On October 1, 1960, Nigeria became independent. The ceremony took place at the Race Course in Lagos — later renamed Tafawa Balewa Square — where the first Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who had held the office since 1957, addressed the nation. Princess Alexandra of Kent, representing the Queen, presented the constitutional instruments of independence. The British flag came down. The green-white-green went up. There were speeches. There was music. There was, for a moment, the feeling that something new had begun.
But what exactly had begun? What was the country that was born that day? Not the country we know now — not the presidential republic with its thirty-six states and its federal capital territory and its winner-take-all politics. The Nigeria of 1960 was a different creature entirely.
The Independence Constitution of 1960 created a parliamentary democracy modeled on Westminster. The head of state was the Queen, represented by a Governor-General — a position filled by Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first Nigerian to hold it. The head of government was the Prime Minister, chosen from the party that commanded a majority in the House of Representatives. The country was divided into three regions — North, East, and West — each with its own premier, its own legislature, its own civil service, and its own constitution.
The regions were powerful. They controlled their own police forces. They collected their own revenue. They managed their own education and health systems. The federal government handled defense, foreign affairs, and a limited set of other matters listed on the Exclusive Legislative List. The regions controlled everything on the Residual List — which was most of domestic governance.
This was not an accident. It was a negotiation that had played out across a decade of constitutional conferences — from the Richards Constitution of 1946 through the Macpherson Constitution of 1951 to the Lyttleton Constitution of 1954. The leaders of the three regions — Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, who led the Northern People's Congress; Obafemi Awolowo, who led the Action Group in the West; and Nnamdi Azikiwe, who led the National Council of Nigerian Citizens — had spent years arguing about the structure of the country they were about to inherit.
Awolowo wanted true federalism — a system where the regions were sovereign in their own spheres and the center existed only to coordinate. He laid out this vision in his 1947 book, Path to Nigerian Freedom. Bello wanted the North, with its larger population, to maintain proportional representation at the center. Azikiwe's position evolved over time — he initially favored a more unitary structure but came to accept federalism as the necessary compromise. The Independence Constitution was the result of these competing visions.
It lasted six years.
By 1966, the first military coup had happened. By 1967, the Eastern Region — now led by Lt. Col. Ojukwu, after Azikiwe's departure to the federal level and Michael Okpara's removal by the military — had declared itself the Republic of Biafra. By 1970, the civil war was over and the regions had been broken into twelve states by Decree No. 14 of 1967. The parliamentary system was gone. The regional premiers were gone. The police forces were centralized. The revenue was centralized. Everything was centralized.
What was promised in 1960 — a federation of strong regions, a parliamentary system with checks and balances, a country where no single group could dominate — was dismantled in less than a decade. And what replaced it was the opposite: a unitary state disguised as a federation, where the center controls everything and the states survive on monthly allocations from Abuja.
The Independence Constitution was not perfect. It had real flaws — the census controversies of 1962 and 1963 that inflamed regional tensions, the Action Group crisis of 1962 that destroyed the Western Region's political stability, and the deeply flawed federal elections of 1964. Its bill of rights provisions in Chapter III, while present, lacked strong enforcement mechanisms. But it was a negotiated document. It represented what the people who built it could agree on. It was the closest Nigeria has ever come to a constitution that its own leaders designed for their own people.
Everything since has been imposed — by military decree, by constitutional conference, by fiat. The 1999 Constitution, under which Nigeria currently operates, was drafted by a committee appointed by General Abdulsalami Abubakar's military government and handed to civilians as a parting gift. It begins with the words "We the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria" — but no referendum was held. The people were never asked.
The question that the Independence Constitution raises is not whether we should go back to 1960. We cannot. The question is whether we have ever, since 1960, sat down as a people and decided — freely, without guns, without coups, without the shadow of military power — what kind of country we want to be.
We have not. And until we do, every constitution we operate under will be someone else's answer to a question we were never allowed to ask.