COLONIAL governments determined the security and orderly governance of colonial societies. From this structure of the provinces of the British Empire arises the statecraft challenges of the post-colonial society of independence Nigeria.

THE anti-historically impatient analysts may question the base line chosen for the identification of the issues addressed in these election reform series. There is good reason why the choice of the colonial as base is the relevant empirical base. The reason is that Nigeria’s transition from colonial condition to the post-colonial was evolutionary and that post- colonial changes in the structures and functions of our inherited institutions have been adaptive.

AMIN, a Uganda soldier became President of Uganda for eight years (1971-1979). He came from the Kakwa people of the West Nile area, in the far north of Uganda near the DRC and Sudan borders. For several decades many Kakwas and various other Sudanese peoples (together called “Nubis”) served in the British colonial army.

BOTH the old rulers and the rulers-in-waiting ruled the same society, the colonial province of Nigeria. On September 2, 1957 Tafawa Balewa became the first Prime Minister of the British Colony, Nigeria. After the 1959 Independence elections he became on October 1, 1960, the first transitional Prime Minister voted for in colonial Nigeria and to be Prime Minister of an independent Nigeria. The federal election in 1964 was the first organised by the Federal Government of an independent Nigeria.

THE importance of this issue will now be apparent as in retrospect we appreciate the fact of one party rule in Africa’s first two decades of independence. Similar conditions produce the supplanting of these one-party rule systems by military rule.