conversation with you and listeners should stay tuned for that. But we're going to talk about the independence movement and the transition into an independent state today. We would be remiss, however, to not open with at least one question that talks about the colonial period to help orient the listeners into why the independence movement unfolded the way that it did. So while the focus of this discussion will be on the independence movement and post-colonial era, I want you to, if you can, briefly discuss what the process of colonization was, how that occurred, and also what the conditions under colonialism were like in Nigeria.

Max Siolun: Sure. Happy to do so. And maybe for the benefit of your listeners who are not so familiar with Nigeria, what I'll do is I'll start at independence and then work my way backwards from there to answer the other part of your question. So Nigeria was Britain's largest African colony. When it became independent in 1960, two things happened. One, Africa's independent population doubled. And two, the size of the British empire shrunk by half, reduced by 50%. In terms of the process of colonization itself, it was actually not really planned by the Brits. It was a case of slow mission creep. So they started the colonization project really in the late stages of the British Empire in 1850, when they conquered Lagos to the West African coast on the Atlantic coastline, and didn't complete that colonization project until the early part of the following century. We're now talking early 1900s. 50, 60 years later. How Britain did that was actually ironic in that the government wasn't actually involved for a large part of that colonization project. Because one, like I said, the British government was really getting tired of empire. One, it was expensive. Two, it was an admin burden because you had to send talented personnel off to the colonies, place them in the middle of a hostile population and perhaps endanger their lives and You had to pay them substantial salary while they were there as well. So Britain was actually becoming reluctant about acquiring new territories. So what they did, as they did in India and other colonial territories, is they would grant royal charters to mercantile British companies to basically go and govern the territories on the British government's behalf. And that's what they did in Nigeria, using a company called the Royal Niger Company. Now, why did they do this? Basically at this stage, colonialism was Britain really running an extraction project in West Africa. Them colonizing Nigeria coincided with the industrial revolution unfolding in Europe in the 19th century. So a number of things will happen. Because of the increase in machinery in Britain, Britain needed oil to lubricate the machines and the factories. Where did that oil come from? It was in the palm trees in what is now Nigeria. The pneumatic rubber tire had been invented. Where were the rubber trees to make these tires? In Nigeria. In the 19th century, also hygiene and infant mortality was absolutely appalling in Britain and large parts of Europe. So soap, washing, hygiene became really, really essential to survival and health. Again, where were the ingredients? The shade tree, the plants, et cetera, used to make soap. Again, it was in Nigeria. So this is what these economic and social factors are what really motivated Britain to conquer Nigeria.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, and you were telling us a little bit about the 1960 revolution or independence. I guess we shouldn't necessarily call it a revolution, but the process by which it happened is something that I'm interested to learn about and also to put it in a kind of broader context of the British Empire. You've already mentioned that It was seen as a burden, which is why in many cases they used these companies, whether it was the East India Company or the Royal Niger Company and so forth, to carry out colonization activities. But by the early 20th century... there's also stories of resistance. So I'm wondering, and also policies and how the British dealt with the problem of resistance. So I'm wondering if maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that late colonial period and you know, what its legacies were for patterning the way in which independence movements start to begin and their relationship as independence movements to previous experiences of resistance to British colonialism.

Max Siolun: Sure, happy to do so. And maybe I can group the resistance, the anti-colonial resistance into two categories. The first category is what I call initial resistance. This is when the Brits were conquering. The indigents fought many, many resistance wars. Some of them went on for 20, 25 years, especially in the southeast of Nigeria. And the reason why the resistance was more intense in that part of the country was because free colonial rule They didn't have monarchs. They didn't have paramount rulers. These were societies that were very, very egalitarian where, I guess it's an alternate form of democracy where decisions affecting the entire community, every member, every adult in the community had a right to participate and a veto right really over decisions affecting the whole town, the whole village, et cetera. Then you imagine this kind of egalitarian society that's not used to having and that would not accept paramount rulers from their own society. Imagine what happens when you take an outside conqueror that tries to then start running that society with an external paramount ruler. So what Britain did in Nigeria and most of its colonies is that they used a process of rule they called indirect rule, which it was cheaper. It involved less personnel. What they would basically do is rather than ruling directly, they would find local rulers, local kings to rule on behalf of the British government. This worked fantastically well in Northern Nigeria, which had pre-existing, pre-colonial rulers. But in Southeastern Nigeria, big problem. There weren't any rulers there. So what the Brits did is that they just created a new ruling class. They created what they called, quote, warrant chiefs. They would just go into a particular community, find someone who they thought had leadership qualities, give this person a certificate that they called a warrant and say, you're a warrant chief, you're now the ruler over this community. It was absolutely disastrous because what would happen is that it just amplified the resistance in these communities, made them fight even harder because now not only have you conquered us, but you've now gone and done something which is just heretical to us, is appoint one of our own over the rest of us. So now what would happen is that the community would not only resist against the Brits, but they would also target their resistance against these Warranty's who they really saw as collaborators with the foreign conqueror. So that's the initial resistance. Over time, The military disparity between the Brits and the indigenes was so large that physical and military resistance was never going to succeed. Britain just brutally suppressed those initial wars or resistance. And what they would normally do is collective punishment. Every village or town that resisted, after the Brits won, they would go through the entire town and just bulldoze and set fire to every single house in the town or village to deter future resistance. So over time, resistance started evolving to not be military, to take the shape of civil disobedience. So you'd get strikes. Women got involved. and would do what we now call sit-down protests, where thousands of them would surround a British district court or a British colonial office and would refuse to leave until the British district officer paid attention to and addressed their grievances. Over time, these strikes, these petitions, these sit-in protests eventually morphed into what became the independence movement. And that turned into the educated class, the educated indigents, verbally and in writing, articulating the independence and in what the post-British order should look like.

Henry Hakimaki: You know, this is something that I think we have to remind the listeners of from last time. And it's the fact that Nigeria was absolutely an artificial colonial creation. And so what would be very important for us to understand at this point during this independence movement is is what nigerian nationalism looked like or nigerian nationalisms perhaps looked like in this late colonial period and how those nationalisms come together within an independence movement and i'm putting air quotes around this because inside of this independence movement There are, of course, numerous competing visions of what an independent Nigeria should look like, because prior to the colonial period, there wasn't a Nigeria. There was all of these different areas, like you said, that had completely different governing structures, different histories, different peoples, different culture. that had been forced together by the colonial situation. And now they're theorizing what a post-independence Nigeria would look like when no pre-colonial Nigerian state had existed. And all of these competing nationalisms within that movement have, of course, their own visions and their own competing motivations, let's say. So can you talk about what... the character of Nigerian nationalism or nationalisms was like in this late colonial period and how those competing visions of those nationalisms coalesced within the independence movement but then also pushed the way that the independence movement actually operated in that late colonial phase.

Max Siolun: And that's a great point, Henry, about the Nigerian independence movement not being one unified movement. Again, for the benefit of the listeners who are not Nigeria experts and maybe not so familiar with it, just to give you some idea of the sectarian divides in Nigeria. Nigeria, according to most anthropologists, has over 500 different languages. It is the only country in the world that is equally split 50-50 between Christians and Muslims. Yes, there are other multi-religious countries in the world, but it's the only one where it's 50-50. Usually in other countries, Christians and Muslims, one of them is the far, far, far bigger majority. Why am I telling you all this? It's because when Britain merged all those sub-national identities together to create Nigeria... It really didn't govern them the same because Northern Nigeria was largely Muslim. Southern Nigeria was not. It was largely animist and traditional religions. So what the Brits did is in Southern Nigeria, they allowed Christian missionaries who weren't just religious evangelizers. They were also educators. Wherever a missionary went with a Bible, he or she also traveled with textbooks, traveled and opened schools. The missionaries saw Western education as a way of winning more converts. So two things were happening in the South. One, it was Europeanizing, absorbing European education. And two, absorbing Europe's religion as well, Christianizing. The Brits didn't allow the missionaries to go to the North because one, they didn't want to offend the Muslims in the North who mentally, and quite rightly so, associated Western education with Christianity. Because to them, the same people who are coming to educate us, they're not just coming to educate us, they're coming here to change our children's religion. So of course, quite rightly, they just rejected and refused to accept either A, Christianity, or B, Western education. So basically, the Brits governed northern and southern Nigeria really as two different countries. They had different legal systems, different education systems, different land tenure systems, different court systems. So of course, when we're now talking 1930s, 1940s, when people mostly from the south started agitating for independence, it alarmed the northerners. Because they suddenly realized that once Nigeria became independent, political power would move from Britain to those who had Western education, and that was the Southerners. So the Northerners didn't want a united Nigeria where they would, in their minds, become second-class citizens. And the South obviously had a motivation to... Fast forward the process of independence because it was going to benefit them. Once Nigeria became independent, the educated southerners were the ones who were going to take the jobs that were created, the job vacancies vacated by the departing British colonial officers. So what you had is multiple different independence strikes. So you had what I would call the people who didn't want independence at all, who wanted it really delayed as far as possible in the north. In the South, although I talk about the Southern independence movement, some of the Southerners from the Southeast, they wanted a united Nigeria. The reason for this is that a lot of the people who were leading the Southeastern independence movement have been educated in America, have been educated abroad. And they came back with these kind of very, very romantic visions of building a rainbow nation of look, there's this America where 50 different states came together and they have a functioning country. We can do the same thing in Nigeria. In the Southwest, they wanted independence as well, but it was a regional form of independence. Their view was, look, allow each region of the country to shape their own region, to shape their own destiny, to form independence as they want. And let's not pretend that Nigeria is anything more than a British artificial intention for the country. So what you had is maybe three, four different constituencies, all agitating for independence, but independence meant something different to each of those constituencies. And they all wanted independence on a different timeline as well.

Adnan Hussain: Well, that's very interesting. I mean, I didn't know about the American educational roots to some of the intelligentsia in the southeast part of Nigeria. And in general, I think we could say that we see anti-colonial nationalist movements and reformist movements trajectories in parts of the global south that weren't subjected to direct uh colonial control and rule tended to come from these sorts of intelligences who had absorbed modern education and um you know, literacy and ideas about nation-state identities and the techniques for how this could be discussed and achieved through public media and journalism. And so that seems to make a lot of sociological sense with this educated class developing these kind of you know, bourgeois, you know, ideas of bourgeois, you know, political liberty and so forth. I'm a little surprised that coming back from the United States in the 1940s and 50s would have led them to believe in the American project when there's segregation, the civil rights struggle is taking place, you know, in front of the world. You have You know, kids being attacked with dogs and sprayed with hoses. And, you know, so it's a little strange to think that for these West Africans, they could look and see the United States as some kind of hopeful land and a vision for Nigeria of like these differences coming together, especially since... They would have also probably have heard that there had been a massive civil war over these sorts of divides in the country. So that's kind of interesting. Maybe you might comment. But the question that I have that this leads to is really thinking about comparative cases, you know, where in the decolonization of the British Empire from you know, Southeast Asia, even you could say, you know, earlier from Ireland and, you know, in many locations, the British tended to leave, well, we could say, you know, the Palestine, you know, the mandate of Palestine, right? I mean, is that they left partitioned states and territories that they had ruled and often partitioned on the basis of ethno-religious identity. So it's kind of interesting that in the case of Nigeria, this didn't happen. I'm wondering... And since it happened later than these other cases, was it a situation where criticism of the way they partitioned led them to think, well, we should just pull out of the territory as a whole? I'm kind of interested in that dynamic between the divided and different aspirations of the peoples of this territory that you've highlighted, and the policies of the British in managing the future of Nigeria in the post-colonial period, because they've often had a big role in what that post-colonial state will look like, whether divided or not.

Max Siolun: Absolutely, and I'll respond to your comment about America, which is absolutely right. These West Africans, and it's not just Nigerians, Ghana's preeminent colonial campaigner as well, Kwame Nkrumah, he also was educated in the US. So In fact, he was influenced by Nigeria's preeminent independence campaigner, a man called Azikiwe, who was one of the first Africans to be educated in the US. Now, Azikiwe went to HBCUs, the historically black colleges and universities in America. He attended Howard, Lincoln. I think at one point, he also then went to UPenn as well. And when he came back... A lot of other West Africans followed in his footsteps, including Nkrumah. Now, when they went there, they had two contrasting experiences, one of which you've touched upon. One was, wow, look at this country where these disparate territories have come together and they're still here hundreds of years later. But all of them also experienced racism. And when they went back to Nigeria or to West Africa, to Ghana, et cetera, to their respective countries, they carried with them racism. the grievances, the kind of racial unrest, the memories of racial unrest and racial animosity they'd experienced in America. And it hurt them when they got home to see that racism being carried out on them in their own country. So the Brits kind of made a rod for their own backs by indirectly creating an independence movement because the way they treated the black educated class in their own country kind of showed the indigents There's really no benefit to us to corporating with the Brits. You know, they're racist against us in our own country. We want them to leave. Now, to your second point about, look, why did the Brits not do to Nigeria what they did to legacy India? Unfortunately for Nigeria, Britain had already had the experience of India approximately 13 odd years before Nigerian independence. And the Brits were very, very worried about their legacy. If they went down the path of splitting their colonial territories, that's kind of an implicit admission that you were wrong to create these territories in the first place. The second thing they were worried about in Nigeria's case is that the differences between the North and South was so sharp and the animosity between them was so great that they were worried if we depart and don't glue these territories together, Northern Nigeria is landlocked. They need access to the sea. And if the South denies them access to the sea, They might just invade. They might just start a war, a war of conquest, and you'll get a war between what was then southern Nigeria and northern Nigeria. And who's going to get blamed for that? Us. So I think that's why the Brits were just bending over backwards and were so committed to keeping Nigeria together, even though most Nigerians themselves didn't want it, apart from the southeast of Nigeria.

Adnan Hussain: Yeah, that's interesting. It did occur to me that it would be landlocked, and obviously, I don't know how far the Niger River is navigable, but it wouldn't have been very easy without cooperative agreements. But if there was all of this tension and animosity, that could be But I also wonder if they, you know, that's a, you've put a kind of sober kind of perspective in some ways, you know, on British calculations and thinking. You know, I mean, I think in one, you know, one other respect might be is that you could say, and perhaps you would say, is that some of the divisions that are a result of the colonial legacy and the differential administration of parts of Nigeria helped reinstantiate such differences that even if there had been like, you know, cultural and religious differences, I mean, there are other states that have managed to somehow figure out you know, perhaps how to do it, you know, maybe not so easily, et cetera, but it certainly seems to have emphasized these differences, created institutional differences in, you know, their colonial values administration in law and so forth, governance, one group being very heavily involved in military, and we could talk a little bit about that, and the other, you know, creating intelligentsia through Western education from the missionaries. that would allow them to be state bureaucrats and functionaries and govern a new nation state versus a military, and that if you're going to think about what the subsequent post-colonial history is, those legacies obviously clearly are a response to British administration that built upon some cultural differences, but they're also very much a product of this period of colonialism. So one could also put, you know, maybe a less positive, you know, spin our interpretation on it that, you know, they, you know... they left calamities wherever they decolonized. It's just, they took different shape and different form, you know, in different, in different contexts, you know, and that that dynamic, that division and yoking these countries together, uh, so that they didn't feel that they had real independence on terms that were, uh, you know amenable to them but they kind of enforced into this kind of arrangement of course has retarded the post-colonial development you might say as a state as an integrated state of of a place like nigeria so i'm wondering if you have any perhaps we'll have to cover a lot more history to be able to answer such a question but you would be the person to to answer it i think yeah

Max Siolun: Absolutely. Of course, I'm not one of these people that presents pre-colonial, I hope I'm not anyway, that presents pre-colonial Africa as this kind of garden of Eden where everything was perfect before the Brits came and messed everything up. Of course, the indigents had their own cultural, religious, historical differences with each other. But what British colonialism did is that it amplified those differences. I've spoken about some of the agents of that amplification, you know, the missionaries and religion, and so on. The Brits also had this kind of modus operandi for operating their territories, where you touched upon it, where they tended to segregate different ethnic groups into occupational specialities. So one part of Nigeria, northerners, Hausa Muslims, The Brits regarded them as, quote unquote, a martial race, warriors. So when they started the institution that is now the Nigerian army, they only recruited Muslims from Northern Nigeria into that army because they felt that these people are natural warriors. The Southerners are soft. They can't be warriors. And it's not just Nigeria. They did this in India too, where they recruited Sikhs to be their martial race in India. Now in Nigeria, unfortunately, The Northerners, the Brits viewed them as the soldiers, as the fighters. The Southerners, they gave European education. What that did is create mutual fear and suspicion between the North and South because the South is afraid. All the people that have guns, they're all from the North. The North is afraid. The people who have the colonizer's education and understand the colonizer's system and administration, they're all Southerners. So one side is thinking, when the Brits leave, those guys are going to come and kill us. The other side is thinking when the Brits leave, the guys who understand their education and their governance system, they're going to rule over us. So that's what caused this animosity and this friction about when is independence going to occur? And when it does occur, what will it mean?

Henry Hakimaki: And so you're talking about all of these structural issues that are being put up during that late colonial period and really throughout much of the colonial period. But in particular, in that late colonial period, a lot of these colonial structures were being put in essentially at the last minute, right before the British pull out. Now, what's interesting is that many of these structures persist through the independence movement and into the independent era. But additionally, The structures often still had British integration in them in the post-colonial era. And so I have, I guess, two questions that kind of take us into this. It's going to relate to the last question that Adnan had asked, but also brings us into the post-colonial era, which is how did the independence movement evolve? actually succeed in talk about the process of britain uh pulling out of nigeria and again pulling out here is very much in air quotes because as the second part of the question is going to ask can you also talk about how britain didn't just grant independence and leave how the shaping of the military the shaping of the civil service the federal structure uh Your book, Oil Politics and Violence, talks about British officers remaining in key position, the British High Commission being involved during crises in this period. How did these structures that were set up at that very end period of the colonial period then persist into the independent period through the decolonization process, and why Additionally, to what extent has the post-colonial instability in Nigeria, which we're going to talk about for the rest of this conversation, I'm sure, a direct inheritance of the colonial government structures that were set up by the British in this late period that then persisted through into the independent era?

Max Siolun: Sure. I'll go chronologically and I'll start with the first part of your question about why the indigenous independence movement succeeded. So the agitation for independence started late 1930s, kind of early 1940s or so. The Brits at that point weren't interested. They just felt Nigeria wasn't ready. But a couple of, or multiple things rather, helped to turn events in favor of the independence movement. Some of them were internal, some of them were external. The internal things was, I mentioned earlier, this educated class who were going abroad to the US. They were very, very radical, number one, very, very nationalistic, and were very, very impatient for the Brits to leave. And Britain started becoming concerned that if you didn't start making concessions to this group because of their radicalism, this agitation might turn into an armed agitation. And there's actually evidence that MI5 and the special branch of the British police, they uncovered plans by these guys to acquire explosives. They were trying to get weapons because they were trying to emulate the Mau Mau resistance in Kenya. So the Brits didn't want yet another African colony to fight an armed war of rebellion or freedom, whatever you call it, an independence war against them. Then the second thing that went in favor in the independence movement is that World War II, it economically just crippled Europe, crippled Britain, and also crippled or affected its colonies. So when World War II was coming to a close, It caused a massive spike in the cost of living in Nigeria. Really, foodstuffs, just normal consumer staples are just getting out of hand at the cost of them. And who were the indigents blaming? It was the British colonial power. And the leaders of the independence movement were very, very clever in exploiting that frustration, in making people believe the people who are making your lives difficult are the Brits. They've dragged you into their war, taken 100,000 of your sons to go and fight, over 100,000 Nigerians fought in World War II. They've taken your sons abroad to faraway countries to fight their wars. Many of your sons, your husbands, your brothers, et cetera, never came back. And now look what they're doing in your country. Your country is suffering because of their wars. So the British colonial government started becoming really, really unpopular. And because of its own economic problems, the Clement Attlee government, the Labour government that came to power in Britain in 1945, they really faced a moment of reckoning. And they said, look, the colonies are becoming really a burden. With no fixed time limit, we are going to start granting independence when we think the colonies are ready for it. However, in terms of being ready, you touch upon it. Unfortunately, the Nigerian institutions had not been Nigerianized. The civil service, the court system, the police, the Navy, the army were all, number one, led by British officers. And number two, I mentioned this lopsided ethnic recruitment policy. The security forces were mostly, in some cases, 75% of them were northerners, were just from one part of the country. So what Britain was handing over wasn't really institutions that demographically represented the country at all. as a whole, they were handing over institutions that were A, led by Brits and B, that represented only one ethno-regional constituency in the country. And this just caused a lot of tension, a lot of frustration in the lead up to independence and beyond.

Adnan Hussain: Well, that's something that fits into patterns we see in decolonization history. I mean, firstly, the importance of colonial troops in World War II was absolutely central. Of course, say, for example, in the Algerian Revolution, you know, that many of the people... who fought and were veterans, war veterans of World War II, and helped free France from fascist occupation, then wanted their rights and not to be treated like they were being occupied by Nazis, which is what it felt like for them living under French colonial administration. So it seems like there's a similar kind of story. I was interested, though, in this kind of fear of the Mau Mau and the Kenya experience. And I should point out that, of course, that we have a couple of episodes on African revolutions and decolonization series here on Guerrilla History on Mau Mau and Kenya. How could you not? Absolutely crucial episodes. So listeners, you may want to go check those episodes out. But I'm wondering, you know, how much this kind of sense of what was happening in the era and the struggle of African peoples and peoples around the world for independence and liberation changed. you know, how this may have informed these strategies and thinking of this indigenous national liberation, you know, national independence-seeking intelligences, you know, in their calculations and in their approach in dealing with the British. Was there a genuine possibility that there could have been, you know, a militant sort of struggle, armed struggle? Or, you know, what were the forms and shapes by which the independence movement was expressing its discontent with British rule, even if, you know, there were some acknowledgement on the part of the British that they wouldn't be able to control and keep a hold of all of their colonial possessions and had to prepare for for financial reasons, moral reasons, you know, just exhaustion with the empire and fighting, you know, wars against resistance movements. You know, what was that situation looking like? And, you know, maybe you can tell us a little bit about some of, you've mentioned one of the leaders, but maybe some of the other people who were involved in organized resistance on behalf of Nigerian independence.

Max Siolun: Sure. What was actually happening to the independence movement is that in the early stages in the forties, it was committed to getting independence via negotiations, via dialogue and writing petitions to the secretary of state for the colonies in London and petitioning the British governor of Nigeria, et cetera. But the younger movement members, the ones in their early twenties, they were way, way more radical than the ones who were maybe 20 years ahead of them. And they just viewed, look, this negotiation These Brits are just taking you along for a ride. Why are you negotiating your own freedom? So I mentioned the leader in the independence movement, Aziki, where this younger, more radical movement, they started a movement called the Zikist movement, which they named after him. I don't even know how to describe that Zikist movement, what they believed in, because some of them were socialists. Some of them were near to being communists, even though they were educated in America. They intensely, intensely disliked colonial rule. And they were pan-Africanists as well. So they viewed... Nigeria's independence, not just about Nigeria, but as part of a broader continent-wide movement to free Africa. So they looked up to Mau Mau. They looked up to Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. And a lot of these fellows who were leading these independence movements, they knew each other. So Jomo Kenyatta, who is Kenya's freeman and freedom fighter, at his treason trial where he was tried for being, you know, allegedly, I should say, being the leader of Mau Mau, his lawyer was one of the, was a Nigerian lawyer who was part of Nigerian independence movement. I've mentioned Nkrumah, his good friends, one of his good friends was Azikiwe, the leader of the Nigerian independence movement. So clearly these people were in touch with each other, went through the same education institutions, were assisting each other and often visited each other. Then the second thing that was happening was the military. At that time, the African colonies did not have their own equivalent of West Point. They didn't have their own indigenous military training institutions. So they all used to go to Sandhurst in England, which is the elite military training college. So it will maybe interest some of the listeners to know that the leaders of the first military coup in Ghana and the first military coup in Nigeria, they were at Sandhurst at the same time. in the same company, some of them, training company in San Jose. And when they came back after finishing their training, they staged their coups in Ghana and Nigeria within two months of each other. Can that be coincidence or is that evidence of some collusion among them? So I think, yes, I'm here talking about Nigeria, but it's important to make listeners aware that a lot of these early independence campaigners were pan-Africanists who wanted to liberate their countries together at the same time.

Henry Hakimaki: And taking us then from this moment in 1960 when independence is granted and up until 1963 when the First Republic is granted, or First Republic is established rather, we then have this question that begins to arise as well, which is something that persists throughout Nigerian history but is a major issue issue here in the first republic period which is the question of corruption and again it's something i'm using your book oil politics and violence nigeria's military coup culture 1966 to 1976 quite heavily in this we discussed that the the specter of corruption was a huge issue in the lead up to this coup that we're going to be talking about which you just referenced happens in 1966 but we'll sideline that for just a second This question of corruption is a very interesting one, though, because as we had just described previously, the structures that had been set up in Nigeria were set up by the British and were then maintained with British support in some cases, British collusion in other cases, into this independence period. And so the question of corruption then is... when we look at corruption during this period of the First Republic, are we looking at an issue that can be analyzed in terms of greed of individuals, or do we really have to look primarily at the way that this neocolonial economic system had been set up and structured even prior to independence by the British in enabling this corruption. And there's a character who's very interesting from this book, and I'm not going to say his name because I'll mispronounce it, but I'll use the descriptor that is quoted about him in the book. A gross, squalid crook, the finance minister during the First Republic period, Can you talk about this issue of corruption in this period? How systemic and what was the scale of corruption? Was it a result primarily of those structures that had been set up in that late colonial period by the British? And then... So I understand I'm asking a lot of questions here. But then that specter of corruption, how does that play into the sentiment that I guess leads towards the 1966 coup?

Max Siolun: Sure. What I'll do, corruption in Africa is just such a big topic. And there's so many causes, so many factors that contribute to it. But just for the sake of brevity, I'll just touch upon two of them. So the first element, I have to go back to the, I guess, the pre-colonial period, the early stages of European-African contact. When the Brits and other Europeans first came to West Africa, their system of transaction and buying goods from the indigents involved them arriving in a particular area. paying, whatever you want to call it, a tax, a levy, a license fee to the local leader in exchange for being allowed to trade in that leader's territory or fiefdom. Back then, it used to be called dash or commie. So why am I saying this? It's because the indigenous African leaders became accustomed to receiving payments, gifts in kind for doing anything. You want to enter my territory? You have to pay me. You want to do business in my domain? You have to pay me. That was the system for hundreds of years. However, when you suddenly overlaid a new administrative and moral order of colonial rule over this system, those systems of dash, commie, license fees, payments, they suddenly acquired a new name, corruptions. Secondly, I've mentioned how the different regional constituencies in Nigeria didn't trust each other, didn't like each other. What it did is that anytime someone entered government, it created this, it's our turn to eat mentality, where when you're in government, You're there as a representative of your particular community. You don't know how long you're going to be there. Maybe days, weeks, months. When you're there, you need to ensure that you appropriate your slice of the quote-unquote national cake, which is the national resources, and bring it home for your community. Because if you don't, when it's no longer your turn and the other part of the country gains control of those state resources, they are going to exploit it and use it to develop their own community. So I think these two factors, they're not the only ones, but they are two dominant factors that contributed to the corruption that was a part. It wasn't the only reason, but it was one of the reasons that caused the grievances that led to the first military coup in January 1966.

Henry Hakimaki: Adnan, do you have anything here?

Adnan Hussain: Should I take us into the... Well, I was just going to ask, perhaps you can tell us a little bit about how this very first military coup occurred and what do you think is important for understanding subsequent Nigerian history in what ways did it contribute to a kind of dynamic or a pattern that has defined much of post-colonial Nigerian history since the 66 coup.

Henry Hakimaki: And I'd like to just add in a little bit to that, which is to also discuss the ethnic dimensions of the January 1966 coup, and I guess the mythologizing that takes place surrounding the ethnic question of the 1966 coup. I'll leave it there because I'm sure you'll explain it. I don't really need to preface it any further than that.

Max Siolun: Sure, and that 1966 coup, till today, it is the most controversial event ever in Nigeria's history. Minds are fixed on it. It's Nigeria's JFK moment. What did you want to call it? So, again, the coup was influenced by the ethno-regional military recruitment patterns I mentioned. So, by now, we're talking early 1960s. The Brits have been, for the entire 20th century and late 19th century, have just been recruiting soldiers from one part of the country only.

Adnan Hussain: As they are preparing to leave, they realize that this is a problem.

Max Siolun: You're basically departing and giving the guns to only people from one part of the country. So they're now trying to diversify the ethnic composition of the army and they start recruiting to replace them when their officers leave, educated people, educated officers. It didn't achieve the intention. Rather than diversifying the army, what it did, it instead stratified it and we had different levels, different strata in the army corresponding to different ethnic loyalties and different parts of the country. So The fighting troops, most of them were northerners. In the late colonial era, Britain starts recruiting southerners, starts advertising, look, educated people join the officer corps. A lot of the people who answered that call to join as officers were from the southeast, were Igbos from southeastern Nigeria. So you ended up with this extraordinary seesaw, this asymmetry in the army where the bulk of the fighters were northerners, But the technical officers, the commanders, three quarters of them, or depending on who you talk to, it's either two thirds or three quarters of them were Igbos from the Southeast. So the government was Northern led. The leadership of the military was from the other part of the country. And that just created this I guess this unlit stick of dynamite waiting for controversial political events to ignite and explode where government, one part of the country, military from the other part of the country. And in 19, in January, 1966, This Igbo part of the officer corps staged a military coup, and they killed the prime minister, who's a northerner. They killed two of the regional governors, one of whom was also a northerner. So if you view that coup from the perspective of the northerners, Their conclusion was the Igbos, the Southeasterners, have staged this coup not to address corruption, not because of the residual instability in the country, it's because they want to divest us of power and take power for themselves. And then it just fed into all the colonial fear that the North had always had about Southerners, which is they are basically setting themselves up as the successors to the Brits. This military coup is their own way of achieving what they always wanted, which is using their educational or Western, let me say Western educational advantage over us to dominate the country. So it just fed into every Northern fear. And from the point of view of the North, it was an utter disaster. And they had just... lost power and lost all the leverage that they had been struggling to maintain during the latter years of British rule.

Henry Hakimaki: I'm also curious about if you can talk, I guess briefly, because it's not the biggest part of this story, but also within the context of the military in the lead up to the January 1966 coup, and the recruitment of various people into the officer corps. In your book, you also talk about lowering of educational standards and entrance requirements. And I'm curious if there is any class dimension or class analysis that could be made of this lowering of educational standards and entrance requirements into these upper echelon of the military and how that also fits in with this geographic and ethnic divide that also you've been talking about within the military.

Max Siolun: Sure, this ethnic and regional flip-flopping of recruitment patterns, every time the Brits changed the recruitment patterns, it just made things worse. So they had a predominantly Northern army to begin with. They tried to correct it by recruiting Southern officers. What that did is create fears in the North that, hey, look, our boys in the military They're just all going to have Southern commanders. So we need to make sure that we're also recruiting Northerners. So the government introduced a quota system, which still exists till today for recruitment into the Nigerian military. But because the Southerners had a headstart on education, more Southerners were being recruited into the military than northerners. So the northerners had an antidote to this, which is, okay, the way we'll get around this is we'll just lower the educational requirements for our guys to get into the military to make sure that we are matching the southern recruitment level. And of course, that also caused resentment in the southern officer corps because they were angry that in your attempt to equalize the ethno-regional representation in the army, you are reducing standards. So all these frustrations about recruitment, all these frustrations about politics, all these frustrations about regional bias, all these frustrations about corruption infiltrated into the army and the political splits in civil society replicated themselves in the army. And unfortunately, now started the domino chain of reverence that led to the Nigerian Civil War.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, so that brings us to this period in 1966 where everything just, I mean, it really goes crazy. So we've been alluding to this 1966, January 1966 coup. First, can you talk about what that coup was and what the outcome of that coup was? But then also, Very shortly thereafter, in July, there was what is often called another coup. You also describe it more like a mutiny than a coup. And you also look at the factors that play into that July 1966 coup and how it came out of the January 1966 coup and the aftermath of it. It's a very interesting story. And then, of course, as you mentioned, really lays the groundwork for what becomes the Civil War. But can you talk first about what was this January 1966 coup and what was the result of that coup? And then how did that process then lead into this mutiny or this counter coup or however you want to think about it just a few months later? Yeah.

Max Siolun: Sure. So the officers who staged that January 1966 coup, most of them were Southeast, not all of them. Some of them were from the Southwest as well. Most of them were Igbo with a few Yorubas. They were left-leaning socialists. They were influenced by a lot of the military coups that had occurred in Latin America and also in Egypt, the three officers who had staged a coup against King Farouk and replaced their predecessor civilian governments with these very revolutionary left-leaning governments. And they wanted to do the same thing in Nigeria. They didn't actually want to rule themselves. They had a hero that they absolutely admired, who is the leader of the opposition, a man called Awolowo, who, like them, was a socialist, was left-leaning as well, and he was the darling of the younger generation in Nigeria. So their plan was stage this coup, get rid of the very, very conservative northern government, and give power to our hero, the southerner called Awolowo. In the process of staging the coup, as the coup was unfolding, the commander of the army, Major General Ironsi, suppressed the coup, stopped what they were doing, and took power for himself. He couldn't hand power back to the civilians because the prime minister was dead and all the major civilian leaders were dead. However, unfortunately, Ironti himself was also Igbo. So the optics just looked terrible. It just looked like it was all orchestrated. It looked like, hey, look, these guys have just killed a bunch of Northerners to create a vacancy for their kinsmen, who's also from their part of the country, to fill. So six months later, the northerners are absolutely not having this. They're not believing that this is a revolution. They just think this is just a pure naked power grab by the southeasterners. All we care about is let's look at the simple arithmetic of this coup. Most of the planners are from the east. Most of their victims are from the North. And somehow, by staging this coup, we've gone around in circles and somehow someone from their region has ended up being the head of state to replace someone from our region. So in July 1966, The northerners stage a revenge coup. I use the term coup loosely because they're not really at first trying to seize power. They just want to gain revenge and avenge and restore the honor of their northern kin who were killed in the January coup. So they then kill Ironsi, who is the military head of state from southeast of Nigeria, the Igbo. And their intention is actually to break out of Nigeria and just secede from Nigeria altogether. They've actually taken planes, started evacuating their family members up north. But then something happens. Remember when I said that northern Nigeria is landlocked? Northern civilians start talking down their own officers and saying, if you secede, how are you going to export goods? You need access to the southern coastline and you just killed the southern head of state. Do you honestly think they're going to cooperate with you after you just killed their head of state? The money that pays your salaries, that money is housed in the central bank of Nigeria, which is in the south, in the southern capital, in Lagos. You need access to that central bank of Nigeria. So... You had these unwieldy negotiations that convinced at the last minute the North not to secede because of all these topographical factors, these operational reasons. But now everything's kind of turned 180. So the North, which wanted to secede, changed its mind and suddenly decided to stay in Nigeria. But the East, which had been the advocates of Nigerian unity, They now became reluctant to stay in Nigeria because they were aggrieved that this counter coup, it wasn't just limited to the military. It spilled over and turned into pogroms where Northerners in retaliation started killing Igbo civilians, any Igbo man, woman, or child they could find. And it turned into massive massacres where 30,000 Easterners were killed. So the Easterners point to the viewers, look, You can't just kill our head of state, kill all our army officers, kill 30,000 of our civilians and expect us to sit down with you and live in peace as brothers and sisters with you in the same country. This country is no longer safe for us. We are now the ones that want to go and form our own country. And then that's the segue that leads to the Nigerian civil war.

Adnan Hussain: Well, perhaps you can tell us a little bit about, um, You know, the consequences, well, you know, the course of and the consequences of the Nigerian civil war. In some ways, you suggested that the 1966 coup is this... talismanic kind of central event from which the various different narrations and perspectives politically of different parts of the country all have an investment in how they would understand what happened and its consequences. But normally one thinks of a civil war as also producing The kind of political strife that's very difficult to resolve, even if the country, rather surprisingly, from all these different secessionist ambitions that at different times, you know, kind of get derailed, how and why it is that the country of Nigeria has managed to stay together again. and what the consequences of the civil war are for the nature of the subsequent Nigerian state.

Max Siolun: Sure. So the Southeast had an advantage and a problem for the rest of Nigeria in that when it decided to secede, and we're now in the following year, 1967, unfortunately, all the oil fields, Nigeria's oil fields, are in the Southeast. So the rest of the country was not going to allow them to leave and basically take the entire country's wealth with them. So there was an economic rationale now for resisting their resistance, their secession rather. So the war goes on until 1970 and the Southeast can't win because as I mentioned, most of the fighting troops are from the North. There's really one corner of the country, the Southeast. fighting the rest of the country. It's a bit like you imagine the west coast of America, maybe California and Washington state for the international listeners. Imagine those two states fighting a war against the rest of America. They're not going to win. They're just boxing to one corner of the country. So the, let's just call it the rest of Nigeria, inevitably won the war, suppressed the secession. But then something remarkable happened in 1970 when the war ended. The Southeasterners, after a million people had been killed during this war, 90% of them civilians. So actually the combatants didn't really bear the brunt of the war. It was civilians that bore the brunt of the war and little children. And that was really the first war that gave Western audiences that they're now stereotyped in a job, you know, the emaciated, suffering African child. That was really the first African war on camera. But when the war ended, the Easterners fully expected the rest of Nigeria to punish them and to really finish the job. And there were allegations of genocide and that's what they expected. But the victorious Nigerian leader, General Gowon, said no, that this is quote unquote a brother's war. It's not a war against another country. And he recast the image, the narrative of the war, rather than being a war of secession, he recast it as no, this is a war of national unity. It was a war of national preservation and we have to welcome them back. They're not our enemies. And he granted amnesty to all combatants on both sides of the war. No war crimes trials, no prosecutions, no executions. He also said that nobody who fought the war on either side would be granted medals because in his view, There is no honor in fighting a war against your brother. He just viewed it as a family feud. And he said also, all Igbos, all people who seceded, whatever you were doing, whatever job you had, if you're in university in year two, you go back to university and restart from there. If you had a job in the federal government or in a university, you go back to your old job and you restart on the same salary and... at the same job title you had before the war was fought. He even extended the amnesty to the soldiers. He said to the soldiers on the other side, the secessionist soldiers, you can rejoin the Nigerian army at whatever rank you held before the war was fought. And those years that you spent fighting the war, we are just going to treat those years as unpaid leave. You weren't AWOL. You were on unpaid leave. And it's actually remarkable. This is before, and this is all done without United Nations or international involvement. It was all done with Nigerian auspices. A number of things happened long-term from this kind of reconciliation, this remarkable reconciliation after the war. One is that Bizarrely, a war of secession, a war where the country splits apart, bizarrely created a consensus for national unity. Because the federal leader was so magnanimous, there was a consensus that, within the military at least, that something like that could never happen again. Never would the brother officers of the Nigerian army turn their guns on each other. So the government started developing these post-war initiatives to make sure the country would never split again. One was that it started tightly enforcing the quota system, the ethnic quota representation into the army. Two, it started splitting Nigeria into more and more states corresponding to ethnic groups so that each ethnic group would have their own governor and would have control of their own local politics. The government started... other initiatives to boost national unity. Like I mentioned the oil being in the Southeast, all of a sudden the oil became a national resource. So basically the federal government would just take control of the oil, collect all the receipts on the oil and then just distribute it equally to all the states. So ironically, and maybe, you know, some of the American listeners might find some parallels with American, the American Civil War, where Lincoln did some very, very similar things after the American Civil War, where he granted amnesty to a lot of the Confederate officers. So to some extent, Nigeria, modern Nigeria is really has been living in the shadow of that civil war and all the post-war political innovations, the systems of Nigeria, are really all designed to prevent the patterns of conflict that led to that civil war. And so far, Nigeria succeeded in that regard. It succeeded in not allowing the country to ever split up again. It's failed at many other things, but For that alone, that's probably the greatest achievement of the post-independence Nigerian governments.

Henry Hakimaki: It did certainly prevent fragmentation of the state, but it did not prevent further coups from happening, as we'll talk about. But you bring up a couple of interesting points here that I want to put together to get us into this next phase of history and this establishment of a coup culture. So you did mention oil, and very interestingly, oil comes up very frequently in these discussions that we have on the show. But here you discuss in your book that oil wealth, quote, incentivized the military to seize and retain political power. You talk about how before oil, Nigeria was agriculturally self-sufficient, but after oil oil production, extraction. Essentially, whoever controlled the state controlled everything. So the first aspect that I'm really interested in hearing you discuss is if you can talk about how the oil boom that happened in the 1970s, so just after the end of the Civil War, fundamentally transformed the stakes of political power. But then also, talking about this establishment of a coup culture, you also discuss how many of the same officers that were present in the 1966 coups, particularly the July 1966 coup, became the plotters of the 1975 coup and the 1983 coup. basically establishing a coup culture where we see that what essentially were unpunished coups and you discussed how this, you know, these coups and then the civil war were essentially unpunished because they go unpunished, it breeds more coups. Do you think that that's an oversimplification that, you know, the not punishing of these actions then allows for the further perpetuation of coups to take place and establishment within the national political culture? Or is there something about military socialization that made the pattern inevitable there? So yeah, I know, again, I'm asking really big questions because there's just so much to talk about here, but it's really interesting talking about oil and the impact of oil here in the 1970s. And then also the fact that you have these repeat offenders within the coups.

Max Siolun: So I'll start with my oil first, because maybe that's the shorter part of your question. That's the easiest part to answer. So one of the reasons why Nigeria was able to bounce back so quickly from the civil war was because as soon as the war ended, It coincided early 1970s with the global spike in world oil prices. And Nigeria was, or still is, Africa's largest crude oil producer. And just to put this into figures for the listeners, between, in a space of four years, between 1970 and 1974, this is the four years immediately after the civil war. Nigeria's revenues increased by 500%. And that was because of oil and just kept growing, increasing, increasing, increasing. So pretty much the government could reconstruct the war damaged areas very, very quickly. It didn't have to borrow any money to reconstruct after the war. It could paper over national cracks, cracks in the national psyche with money. It just had more money than any African country has ever had. And even till today, more money than it had dreamed of. But this spectacular inflow of money became a blessing and a curse. If you remember, part of the reason why the military took power in the first place was because of corruption. So the military became apprehensive about handing back power to the same civilians who they denounced as corrupt in the previous decade. What's going to happen if you give these guys back power and now they have access to the national treasury with way more money than they had in the decade before? Selfishly, it also gave the military themselves an incentive to stay in power because they were the beneficiaries of this oil wealth. They became spectacularly wealthy personally by being military governors, heads of state, ministers, et cetera. There was another element as well in that the military, because it won the civil war, they could now present themselves to the public as the custodians of national unity. We are the ones that saved this country from dissolution. So now we have a cachet and credibility as the architects of the country's national political future. So you had that problem in there. The military now had a disincentive to leave power. And I mentioned, perhaps in romantic terms, this post-war settlement where there was an amnesty, there was forgiveness, and there was no repercussions for the military coups or the civil war. All well and good. The military had to do that in order to move the country forward. But what message have you sent to the army? You just sent perhaps a message that there is no punishment for taking up arms against the state. There is no punishment for breaking the chain of command and staging a mutiny. So some segments of the army started becoming viewed really as a national security risk, as armed interest groups, that if politicians got to them, They could be used for nefarious ends. And unfortunately, after the Civil War, five years after the war, the same group of officers that nine years earlier had staged a military coup, they were back then young officers in their 20s that staged the 1966 coup, the second one. They got tired of the guy they put in office in 1966 and in 1975 decided to get rid of him. Because in their minds, we are the victorious war heroes. We get to decide who is in power and we get to decide the country's future political trajectory. So yes, on the one hand, give the military credit for fighting this war and successfully preserving the union and reconstituting itself together. But now you created a class of very, very arrogant military officers who think that the country belongs to them.

Adnan Hussain: Well, this kind of raises a question in my mind about, we've seen other African countries where there is oil production and also regions where oil is centered as a resource and also a fragile political unity that has led to fragmentation. I mean, we have Sudan, for example, in mind. And so I'm actually wondering, this is interesting, whether there have been pressures during this period, particularly after this period of the 70s and early 80s when oil wealth was kind of floating all the boats to some extent and could paper over some of the previous divisions. You know, when you have depreciation in oil revenues starting to take place and you also have, as a result, fiscal problems of how to borrow to pay for social services and the bureaucracy and so forth, and you come under, you know, you know, World Bank and IMF restructuring, you know, I'm interested in how that process has led to different kinds of political outcomes or what the consequences have been for Nigeria's state. And I'm also wondering, in some sense, whether there have been pressures in one way or another from external powers to support secession, particularly of the Southeast you know where uh i mean this is just a pattern i mean look at all the gulf statelets you know in the middle east i mean they basically were created by colonial powers in order to sequester you know the oil resources in the hands of a small you know a small elite um from the rest of the population. So it's just curious to me in some ways that with everything that you've described, how the Nigerian state, the most populous country with a huge territory, with these major divisions, with many secessionist attempts in earlier eras, you know, that it still continues and how it has survived through the pressures of the neoliberalization and the structural adjustment eras.

Max Siolun: Sure. I'll tackle the economic part of your question first. So in the 1970s, when the oil money was flowing, you know, everybody was partying, it was a jamboree. the military governments of that era, it never occurred to them that oil prices won't stay high forever. So everything they planned, everything they budgeted was based on the jamboree of the 1970s. So they started these very, very expensive national programs like They had free, national free education for all Nigerian school children from primary school all the way up to university level. Then when you got to university, it wasn't completely free, but it was nearly free. It was heavily subsidized. Now, that was all based on a 1970s budget. We get to the 1980s, all of a sudden, the world oil prices start plummeting and trouble starts because the military struggled to fund all these social welfare programs that it had committed itself to in the 1970s. And as we all know, It's very, very hard to take things away from people once they got used to it. So, you know, kind of rolling back those benefits was completely out of the question. So within the space of 10, 15 years, there's this remarkable economic turnaround where this country that is being predicted to be the first African superpower that is just stupendously wealthy, all of a sudden can no longer really pay for all the obligations, the construction projects, the development projects it's committed itself to and has to start borrowing money from the World Bank and the IMF. And the servicing of those loans by the 1990s becomes absolutely crushing, absolutely crippling. And then something else happens where the people that live in the oil producing areas, because by now oil has been extracted for 30 odd years or so, From their perspective, we are the ones that deal with the oil spills when the pipes get cracked or when oil spills. We are the ones that deal with the environmental damage, the polluted rivers, streams, the acid rain, the gas flaring. But the money is being sent to the big cities, Lagos, Abuja. Nigeria had so much money that Its way of dealing with an over-congested capital was just, oh, no problem. We'll just go and build a capital city from scratch somewhere else in the middle of nowhere because we've got the money to. So this new economic resentment started getting bred in the oil-producing areas because although Nigeria has 36 states, 75% of the oil comes from only three of those states. So of course, the indigents of those states feel Really, we're the ones feeding and financing the rest of the country, but we have no stake in this oil. And you had two contrasting national narratives or national patterns of political development where the other 33 states, oh, they loved being part of Nigeria because they got to enjoy the oil money. But those three states, they did not care anymore. And if Nigeria just broke apart, so be it. So late 90s, early 2000s, that's what led to this oil insurgency that made the international medium that some of your listeners may be tangentially familiar with, and also the military, which in the 1970s had been heralded as the savior, the national savior, all of a sudden everyone was seeing it for what it is, an unelected military dictatorship and a pro-democracy movement emerged in the 1990s.

Henry Hakimaki: You mentioned the collapse in oil prices of the 1980s and the inability to pay for obligations. This is something that I had mentioned in previous episodes of the show, and I wish that I knew that this was going to come up so I could have my statistics in front of me, but I don't have... I wasn't planning for this specific point. But I had mentioned previously in this conversation that prior to... oil really being the focus of the economy, Nigeria was agriculturally self-sufficient prior to the 1970s. But then throughout the 1970s, as they began to swim in money, essentially, as we were talking about with this oil boom, there was a massive shift away from domestic agriculture within the country to the extent where annually millions of tons of agricultural goods were having to be imported into Every year, and again, I wish I had the statistics on the specific numbers of millions of tons of each agricultural product, but the point was is that by the time the 1980s rolled around, Nigeria was extremely reliant on food imports. And at the same time, and as you just described, Max, oil prices collapsed and suddenly the Nigerian government finds itself unable to pay for many of its obligations. The Nigerian government at that point starts to put in a lot of import bans on food. at the same time that the agricultural sector within Nigeria had been completely destroyed throughout the period of the 70s. So you end up with a situation that's extremely difficult for the people in the country because you have this situation where the country is no longer agriculturally self-sufficient. They had been reliant for a decade and a half on food imports, and now because you're unable to pay for large-scale food imports because of the collapse in oil prices, you're having to ban food imports without having reoriented your agricultural industry to become self-sufficient again. Again, I wish I had the statistics on this, but Perhaps, Max, you can say a few words on how difficult that 1980s period was from an agricultural and food perspective in Nigeria. It's something, like I said, I've mentioned it in previous episodes, but I'm sure that you have something much more incisive than I do on that.

Max Siolun: I can speak probably more just to the general economic challenges. I can't speak to food in particular. I'm not an expert on that, but just the economic challenges. I think the problems that you highlighted... were all an outcome of a lack of long-term economic planning. So I mentioned these social welfare programs, free education and so on. The government in giving free education to primary school students, secondary school students, they didn't plan for what would happen when these kids graduated. Number one, you would have an explosion of people trying to enter university. Have you opened up enough universities for them? No. Because of that explosion of people entering university, have you trained enough professors to educate them at university level? No. Have you created a big enough job market to absorb all these school leavers and university leavers? No. It feeds into what you were saying, that the perception of the population is, oh, we're an incredibly wealthy country. We've got limitless oil money. Farming and agriculture became looked down upon. People didn't want to farm anymore. It was... viewed as an occupation for the uneducated, the unsophisticated. Everybody wanted to wear a suit and work in the oil sector because that's where the action was. That's where the money was. So you're absolutely right that the country had this problem of perception versus reality where the population, their economic and professional expectations had increased because of the vast amounts of money in the federal government repository. Number two, their professional expectations had increased because they're now educated and they are expecting to go into the tertiary sector of the economy and not the agricultural sector of the economy. So the oil, which was supposed to be a blessing, kind of turned out to be a curse because it just turned Nigeria really into a mono-economy where 90% of the foreign exchange earnings came from oil alone. And the challenge that you're discussing, it's not even just a 1980s problem. These challenges still exist till today in Nigeria, where the agricultural sector is still understaffed, one to a better term. And it was so badly neglected that when Zimbabwe, several years ago, when Zimbabwe kind of ejected, for want of a better term, the white farmers, Oh, Nigeria welcomed them with open arms because Nigerians don't want to farm. So Nigeria was delighted to find foreigners who were willing to farm. So this is a problem that exists in most oil economies where, or most, let's just say, natural resource rich economies, where it turns them into mono economies and they abandon all other, or most other sectors of their economy.

Henry Hakimaki: Yeah, absolutely. I just bring it up because the agriculture question is one that I tend to bring up in a lot of episodes, also related tangentially to the most recent book that I had done some work on. But I know Adnan and I are looking towards getting towards the conclusion of this episode, but I would be remiss to not have us talk about a few more coups. You mentioned that there was a... democracy movement that really um established itself in the 1990s but there were some coups that happened before then you mentioned the 1975 coup i had previously mentioned that there was a 1983 coup we really should mention the dimka affair that's a very interesting um event 1976 it would be very interesting to talk about his you know visits to the british high commission and the way that the trials double trials unfolded and whether or not we actually can ascertain what happened within that affair. I know I'm just, I'm saying this without explaining for the listeners what I'm talking about, but point is very, very strange and interesting story that occurred in, uh, in, in 76. So, uh, I guess, Max, can you just take us through the next few coups, any major points that you want to hit? Can you talk about the Dimka affair a little bit for my behalf? Because I would love to know, you know, what we can actually conclude with confidence from this. And then we'll move towards conclusions of this conversation after we discuss these coups and this affair.

Max Siolun: Sure. And, you know, that coup you mentioned, so for the benefit of the listeners, this is in February 1976, so it's almost to the day 50 years ago. And that coup is very, very important for a number of reasons. One is that it was the last time A Nigerian head of state was assassinated back in 1976 during that coup. And secondly, it's almost like Nigerian history has come full circle because Nigeria is democratic now. But just a few weeks ago, the Nigerian government announced that there was a coup attempt against the government. And that was the first coup in Nigerian history for, I don't know, 25, 30 odd years or so. The reason why I bring up the latest coup is that the reasons for it sound very, very similar to to the 1976 coup. So I mentioned that the officers who staged the 1966 coup are the same ones that staged the ones in the 1970s. Most, not most of them, all of them were Northerners. Some were Muslims, some were Christians. So what happened in the 1975 coup is that the victorious war leader, General Gowon, I mentioned to you, he'd been in power since 1966. The reason why he'd been in power for nine years is because although he was a Northerner, he was a Christian. So he's a Northerner. but he practices the religion of the South. So he was just this wonderful bridge between the North and South in identity terms. The officers who deposed him in 1975 were Muslims. So what you have is the Northern identity is being fractured into the Northern Muslims, the Northern Christians. In 1976, the Northern Christians strike back and assassinate the Northern Muslim head of state as he's driving to work and in morning traffic, morning commuter traffic. Now there is international ramifications to this because I mean, I don't know how much of this is conjecture, but there's allegations of British foreknowledge and even of CIA involvement. And you can edit this out if you don't want the letter CIA mentioned on your podcast.

Henry Hakimaki: We always greet our friendly CIA listeners. You know, we don't invite them to listen to the show, but we know that they are. So, you know, hello, CIA officers that are listening in. We don't have... Go ahead.

Adnan Hussain: Can you have a... How can you have a global left history podcast that doesn't discuss the CIA pretty frequently? And that's why they listen.

Max Siolun: So what's really interesting about this coup is that the coup leader, a guy called Lieutenant Colonel Dimka, on his way to stage the coup, he bizarrely pops into the British High Commission and has a friendly conversation with the British High Commissioner. And minutes later, the head of state is dead. So on top of that, before he staged a coup, he'd visited Britain and had discussion with a very, very senior military officer. So, of course, when the coup is being, in the post-coup aftermath, when the coup is being investigated, the Nigerian investigators become aware and have very uncomfortable conversations with the British High Commissioner and ask him, why is it that you are having a conversation with someone who killed the head of state just minutes before murdering the head of state? And why did you not think fit to communicate that conversation to us? Did you not think that this was a matter of national security that perhaps the government should know about? And it actually caused the biggest rift in Anglo-Nigerian relations ever. And unfortunately, the British High Commissioner could not satisfactorily answer those questions, and Nigeria expelled him. And relations between Nigeria and the British government did not fall for several years after that coup. But long-term, what that coup really did is that it shattered the innocence of the Nigerian army and of Nigerian military governments. It basically made them aware that some of these ethno-regional tensions and controversies that had led to the civil war They've not really gone away. They just, they were just bubbling beneath the surface. And all of a sudden these military officers in the government who used to travel around without security. The reason why they killed the head of state is because he didn't have a motorcade. He just drove himself around, just drove with his driver and one aid because he felt we're popular. You know, the whole country's behind us. We've overcome the narrative of the bitter narrative of the civil war that shattered that. And now Nigerian Heads of state basically drive around with a mobile battalion, a bit like the American head of state, you know, these incredible convoys with 50 to 100 armored vehicles in them. And that's probably why, since then, there's never been another assassination attempt on a Nigerian head of state.

Adnan Hussain: Well, I'm just wondering now, like, how would you assess if you were to look at it kind of synthetically? Well, in a way, I had a I had a question, which is where this is part of our African revolutions and decolonization series. In some ways, you could say Nigeria didn't have a revolution in the way that perhaps some other countries that liberated themselves from colonialism did. It came about through a different kind of process. And also, given, you know, the consequences that were so deep-rooted of colonial rule and subsequently so many of the concerns and fears of the ethnicized and regionalized differences that were... While endemic, we're certainly exacerbated, and as you've said, amplified by the forms of colonial administration, whether we should or could talk about, you know, it as having been decolonized, and especially when you have the influence of the World Bank and IMF really repatterning what had been a period of national sovereignty and national unity after you know, the civil war, that it has taken a different kind of turn, you know? What are the prospects for decolonization and revolution in Nigeria to complete, in some sense, the independence of the country? Where are we, and how do you see Nigeria going forward?

Max Siolun: So those subnational agitations and those controversies from the independence era, i.e. should the country be one country? If it is to remain united, what does unity mean? Those national questions are still being debated today. They've never been resolved. Now, the post-war Nigerian governments are, to some extent, carrying out policies which are almost reminiscent of the Brits. So there's this, I mentioned ethnic quotas and so on. That ethnic quota started in the military. It now extends to all facets of national life. Nigeria operates one of the largest affirmative action programs in the world. So in its constitution, there is a principle, a legally binding principle called federal character, that basically the way the courts have interpreted it and the system has interpreted it is that all state institutions from the police, the army, the civil service, the government, Even schools and universities must, quote, reflect the federal character of Nigeria. What does that mean? That's just a byword for an ethnic quota. So admission to universities is not just by merit. It's not just on who gets the best grades. It's each state has its own quota. Now, this ethnic micromanaging of national life, that was the government's way of making everybody in the country feel included. But all it's done is just made everybody more aware of ethnic and regional differences because I gave the example of a quota for entry into university. Say you're a very, very talented kid from state X and you get the grades to go to university, but then you can't because, oh, your state quota is full and you have to either wait till next year to be admitted, or you have to tell your parents, oh, please come up with loads of cash so that I can go to a private university outside the state system. Is that making that kid feel, feel more nationalistic or is it making that kid more aware and resentful of the ethno regional differences? So I would say that. The post-war innovations, the wars over, goodness, 55 plus years ago. It's going to 60 years now, nearly. Those innovations for preventing a balkanization of the country, in my opinion, should have been temporary. They've outlived their use for this. They had no business still existing in 50-something years after the war ended. And number two, this focus on oil, which we've talked about so much during the conversation, Nigeria, to some extent, by focusing so much on sharing the oil wealth, so much on sharing on ethnic lines, national resources, The country's leaders have kind of created the country that just exists to share money and jobs. And they've not done a very good job of creating a psychological compulsion for national unity. Now, there's some reasons for that. Because of the way the independence movement unfolded without a war of national liberation, and because it was disunited. There's no national hero figure like George Washington or Kenyatta and Nkrumah. And because of that, there's not one national figure that everybody can look to and say, this is the man or woman that created this country for us today. So what still exists in Nigeria today, unfortunately, is different competing visions of national unity. I don't think there's going to be another secessionist movement, but I do think those questions about what does staying together, what does national unity mean, those questions are going to continue for the foreseeable future.

Henry Hakimaki: And that was a great question from Adnan. And I'm very tempted to leave that as the final concluding question. But as we had discussed, as you were talking about in that final question, and this had come up throughout this episode, Nigerian history is a very interesting thing. And there's so many misconceptions and misunderstandings about it in the West. So I'm wondering if you'd be willing to take a stab at what you think is the biggest or most maybe the two biggest, if you can't narrow it down to one, the biggest misconception about Nigerian history, and particularly post-independence Nigerian history, since that was the focus of today's discussion, and how the discussion that we had today would help the listeners understand that it is a misconception or a misunderstanding of the history, because really, there are so many misunderstandings of Nigerian history, or just under-understandings, let's be frank. There's not a whole lot of understanding of Nigerian history in the Global North, unfortunately.

Max Siolun: I mean, I would extend that, Henry, to even within Nigeria, there's not a lot of understanding of Nigerian history in Nigeria, let alone outside Nigeria, because a lot of Nigerians tend to think that all their problems are just the outcome of misrule by the post-independence Nigerian leaders themselves. And there's not a lot of understanding of how much of these crises were embedded by the ingredients of colonial rule. And the reason for that is because history is not really taught in Nigeria. Because of the civil war and the desire to not allow a new generation of young people to absorb the bitter narratives of the civil war, the government several years ago just removed history from the national curriculum. So it's almost like you read Nigerian history, you get to the 1960s, There's a gap. It didn't happen. And you just jump forward to the oil boom. And I understand why the government did that. They were trying to heal the country. But unfortunately, it's caused this lacuna in A, literature, for the indigenous population or the external population, which is why Nigeria is misunderstood. I'd also say, I know I've been bashing Nigeria a lot. The area, if I can say the word, where the leaders perhaps deserve some credit is The American professor, John Padden, Professor John Padden, he used to be a professor emeritus at George Mason. He once described Nigeria as, quote, the most complicated country in the world. Just after he studied the country, he just couldn't make head and tail of just how complicated incredibly complex this country was. And we have to give the leaders a bit of country. If you look at other African countries like Rwanda, where speak the same language, have the same religion, and you look at the extent of crises that have happened in those countries that don't even have the complex of terrorism that Nigeria does. And then sometimes we have to doff our hats to Nigeria and say, you know, it's actually a miracle that you've not had a second civil war. It's actually a miracle that 99% of the time, Nigerians just kind of get along. 500 different languages, 100 million Christians, 100 million Muslims. And we only hear about the outbursts of sectarianism when it gets violent. But you don't actually hear about the 99% of the time where if you go to a Nigerian city or a Nigerian school where... You have, in a Nigerian university, you have hundreds of different languages, hundreds of different ethnic groups, and they all get along and there's no problems. So I think we should give Nigeria, I know South Africa is given credit as a rainbow nation. I think Nigeria sometimes doesn't give itself enough credit for suppressing some of these incredibly elaborate, almost irresolvable sectarian problems that it has.

Henry Hakimaki: A much more positive note than guerrilla history episodes typically end on, but I'm happy to hear it. So again, listeners, our guest was Max Ceylon, author of several books on Nigerian history. I recommend all of them. So I've been referencing most frequently today, Oil Politics and Violence, Nigeria's Military Coup Culture, 1966 to 1976. He's also written What Britain Did to Nigeria, A Short History of Conquest and Rule, and then the book that we focused on in our previous conversation, The Forgotten Era, Nigeria Before British Rule. Again, do listen to that previous conversation that we had with Max on pre-colonial Nigeria if you haven't done so already. Max, it's been a pleasure having you back on. I know that you have a podcast of yourself that's going to be launched soon. We don't have anywhere that we can direct the listeners to yet, but can you tell the listeners where they can find you online to keep up to date with when that is officially announced and where they can listen to that podcast? And also tell the listeners what the podcast is going to be about, I guess.

Max Siolun: Thank you so much for giving me time, airtime to plug myself, Henry. So yes, I've decided to start a history podcast, initially focused on African history, but it's going to enlarge over time and encompass global history as well. It's probably going to be launched in 2026, maybe Q2 of 2026. You can find me online and see the trailers for the podcast, which I've already created. I'm on X at Max Siolon. That's M-A-X-S-I-O-L-L-U-N. I'm also on Instagram on at Siolon. That's S-I-O-L-L-U-N. And if you want to hear more about the podcast, you can view the trailers for the podcast I posted on both of those channels. And it's going to be on all the usual podcast platforms, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, etc.

Henry Hakimaki: Very excited to hear that myself, and Max, we'll have you back on again in the relatively near future to talk about the colonial period, more specifically of Nigeria, and hopefully at that time we'll also be able to discuss the podcast being out. Adnan, can you tell the listeners where they can find your other excellent show and how they can keep up to date with what you're working on?

Adnan Hussain: Sure. Well, you could check out my show on YouTube or all the usual platforms, Adnan Hussain Show. Not a very inspired name. Max, kind of hopefully you'll think of a more exciting name for your podcast. But Guerrilla History was already taken, so that's the best name you could look for. So Uh, but you can check that out at Adnan Hussein show on YouTube. Um, and of course you can always follow me on Twitter X, um, at Adnan A Hussein, H U S A I N. Um, look forward to hearing, uh, you know, from you, uh, in the comments sections on the YouTube, we do a lot of live streams, um, weekly office hours program. And, um, panel live streams once a month and other sorts of things. So do check it out.

Henry Hakimaki: Absolutely. Highly recommend that. As for me, listeners, I'm pretty much impossible to keep up to date with these days because of all of the problems and accessing social media here in Russia. But I mean, I guess you can follow me on Twitter if you want at Huck 1995 H U C K one nine nine five, but no promises that I'll be on there anytime in the near future. But the more important thing that you can do is help support Guerrilla History and allow us to continue making this show. Again, you can do that by going to patreon.com forward slash Guerrilla History. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A History. And just a further reminder that this show is 100% listener funded and we're never going to run advertisements for you. So, you know, be glad because I know when I listen to podcasts, I have to use a VPN to download them these days, which is annoying in its own right. And so I get like five minutes of British or German advertisements on every podcast that I download, depending on where my VPN is connecting to. So, you know, appreciate that this one doesn't have any advertisements and help support us at Patreon. So with that being said, listeners, and until next time, solidarity.