ETHNICITY AND THE NIGERIAN CIVIL WAR (1967- 1970)

For most African nations, ethnic balancing has remained a huge problem to national development. In many occasions, ethnicity has become a very important political tool in the hands of greedy politicians parading themselves as nationalist or political elites. The manipulations of ethnic sentiments in politics have resulted to several civil wars in different parts of Africa. This is not far fetch from the circumstances surrounding the birth of African nations, as a result of European creations. Nigeria as a modern nation state is one of the British creations in West Africa. The amalgamation of 1914 brought together the Northern and Southern protectorates to form a single entity now called Nigeria. Despite the amalgamation, there was no deliberate effort by the British to build a solid foundation of unity among the people. The South and North were ruled as separate entities. These two main regions had several ethnic groups that contended for superiority in the state. Thus, the North-South dichotomy was established by the British colonial authority for their own convenience. From such a background of mistrust and agitation, conflicts characterized by ethno-linguistic identities were inevitable. It is in this light that this paper, however, seeks to interrogate ethnicity in relation to the Nigeria civil war. The scholarship on the Nigerian civil war pays less attention on the ethnic factor of the war and this paper hopes to fill that lacuna. By adopting the historical method and utilizing a myriad of sources to focus on ethnicity as the immediate cause of the Nigerian civil war, the paper concludes that ethnicity has been a major impediment to national cohesion in Nigerian politics.