Parties And Politics In Northern Nigeria

The pattern of Nigerian politics was perhaps radically altered when at the 1958 Constitutional Conference in London, the decision was taken to base representation in the Federal Parliament on a population basis rather than on the previous (pre-1958) system, which was one of equality of representation between the North and the South. With this change, which gave Northern Nigeria a representation greater than the combined total of the East and West Regions, the balance of power tended to shift to the North. With ‘regionally’1 based political parties, and a tendency for these parties to control the regions in which they are based, the possibility of a one-party system emerging in Nigeria was suggested in 1962.