On October 1, 1960, the Union Jack came down in Lagos and Nigeria became independent, the largest of the African territories to go in 1960, with about 45 million people. Nnamdi Azikiwe became governor-general and Abubakar Tafawa Balewa prime minister, and the new state kept the Westminster system and the Queen as head of state. A republic followed in 1963.
Britain had assembled Nigeria out of two protectorates and a colony, amalgamated in 1914, and had governed the north through the emirs and indirect rule. That left three regions with three economies, three school systems, and three parties that were largely regional: the NPC in the north, the NCNC in the east, the Action Group in the west. The federal election of 1959 produced no majority, and the government at independence was a coalition of the northern and eastern parties.
The arithmetical fact that shaped everything was the census. The north was counted as more than half the population, which gave it more than half the seats. The count was disputed. The Eastern region, the most densely settled and the most heavily mission-schooled, produced the clerks and then the officers, and the gap between northern political power and southern education ran through every crisis of the 1960s.
The first came in January 1966, when a group of mostly Igbo army officers killed the prime minister, two regional premiers and the head of the army. A counter-coup followed in July, led by officers from the north. In the massacres that followed in the north, tens of thousands of Igbo civilians were killed and about a million fled east. Biafra declared independence in May 1967, and the war that ended in January 1970 killed between one and three million people, mostly by starvation.
Oil had been found at Oloibiri in 1956 and became the centre of the economy in the 1970s. Oil came later. Nigeria is now the largest oil producer in Africa and the most populous country on the continent at more than 220 million people, and the revenue from that oil has been the main prize in every political contest since the 1970s.