At a Glance
Ogbomosho, Journalism, and the Formation of an Orator
Akintola's formation as a public communicator preceded his legal training and shaped it. His early career in journalism — writing for Nigerian publications in the tradition of the nationalist press — gave him the habits of mind and the instincts for communication that distinguished him throughout his political career: the ability to find the angle that would engage a reader or an audience, the awareness of how language shapes perception, the journalist's instinct for the telling concrete detail that makes abstract argument tangible. These qualities, combined with the analytical rigour that his subsequent legal training provided, made him one of the most effective political communicators in a generation that included several gifted orators.
His oratory was different in character from Awolowo's intellectual authority or Azikiwe's inspirational pan-Africanism. Akintola spoke with a directness and an earthiness — a willingness to use Yoruba proverbs and popular idiom, to connect abstract political argument to the daily experience of ordinary Yoruba listeners — that gave his speeches an accessibility that more formally educated politicians sometimes lacked. He could hold a crowd, could manage the rhythms of call and response that Yoruba political oratory had inherited from its religious and ceremonial traditions, and could make people feel that the political choices he was advocating were choices that directly addressed their immediate concerns rather than abstract constitutional principles.
These communication skills were genuine assets to the Action Group in its competitive political environment, and Awolowo recognised their value. Akintola's rise through the party reflected both his personal abilities and the Action Group's need for figures who could build and maintain electoral support in constituencies beyond Awolowo's own Ijebu base — particularly in the interior Yoruba towns of Oyo and Ogbomosho whose political culture was somewhat different from the Lagos-centred world that dominated the party's leadership.
The Western Region Premiership: Inheriting a Success
When Akintola became Western Region Premier in 1959, he was inheriting one of the most impressive governmental records in the history of African independence politics. The free primary education programme, the expanded health infrastructure, the roads and agricultural development, the establishment of the first television service in Africa — all of this had been built under Awolowo's leadership, and the task Akintola faced was to continue and build on what his predecessor had created while establishing his own governmental identity and responding to the political challenges that the approach of federal elections created.
His continuation of the Western Region's developmental programmes in the early years of his premiership demonstrated that whatever disagreements were developing between him and Awolowo, his commitment to the substance of the Action Group's governmental achievement was genuine. The Western Region continued to build schools, to expand health services, to invest in agricultural development. Akintola's own specific contributions — his management of particular portfolios and his handling of specific governmental challenges — showed a competence that was consistent with the standard his predecessor had set.
The political difficulty was strategic rather than administrative. Awolowo's plan for the Action Group was to contest the 1964 federal elections as a national opposition party, building on the regional base and the cross-ethnic alliances that had made the party a significant federal presence to challenge the NPC-NCNC coalition for national power. Akintola's assessment — whether it reflected genuine political disagreement about strategy or personal ambition for the kind of governmental influence that federal alliance could provide, or some combination of the two — was different: that the Action Group's interests were better served by participation in the federal coalition than by opposition to it, and that a Western Region Premier who allied with the federal government would have more practical influence over the region's development than one who maintained a principled but powerless opposition.
The Break, the Crisis, and the Descent into Chaos
The conflict between Akintola and Awolowo became public in 1962 and produced some of the most chaotic and disturbing scenes in the history of Nigerian parliamentary democracy. The Western Region House of Assembly session in which the conflict came to a head — with members throwing chairs, with physical confrontations on the floor of the chamber, with the parliamentary process entirely breaking down under the pressure of the political conflict — was a spectacle that shocked Nigerian and international observers and that the federal government used as justification for declaring a state of emergency in the Western Region.
The federal emergency gave the NPC-NCNC coalition the opportunity it had been seeking to weaken the Action Group, which was its most effective national opposition. The emergency administration displaced both the Awolowo faction and the Akintola faction from power, but the subsequent political arrangements — Akintola's restoration as Premier under the new NNDP he formed in alliance with the NPC — made clear that the federal government's primary interest had been in destroying the Action Group as a national opposition force rather than in resolving the Western Region's governance crisis. Awolowo's prosecution for treasonable felony completed the political neutralisation of the Action Group's leadership, and Akintola governed a Western Region that was nominally under the control of the federal coalition but was in practice increasingly ungovernable.
The disputed Western Region elections of 1965 — in which widespread evidence of fraud and violence produced results that the opposition refused to accept — generated a political crisis of extraordinary intensity. The "Operation Wet ie" — the burning of houses and property associated with NNDP supporters by opposition activists — reflected the depth of the political alienation that Akintola's government had generated, and his administration's inability to restore order or political legitimacy created the atmosphere of governmental breakdown that provided the justification, if not the cause, for the military coup of January 1966.
Death at Government House
Akintola was killed at Government House in Ibadan in the early hours of 15 January 1966 — shot by soldiers of the coup that Major Kaduna Nzeogwu and his colleagues had launched simultaneously in several Nigerian cities. He died alongside members of his staff, in the official residence that the position he had fought so hard to hold had given him. The irony of his death in the same coup that also killed Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa — with whom he had allied against Awolowo, whose imprisonment his alliance had enabled — was not lost on contemporary observers or on subsequent historians.
The coup plotters' targeting of Akintola alongside the NPC federal leadership reflected their analysis of the First Republic's political failure: the Western Region crisis, in their view, was as much a symptom of the political corruption and manipulation that the coup was intended to end as the federal government's electoral chicanery. Akintola's government in Ibadan and Balewa's government in Lagos were both, in the coup plotters' analysis, part of the same broken political system — a system whose failure had made military intervention necessary.
A Career's Impossible Accounting
The assessment of Samuel Akintola's political career requires holding two contradictory truths simultaneously. The first is that he was a man of genuine ability — an effective governmental administrator, a gifted political communicator, a figure who contributed real value to the Action Group's years of achievement in the Western Region. The second is that his choices in 1962 and after — the split with Awolowo, the alliance with the federal coalition, the manipulation of the 1965 elections — were among the most destructive acts in the history of the Nigerian First Republic, contributing directly to the collapse of the civilian political order that he and his colleagues had spent their careers building.
The structural analysis of his choices — the argument that the First Republic's political incentives systematically pushed capable politicians toward decisions whose individual rationality produced collective catastrophe — is both correct and insufficient. It is correct because the structural pressures were real: the electoral system's winner-take-all character, the control of governmental resources and their availability for patronage, the absence of effective constraints on the use of state power for political purposes all created incentives toward the kind of politics that the Western Region crisis exemplified. It is insufficient because within these structures, individual choice remained possible, and Akintola's choices were different from those of figures like Aminu Kano or Anthony Enahoro who operated in the same structural environment and maintained different commitments.
He was killed at fifty-five, in the ruins of the political order his choices had helped to destroy. His life and his death together constitute one of the most instructive — and most tragic — case studies in the history of the Nigerian First Republic.