The Awolowo Akintola Leadership Tussle: A Reinterpretation
The underlying causes and consequences of the Awolowo Akintola leadership tussle which began in the defunct Western Region and spilled to other parts of Nigeria have attracted quite a great deal of deliberate and inadvertent misinterpretations and falsehoods. While the principal actors and their disciples struggled to swing the pendulum of justification and 'truth' to their respective sides; most of the inferences, references, rebuttals and conclusions of scholars on the underlying causes of the rift are not consistent with facts. Ostensibly, the rift was the outcome of Chief Obafemi Awolowo's reluctance to hand over to Ladoke Akintola as Premier of Western Nigeria following the former's resolve to contest the 1959 federal elections into the Central Legislature; Akintola's desire to be the de jure Premier of Western Nigeria; his pointed opposition to the Action Group's adoption of a socialist ideology on the eve of independence, the so called 'Coca Cola War' between the wives of the duo as well as Akintola's interface with the Northern People's Congress, NPC. The last was Akintola's supposed gravest offence. While scholars have almost over flogged the other causes of the Akintola Awolowo leadership tussle, there is paucity of literature, or at best parried accounts, on the epicentre of the crisis Akintola's political interface with Northern Nigeria political leaders. This paper intends to fill this gap by attempting a reinterpretation of some of the factors that may have influenced the political rapport between Akintola and NPC leaders.