Corruption in the Western Region
” In 1962 tensions had emerged between Awolowo and his deputy, S. L. Akintola, who had succeeded him as Premier of the west when Awolowo moved to the federal parliament. Akintola complained that Awolowo was continuing to attempt to govern the region from Lagos, and he himself increasingly advocated attempting to join the federal governing coalition.
Awolowo, however, maintained a strong grip on his party and eventually sponsored a vote of no confidence in the Western Regional House of Assembly, seeking to replace Akintola with another Action Group leader more sympathetic to Awolowo’s leadership. Awolowo’s sympathizers made up a clear majority of the Western House of Assembly but Akintola’s minority of supporters disrupted its proceedings and prevented the process from playing out. Eventually the federal police were called in.
Courts ruled that Akintola should remain the Premier. The case was appealed to the Privy Council in London, which found for Awolowo’s majority faction of the Action Group. The federal parliament responded by removing the Privy Council’s appellate jurisdiction. In the interim many members of the regional and federal parliaments defected from Awolowo’s faction of the Action Group to Akintola’s faction.
Meanwhile, a cache of weapons was discovered in Lagos, which the federal government alleged was evidence of a plot masterminded by Awolowo to take over the government. He and a number of Action Group politicians were tried for treason, and Awolowo was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison.
The consequence of this drama was that the sitting Western Regional government lost a considerable amount of its popular standing. However, the federal coalition faced much less active competition from the western regime. However, the Action Group remained something of a threat to both members of the coalition, even though Akintola’s faction party had chosen to join it.
The chaos of the Western Regional crisis emerged directly from the competitive logic of party politics in the First Republic, both internally as the Action Group debated whether it was better to join the government or remain in opposition and across the federation as the three major political parties maneuvered for advantage and for inroads into their rivals’ home bases. Political and constitutional logic intersected with the new forms of government financing and with the mass politics of development as a means of conceptualizing public entitlement. The rest was ugly.
The politics of the Western Regional assembly and rumors of coup plots were only the most dramatic end of a broader and more systematic shift in how government was negotiated. Where the case of Emir Sanusi exhibited considerable continuities with cases of corruption at earlier periods, the new domain of mass electoral politics and ministerial government dictated corresponding shifts in the corruption-complex, manifested in the role “corruption” played in the regional crisis.
Accusations of corruption played a critical role in Chief Awolowo’s sidelining and the destruction of the Action Group. Looking at that process in more detail thus is a useful window onto how corruption was transformed in this period. A drama that played out alongside the Awolowo/Akintola split and Chief Awolowo’s treason trial began in May 1962.
The Western Regional Marketing Board was discovered to be operating on an overdraft from the Bank of West Africa of approximately £2.5 million despite having taken in revenues of £68.6 million across the eight years of its existence. The marketing board’s legitimate activities and investments did not seem to equal such substantial outgoings. As a consequence, the Federal Prime Minister appointed a commission of inquiry to investigate where the money had gone.
The Coker Commission took testimony across the rest of 1962, returning its report on 31 December. The commission’s specific charge was to examine six statutory corporations that had received loans or other payments from the marketing board, thereby depleting the latter’s funds. The commission discovered serious irregularities in each corporation; these are documented exhaustively in its report.
These irregularities were complex, ranging from questionable investments and sweetheart deals to money that had vanished entirely. While the details were bewildering, the commission’s basic findings were more straightforward: marketing board funds had been improperly funneled toward political expenditures meant to bolster the Action Group.
The party had subsidized its own activities with funds that were supposed to be devoted to stabilizing export crop prices and investing in development projects. The board had also deposited money into banks controlled by people with tight connections to the Awolowo faction of the Action Group, thereby profiting them personally. Some of these people had also received support for their businesses through grants from development authorities.
The Coker Commission’s report was not shocking in and of itself. The diversion of marketing board funds had been talked about for years, and reports of misconduct included all regions. As with the case of Emir Sanusi, the only real question was whether the activities documented by the Coker Commission were any different from activities going on in the Northern and Eastern Regional governments.
Indeed, Dr. Azikiwe had been the subject of a similar investigation in 1956, when he was Premier of the Eastern Region. The allegations against him were that the Eastern Regional Marketing Board had deposited substantial monies in the African Continental Bank, which Dr. Azikiwe founded and which he and his family continued to control. That commission of inquiry found shocking irregularity in these business transactions and ruled that “his conduct in this matter has fallen short of the expectations of honest, reasonable people” and that “he was guilty of misconduct as a Minister.”
Despite such criticism, Dr. Azikiwe was not prosecuted, nor did his political career suffer. Chief Awolowo did not emerge from his scandal similarly unscathed. The underlying issues in the Western Regional scandal were strikingly similar to those in the Eastern Regional affair: in each case, funds meant to stabilize producer prices or to fund development were diverted for politicians’ self-interest.
If anything, the Western Regions scandal was less personal: where Dr. Azikiwe benefited personally from official malpractice, Chief Awolowo seems to have benefited politically rather than personally. While some Action Group officials were found to have improperly benefited their own enterprises with funds taken from the Western Regional Marketing Board, Awolowo did not so immediately serve his own interests.
The authors of the Eastern Region Commission of Inquiry were if anything concerned to preserve Dr. Azikiwe’s political career, but the Coker Commission had no similar compunction. The differences are evident in how the Coker commission framed the question of Chief Awolowo’s culpability. Its report was published in four volumes, which describe in detail the testimony taken before it, and the reasons it arrived at conclusions about guilt or innocence.
In this regard, the report is extremely compelling, at least so far as such reports can be: its conclusions and analysis are dry, dispassionate, but occasionally biting. Damning conclusions appear all the more so because they follow a list of particulars presented with disinterest. Testimony and evidence are weighed, reasonable conclusions drawn. The tenor is moderate; condemnations come only after dry conclusions about factual misstatements. Few figures come out well; some are adjudged dishonest and malign, others stupid or incompetent.
This method is the report’s power. Tracing what happened in particular transactions or deals ultimately can demonstrate particular officials’ honesty or dishonesty, and thus their worthiness to remain in office or not. The report’s conclusions about Chief Awolowo, thus, appear to emerge only from an incremental evaluation of the marketing board’s financial history.
The report’s topline conclusion was that Chief Awolowo orchestrated all financial malpractices in the Western Region.
His deputy, successor, and rival, Premier S.L. Akintola, was adjudged largely innocent of wrongdoing. Akintola’s vindication was not the most ringing endorsement ever made: “He … impressed us as a veritable deputy who all along the line had relied upon his leader. We are satisfied with his evidence to the effect that appointments to all political offices in the Region even during his tenure of office were made by him only with the consent of Chief Awolowo.” Chief Akintola could not be held responsible for his own government’s financial mismanagement.
By contrast, the report would argue at length for a portrait of the federal leader of the opposition as a spider whose web of corruption ensnared public monies to his party’s nefarious aims. The conclusions of Awolowo’s guilt and Akintola’s innocence are doubly striking, since they were published in the immediate aftermath of Akintola’s triumph over Awolowo and his faction of the Action Group. Interpreting the Premier as a mindlessly loyal deputy took determination. Like Akintola’s innocence, Awolowo’s guilt emerged as a series of assertions and interpretive leaps carefully developed through an intricate narrative structure.
The report’s rhetorical crafting is central to this process. To take an instance almost at random, the report contains an extended discussion of the regional government’s acquisition of the land occupied by a village called Moba. The village was bought from its original owners for £11,000 by two officials of the National Bank of Nigeria who were also senior Action Group officials in October 1958.
Shortly afterward, they sold it to a businessman for £150,000. This buyer sold it again, this time to the National Investment and Properties Company for £718,000 in July 1959. The regional government then requested a firm of valuers to assess the land, and it found it to be worth £850,000. Accordingly it paid that sum in June 1961.
The company’s managing director, Chief S. O. Shonibare, also a senior Action Group member, then made a series of payments to the Action Group’s treasurer for slightly more than that total.
The Commission took testimony into these transactions and also into the conduct of the survey firm that came up with the valuation, concluding that the complexity of the transactions was a way to disguise the principals’ intention to transfer government money to the Action Group.
It also concluded that the survey firm had involved itself in numerous conflicts of interest and that its valuation was suspect: the relatively high valuation of the land presupposed the development projects the land was being acquired for. If anything this land was less valuable than other nearby plots.
Chief Shonibare was held up for particular opprobrium and represented as having been the organizer of much of the fraud in this case — the surveyors’ overvaluation of the property and the peculiar chain of ownership after the land’s original sale.
Ultimately, however, Chief Awolowo was the responsible party: it was “entirely impossible that as the Federal President of the Party and as the evidence establishes the man in charge of and in absolute control of the Party funds he should be unaware of the whole plan and purpose.”
While Shonibare was the managing director of the National Investment and Properties Company, Awolowo “organized [its] formation,” and “the multitude of entries in his diary about [it] clearly demonstrate how much he had the matter of the National Investment and Properties Company Limited at heart. He it was who nominated the directors, and we are satisfied that the character Shonibare derived all his inspiration with regard to the affairs of the Management of that Company from Chief Awolowo.”
The positive testimony cited in support of these conclusions is somewhat less than compelling. Claiming that Chief Awolowo had been concerned to acquire Moba quickly lest the federal government buy it first and realize the substantial profits to be made there, the witness reported he had gone to Premier Akintola to report Awolowo desired to acquire the land quickly, which the regional government then did as a matter of urgency.
That detail does support the conclusion that Awolowo rather than Akintola was the guiding light even in regional policy, but it also suggests he was deluded about the prospects for profit from the Moba undertaking.
There is no reason to construe the evidence differently from the Coker Commission or absolve Awolowo (or the Action Group leadership more generally) from the charge of funneling government resources to their own ends. But at the very least Chief Awolowo managed to maintain what might have appeared plausible deniability to a friendlier tribunal.
The Moba incident illustrates a more general quality of the report: the rights and wrongs of the governments case against Chief Awolowo were less important than its general tenor.
It is not unreasonable to suppose Awolowo was ultimately responsible for systematically diverting the marketing boards funds for the benefit of his party and his supporters — not just in a ministerial sense of collective responsibility but in the sense of having crafted the policy.
Nonetheless, the specifics of the case against him were more suggestive than definitive, and they depended on a literal hermeneutics of suspicion: damning testimony was balanced by exculpatory testimony or by absence of other forms of direct evidence. Chief Awolowo’s guilt in specific instances was demonstrated by the miasma of misconduct emanating from the totality of the transactions under investigation.
In this regard, the Coker Commission is similar to the Muffett Commission. Both investigations publicized malpractice and did so judiciously. Both are ultimately unconvincing, or at least they beg the question of why they attacked their specific targets while others remained relatively unscathed: the Emir of Zaria retained his office in 1963; Premier Azikiwe did the same in 1956; the Sardauna of Sokoto’s conduct as Premier of the North was not investigated at all.
Why Emir Sanusi and why Obafemi Awolowo?
As was the case in much earlier times, the obvious answer lay in their vulnerability on other fronts. However, something novel was at play in the investigation of Obafemi Awolowo, emerging from the periods poisonous federal politics, and demonstrated by the commissions determined absolution of Chief Akintola.
It is far-fetched that a panel as distinguished as the Coker Commission would have reached its conclusions without any awareness of their political convenience to the government.
The commission’s findings required construing Chief Awolowo’s actions as uncharitably as possible while remaining almost manically convinced of Chief Akintola’s innocence. It was disingenuous to construe the latter as a “veritable deputy,” given his actual conduct in office. The commissions report — and indeed, much popular Nigerian political history — tends to construe corruption as being a set of nefarious plots orchestrated by singular villains.
In that regard, the image of an Awolowo who orchestrated all Action Group misconduct is a familiar trope. The more obvious conclusion would have been that sweetheart deals and public funds diverted to political parties and to corporations controlled by their members were a more or less universal feature of First Republic politics.
If Akintola was less the architect of such schemes than Awolowo, that presumably has more to do with his subordinate position than with absolute innocence. And the commission’s great enthusiasm for construing innocence and powerlessness on favored figures and damning others for their villainy almost certainly has more to do with the politics of 1962 than with such peoples empirical actions.
Awolowo, by contrast, was portrayed as a much more sinister figure, who “was responsible for all the ills of the Western Region Marketing Board .
” He was the architect of “the most infamous part of the set-up,” and even when there was no direct evidence of his improper interference in any of the board’s transactions, scrutiny of his diary showed he had held meetings about the board’s beneficiary organizations.
The tricky part was that “Chief Awolowo did not himself take any steps which will clearly show that he was involved in any matter; indeed in almost all the transactions in which the events revealed him as the motivating spirit, his name does not appear on the record. He always did everything through the hands of somebody else.”
Nonetheless, the commission continued, “We are satisfied by and large that Chief Awolowo knew everything about this diversion of large sums of money both from the National Bank of Nigeria Limited and the National Investment and Properties Company Limited into the coffers of the Action Group. His scheme was to build around him with money an empire financially formidable both in Nigeria and abroad, an empire in which dominance would be maintained by him by the power of the money which he had given out.”
The Commission also referred darkly to “Chief Awolowo’s continued association with foreign institutions, newspapers, or political associations” though it made no direct accusation about where such invidious contact might have led . In the context of Awolowo’s trial for treason, his association with foreign institutions needed little additional comment.
The report of the Coker Commission was not Obafemi Awolowo’s greatest problem, unlike Commissioner Muffett’s report for Emir Sanusi. In Chief Awolowo’s case, corruption was not the main explanation for his political relegation. Rather it was part of a much more systematic attempt to remove his influence in the run-up to Nigeria’s federal elections in 1964.
His regional powerbase was destroyed by the defection of Chief Akintola and his faction. His liberty, and his position as leader of the opposition, were taken away as a result of his treason trial.
Nonetheless, the accusation of corruption attacked his legitimacy as a political leader. In that, it failed miserably. The Action Group’s supporters were unimpressed by the findings of financial shenanigans.
The basic logic is nicely captured in Wole Soyinkas description of the popular reception accorded Adegoke Adelabu, an NCNC leader from Ibadan whose mass following posed the greatest challenge to the Action Group and Chief Awolowo: Such was his hold on his followers that when, as a then regional Minister, he was accused of financial wrongdoings, he drove his newly acquired motorcar into Dugbe market and invited the throng to ride in it and treat it as their own, protesting: “This is what I bought with the money I am alleged to have stolen. It belongs to you all. Treat it as your very own property.”
If they could have done so, the ecstatic crowd would have lifted the car, with him in it, and danced round the town. It was, however, one of those long, gaudy American limousines so beloved of the first-generation politicians, so they settled for carrying him shoulder-high all the way from Dugbe to Mapo Hall.. .. They proceeded to the living quarters of his main detractor, summoned him out, stripped him naked and ransacked his residence.
It is striking that Awolowo’s reputation — very much in Western Nigeria, but more broadly as well — was not seriously harmed by the condemnatory words of Justice Coker and his colleagues. However one construes “corruption” as an activity or as a charge, the memory of Obafemi Awolowo seems to be determined primarily by assessments of the goods he brought to his political constituencies. And those, as a general principle, continue to be judged as substantial.
Even his less politically inspirational subordinates, such as Alfred Rewane, are remembered less for crimes during the First Republic than for their subsequent activities. Rewane, like too many others, is remembered for his martyrdom during the regime of Sani Abacha more than shady business dealings during the 1960s.
This is a pattern that would occur and recur in subsequent decades.
- “March 1963– Peace Returns To The West – Commissioner Coker (left) and his assistant: The Coker Commissioner completely cleared Chief Akintola. January was the month of joy and sorrow for the Western Region of Nigeria. The month saw the end of the seven-month-long state of emergency; the publication of The Coker Commission of Inquiry into the Affairs of Certain Statutory Corporations; the triumphant return of Chief Samuel Akintola, the suspended Premier; the appointment of Chief Joseph Odeleye Fadahunsi as the new Governor, and return of peace – or semblance of it – to the region.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 