9-th, 2004 - 26: 1   (Posted By: Webmaster)
The Nigerian Civil War    

The Nigerian Civil War

If pan-African accord has been elusive, so too has the ability of legitimate governments to forestall internal disunity and protect themselves against revolution, particularly by their military establishments. Between 1952, the year that Colonel Nasser staged the revolt, which overthrew the government of King Farouk, and 1968, which closed out with a bloodless coup in Mall, there were over seventy incidents, either staged or planned with military collusion, and twenty of these led to the institution of new army-led governments. Dahomey endured five successful coups through 1969, and General Mobutu twice took charge of the government in Congo Kinshasa where lack of public order and indiscipline in the armed forces had been chronic. It was an army revolt in June 1965, which unseated Ahmed Ben Bella and installed Colonel Houari Boumedienne in his stead as chief of state in Algeria, while military revolts swept away civilian rule in Burundi, Upper Volta, and the Central African Republic in 1966. President Sylvanus Olympio was assassinated in 1963 during a successful coup in Togo, and President Nkrumah was deposed by his army and police in February 1966, scarcely a month after a major upheaval in Nigeria had overthrown the federal and regional administrations and instituted a period of growing instability in that unhappy land. Sierra Leone experienced two successful military coups, the first which did away with civilian rule in March 1967, and the second which re-established it in April, 1968. Late in that same year, the long-lived government of Modlbo Keita came to an abrupt, but peaceful, end when the president's army deposed him in favor of a military administration.

This unstable character in African political life reflects the complexities of a society in process of great charge. One major problem in many areas has been a tenacious tribalism, which complicates all efforts to build a sense of national unity and pride. In part this is a legacy of colonial times when territories were formed without regard for ethnic cohesion, but it also reflects the great diversity of peoples in Africa where loyalties have traditionally been centered in the smaller units of family or clan. A second factor is found in the rising frustration of people who looked upon independence as the total solution to the problem of poverty, only to find an improved standard of living still beyond reach. When this sense of frustration reached the armed forces, it touched individuals able to translate their sentiments into action, and revolution followed. That there have been many instances in which control was returned to the civilian authorities attests to a genuine desire for reform rather than an arrogation of power, but unviable economic units like Dahomey and intractable problems of development everywhere have perpetuated and intensified political unrest. It was in Nigeria that these uncertainties burst forth in most violent form on

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