Nigeria: The Mistake of 1914 and the Amalgamation Disaster

Nigeria: The Mistake of 1914 and the Amalgamation Disaster

On January 1, 1914, Lord Frederick Lugard signed a piece of paper.

That single document merged two completely different territories into a country called Nigeria—a name coined by a British journalist for a London Times article seventeen years earlier.

No referendum was held. No consultation with the people living there. No consideration of whether the hundreds of ethnic groups, two dominant religions, and vastly different systems of governance could ever function as a single nation.

The merger happened for one reason: the Northern Protectorate was broke, and the Southern Protectorate had money. Britain wanted to stop subsidizing the North.

That's it. That's the entire vision behind Africa's most populous nation.

And 111 years later, Nigerians are still dealing with the consequences.

Two Countries, One Stroke of a Pen

Before 1914, there was no Nigeria. There were the Sokoto Caliphate and the Bornu Empire in the north. There were the Yoruba kingdoms and the Benin Empire in the southwest. There were the Igbo communities and the city-states of the Niger Delta in the southeast.

These weren't primitive societies waiting to be organized. They were complex civilizations with established governance systems, trade networks, and centuries of history.

The British didn't unite them. They conquered them separately.

In 1900, Britain created two protectorates with similar-sounding names:

Northern Nigeria Protectorate: 716,880 km², predominantly Muslim, ruled through the emirate system via what Lugard called "indirect rule." Traditional emirs remained in power as long as they served British interests. Christian missionaries were largely kept out to maintain Muslim domination.

Southern Nigeria Protectorate: 206,888 km² (less than one-third the size of the North), religiously diverse with Christian, Muslim, and indigenous communities. British officials were more directly involved in governance. Christian missionaries operated freely, establishing schools and hospitals.

For fourteen years, these two territories had different colonial personnel, legal systems, land tenure laws, educational policies, and systems of governance. They were, in every meaningful sense, two different countries.

Then Lord Harcourt, Britain's Secretary of State for the Colonies, decided it was time for a wedding.

"A Rich Wife of Substance"

The reason for amalgamation wasn't nation-building. It wasn't a vision of African unity. It was money.

Northern Nigeria had been running on a budget deficit for ten years. Its revenue wasn't enough to meet even half its cost of administration. The British Treasury paid grants-in-aid totaling over £4 million in the fourteen years of the protectorate's existence—non-refundable payments, not loans—plus another £865,000 in compensation to the Royal Niger Company when its charter was revoked.

This couldn't continue. The British Treasury wanted out.

In 1913, Lord Harcourt made the solution explicit in an after-dinner speech to the Colonial Service Club:

"We have released Northern Nigeria from the leading strings of the Treasury. The promising and well-conducted youth is about to effect an alliance with a Southern lady of means. I have issued the special licence and Sir Frederick will perform the ceremony… May the union be fruitful and the couple constant!"

There it is. The founding philosophy of Nigeria: the poor Northern "husband" would be subsidized by the rich Southern "wife." Custom revenues from southern ports would pay for northern administration.

This was not a marriage of equals. It was a financial arrangement designed to solve a British accounting problem.

Who Was Lord Lugard?

Frederick John Dealtry Lugard was trained as an army officer. He had served in India, Egypt, and East Africa, expelling Arab slave traders from Nyasaland and establishing British presence in Uganda. He worked for the Royal Niger Company in the 1890s.

In 1900, Lugard became the first High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria. For six years, he brutally suppressed resistance. In 1906, a radical Muslim uprising that received support from fugitive slaves was crushed without mercy.

When Lugard advocated for amalgamation as early as 1904, he wasn't thinking about what was good for Nigerians. He was thinking about his career. Amalgamating the two Nigerias would solve the budget problem and carry with it a promotion—he would become Governor-General of the newly combined territory.

His writings make clear that he never envisioned Nigeria as a single political entity. His Political Memoranda, his Amalgamation Reports, and his numerous writings show no guiding vision for a unified Nigerian nation.

Neither did his successors.

His successor as Governor-General, Hugh Clifford, warned in 1919 about the need for centralized coordination. But Richard Palmer, who came after him, stated plainly that Nigeria "was a mere geographical expression, the European label attached to three divergent though contiguous chunks of Africa."

Even the British administrators who created Nigeria didn't believe it could work.

What the Architects Said

The people who made Nigeria didn't expect it to survive.

Margery Perham, one of Britain's foremost colonial experts, concluded: "The day when Nigeria, from being a name written on a map by Sir George Goldie and an administrative framework put together by Lord Lugard, becomes a true federation, still more a nation, is still far away."

Raymond Leslie Buell, who wrote the forward to Awolowo's book, placed Nigerian unity a century away—meaning he thought it might happen around 2047.

British diplomat Sir Peter Smithers, reflecting in 1998, was blunt: "The creation of Nigeria involved forcing several different ethnic, cultural and religious groups into one political structure. In retrospect of forty years, it is clear that this was a grave mistake which had cost many lives and will probably continue to do so."

Cost many lives and will probably continue to do so.

He was right.

What Nigerian Leaders Said

The Nigerians who inherited this creation were equally skeptical.

Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who would become Nigeria's first Prime Minister, said in 1948: "Since 1914, the British Government has been trying to make Nigeria into one country, but the Nigerian people themselves are historically different in backgrounds, in their religious beliefs and customs and do not show themselves any sign of willingness to unite. The fact that we are all Africans might have misguided the British Government. We here in the North take it that 'Nigerian unity' is not for us."

Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Premier of the Western Region, wrote in his 1947 book Path to Nigerian Freedom: "Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression."

Sir Ahmadu Bello, Premier of Northern Nigeria, complained publicly that "the mistake of 1914 has come to light."

Three of Nigeria's most important founding leaders—from three different regions—all said the same thing: this isn't going to work.

The Consequences

The most spectacular eruptions of instability in Nigeria have emerged on the north-south fault line created in 1914:

The military coups of 1966: The January coup was led by Igbo officers and killed northern political leaders. The July counter-coup was led by northern officers and targeted Igbo military personnel. Both events were framed in north-south terms.

The civil war of 1967-70: When the southeast seceded as Biafra, it represented an attempt to repeal the 1914 amalgamation. Between one and three million people died.

The annulment of June 12, 1993: When MKO Abiola, a Yoruba Muslim from the south, won Nigeria's freest election, the northern military establishment annulled the results. The ensuing crisis lasted years.

The Sharia crisis of 2000s: When northern states implemented Sharia law, it polarized the country along religious lines that track closely with the north-south divide.

The north also threatened secession in 1953 and 1966. The east attempted it in 1967. Today, separatist movements—IPOB in the southeast, Yoruba Nation in the southwest—continue demanding dissolution.

111 years after amalgamation, the search for unity has eluded the country. The call for dissolution resonates at every corner.

The Uneven Development

The amalgamation didn't just create political problems. It created developmental ones.

Lugard and his successors protected northern emirs from Christian missionary influence. This preserved Muslim domination—and prevented the spread of Western education that missionaries brought.

In the south, missionaries established schools and hospitals. A Western-educated cadre emerged that was anxious for independence and modernization.

In the north, educational and medical services lagged far behind. The protective policies meant that western influences had very little impact on the Muslim population.

By independence in 1960, the regional disparities were enormous. The south had more schools, more hospitals, more professionals. The north had more land and—crucially—more people.

These spatial differences in education, communications, sanitation facilities, hospitals, and housing bred ethnic competition and rivalry that persists today.

The Question Nobody Asked

The most extraordinary aspect of Nigeria's amalgamation was how little thought the British gave to its long-term consequences.

The architects had no guiding vision or objective. They did not contemplate the north-south differences. They paid little attention to how much British rule had amplified the pre-existing differences between the two regions.

They knew the north was predominantly Muslim with a feudal emirate system. They knew the south was diverse with a growing Christian and Western-educated population. They knew these regions had different legal systems, land tenure laws, and educational policies.

And they merged them anyway. To fix an accounting problem.

Even if amalgamation was necessary for colonial administrative convenience, why wasn't it reversed or reconfigured when it became apparent that Nigeria would one day become an independent self-governing country?

The answer is simple: the British didn't care. By 1914, they had created their sphere of interest. By 1960, they were leaving. What happened after was not their problem.

As Richard Akinjide, a former Attorney-General of Nigeria, put it: "In fact, the so-called Nigeria created in 1914 was a complete fraud. It was created not in the interest of Nigeria or Nigerians but in the interest of the British. Nigeria was created as a British sphere of interest for business."

What Now?

111 years later, Nigeria exists. 230 million people live within its borders. It has oil wealth, a dynamic private sector, and the largest economy in Africa.

But it also has a federal system that struggles to accommodate regional differences, an endless rotation of power between north and south, and periodic eruptions of violence along the same fault lines drawn in 1914.

Can the "mistake of 1914" be corrected without dissolution? Can Nigeria become the true federation that Margery Perham thought was "still far away"?

Some argue for true federalism—devolving more power to states and regions, letting Nigerians govern themselves more locally.

Some argue for restructuring—redrawing the internal boundaries to create more coherent units.

Some argue for confederation—maintaining economic ties while granting greater autonomy to component parts.

And some argue for dissolution—accepting that the British experiment failed and allowing Nigerians to form new, more coherent nations.

What's clear is that the current arrangement—a unitary government pretending to be federal, a north-south rotation pretending to be democracy, a single country pretending to be a nation—isn't working.

Lord Lugard created Nigeria to solve a British problem. He succeeded.

It's up to Nigerians to solve the Nigerian problem he created.