Nnamdi Azikiwe Biography: First President of Nigeria
This is the Biography of late Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, (born March 16, 1904, Zungeru, Nigeria—died March 11, 1996, Enugu ), The last Governor-general and first President of independent Nigeria (1963–66), he is regarded and rightly so as one of the founding fathers of Nigeria.
Nnamdi Azikiwe attended various primary and secondary mission schools in Onitsha, Calabar, and Lagos. In 1925, he went to the United States, where he attended several schools and bagged several certificates and degrees, which includes bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Lincoln University, Pennsylvania, USA and a second master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1934, Nnamdi Azikiwe went to the Gold Coast (now Ghana), where he founded a nationalist newspaper and was a mentor to Kwame Nkrumah (later the first president of Ghana) before returning to Nigeria in 1937. There he founded and edited newspapers and also became directly involved in politics, first with the Nigerian Youth Movement and later (1944) as a founder of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), which became increasingly identified with the Igbo people of southern Nigeria after 1951.
In 1948, with the backing of the NCNC, Azikiwe was elected to the Nigerian Legislative Council, and he later served as premier of the Eastern region (1954–59).
Nnamdi Azikiwe led the NCNC into the important 1959 federal elections, which preceded Nigerian independence. He was able to form a temporary government with the powerful Northern People’s Congress, but its deputy leader, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, took the key post of prime minister . Azikiwe received the largely honorary posts of President of the Senate, Governor-general, and, finally, President.
In the conflict over Biafra (1967–70), Azikiwe first backed his fellow Igbo, traveling extensively in 1968 to win recognition of Biafra and help from other African countries. In 1969, however, realizing the hopelessness of the war, he threw his support to the federal government.
After Olusegun Obasanjo turned the government over to civilian elections in 1979, Azikiwe ran unsuccessfully for President as the candidate of a newly formed Nigerian People’s Party (NPP). Prior to the 1983 elections, the NPP became part of an unofficial coalition of opposition parties known as the Progressive Parties Alliance (PPA). The coalition, which was tenuous at best, could not agree on one presidential candidate and decided to field two—Azikiwe, representing the NPP, and Obafemi Awolowo, representing the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN). Awolowo, the leader of the UPN, was a political rival of Azikiwe, with whom he was often at odds. The coalition had largely deteriorated by the time of the election, and neither Azikiwe nor Awolowo won.
An important figure in the history of politics in Nigeria, Azikiwe had broad interests outside that realm. He served as chancellor of the University of Nigeria at Nsukka from 1961 to 1966, and he was the president of several sports organizations for football, boxing, and table tennis . Among his writings are Renascent Africa (1937) and an autobiography, My Odyssey (1970).
