INQUIRY BRINGING NIGERIA TURMOIL

THOMAS F. BRADY



All Three Regions Are Seen Politically Affected by case of Fund Charges.

Politics in Nigeria is in an uproar. The country?s best known politician, Dr Nnamde Azikiwe, is warming up for the official inquiry into charges that he has grossly misused Government funds.


The political circus is three ringed: The Nigerian Federation is composed of three ethnically distinct regions, each dominated by its own political party. The most serious aspect of the crisis is its possible threat to the always precarious unity of enormous British colony of 32,000,000 Africans and 15,000 Europeans.


?Doctor Zik? as he is known, is busy touring the Eastern Region, of which he is the Prime Minister, ?explaining his policy? to his fellow tribesmen. The Ibos are fiercely loyal to their Prime Minister and his Party, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons .

Kola Balogun, the party?s secretary, summed up what is apparently the view of most Azikiwe partisans when he said yesterday ?if we must choose between self-government and good government I choose self-government? Self-government in the Eastern Region means government by ?Doctor Zik?


Azikiwe Called the Issue

Speaking for the Western region, the land of the Yoruba people, Prime Minister Obafemi Awolowo expressed a decidedly different view. ?Nigerian nationalism is now at mortal grips, not with British imperialism, but with the unprincipled philosophy of Doctor Azikiwe,? he said.


Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, who is generally regarded as the most powerful political leader of the third and biggest region, the Moslem North, took a dispassionate but nonetheless disturbing stand. He said the problem was strictly the Eastern Region?s and would remain so until the findings of an inquiry commission appointed by the British Colonial Office in London, last July 24, were known.

But he continued, if the commission should find Dr. Azikiwe guilty of misconduct and if Dr. Azikiwe then should take the issue to the people of the Eastern region and be returned to office, ?other regions would have to find means to protect themselves from association with a region that had shown itself to be without public morality.?

He added that he had said from the outset that ?no matter what the commission may find, Azikiwe will come out of this stronger than ever in his own region.?


There has long been secession sentiment in the North, where more than half of the Nigerian population lives, but Mr Abubakar has consistently supported the federation.


Chief Awolowo said that if self-government for the Western Region should be postponed beyond the end of the year because of Eastern Region?s crisis, Britain ?would forever have placed a premium, albeit unwittingly, on political rascality in whatever might be left of Nigeria .?


The inquiry into ?Doctor?s Ziks? financial maneuvers will begin Monday under the chairmanship of Sir Stafford Foster-Sutton, Chief Justice of the Nigerian Federation. The proceedings have necessitated postponement of a constitutional conference originally scheduled for next month to establish immediate, full self-government for the North and for a federation of the three regions.


The charges against Dr. Azikiwe are that he engineered the investment and deposit of 2,000,000 British Pounds ($5,600,000) of Eastern Region funds in the African Continental Bank, which he controlled and allegedly used for his private business ventures.


Dr Azikiwe has retorted that the investigation is an imperial plot to protect a British banking monopoly and postpone self-government.


However, neutral observers here are generally of the opinion that the British Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, ordered the inquiry reluctantly only after charges by a disaffected former Azikiwe lieutenant had created a scandal that could not be ignored.