A Nation Betrayed: Nigeria and the Minorities Commission of 1957 (review)

This case study of the administrative mechanics of Nigerian decolonization was drafted in the 1970s but not published until 2010. The author, Michael Vickers, is best known for his co-authored 1973 volume, Structure and Conflict in Nigeria, 1960–1966.¹ The detail he has captured in this monograph makes it an essential acquisition for research collections in African history. While the book breaks no new theoretical ground, it shines a revealing light on the politics of decolonization inside the British Colonial Office and offers new insights into a pregnant moment in Nigerian and British imperial history.

The Minorities Commission (also known as the Willink Commission) comprised 4 British colonial officers appointed by the Colonial Secretary to respond to concerns voiced by Nigeria’s ethnic minorities. The Commission’s task was to first assess minorities’ fears of political and economic marginalization at the hands of ethnic majorities within the country’s 3 administrative regions, and then find ways of “allaying” those fears. Vickers argues that in that charge was an “opportunity to ease, perhaps correct” Nigeria’s “unresolved ethnic tensions.” (10) The failure of the Commission to seize this opportunity lies at the root of the book’s titular betrayal.

In each region were alliances of minorities demanding the creation of new states within Nigeria but outside of the existing regions; the Commission represented their last realistic chance to have these demands addressed before independence in 1960. But as Vickers makes clear in the case of the Western Region, the structure of the Commission’s task—with limits on time and possible remedies, as well as on its ability to gather evidence and protect witnesses—made it all but impossible for the Commission to recommend major changes. New states, the Colonial Office determined, would be a threat to Nigerian stability and endanger an orderly transition to independence; minority votes, not British restrictions, would have to temper the power of regional governments. The leaders of Nigeria’s “Big Three” political parties happily agreed. The Commission, Vickers concludes, compounded its betrayal by being more concerned with “the plight of majorities” than minorities.

The nexus of ethnicity and political power lies at the heart of the book, and frames some of the author’s most interesting evidence. Much of the testimony the Commission heard either advanced or refuted allegations that the Western Region’s Action Group government manipulated political and economic resources to reward its supporters and, said many of its critics, consolidate power and opportunity in Yoruba hands. Testimony dealing with the allocation of funding for education, agriculture, infrastructure, and local government offers glimpses of how state power operated at ground level. Yet in spite of what Vickers argues was a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, the Commission’s report naively accepted the optimistic assumption that “tribalism, the acknowledged source of minorities’ fears, and indeed the cause of their demands, would not increase in the future.” (213)

Despite an impressive body of evidence the book’s title misrepresents its scope. In making his arguments Vickers focuses entirely on the Commission’s activities in the Western Region, particularly its handling of demands by some Western Nigerians for the creation of a mid-west State. That state would, they hoped, sever the Region’s non-Yoruba population from its Yoruba majority and, with it, the dominance of the Action Group political party. While there is attention to the desire of some mid-westerners to be united with members of their ethnic groups in the Eastern Region, there is no meaningful discussion of the Commission’s work in either the East or the Northern Region. Indeed, 7 of the book’s 12 chapters recount, sometimes moment by moment, several days of testimony from the mid-west cities of Benin and Warri. These middle chapters combine background and narrative with bits of analysis, but most of the book’s analytical work unfolds in its concluding chapters, of which chapter 10, a critical appraisal of the Commission’s report, is the strongest. Still, even here...