Tafawa Balewa

Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was born in Tafawa Balewa, in northern Nigeria, on the seventh of December 1912, the son of a district head in the Bauchi Emirate. He took his teacher-training certificate at Katsina Higher College in 1933, taught at Bauchi Provincial School through the 1930s, and completed a year of further education at the University of London Institute of Education in 1945-46.

He entered the Northern House of Assembly in 1947 and the federal House of Representatives in 1952. He co-founded the Northern People's Congress (NPC) in 1949. In 1957 — three years before formal independence — he was named Prime Minister of the Federation of Nigeria, holding the position through Nigerian independence on the first of October 1960 and the constitutional transition to a federal republic in 1963.

His six years in office produced the political compromise that held independent Nigeria together across its first decade: the federal structure that balanced the four regions, the parliamentary system the British had bequeathed, and the diplomatic alignment with Britain and the United States that resisted continental Pan-Africanist pressure to align with the Eastern bloc. He hosted the Lagos Conference of January 1962 — the moderate counterpoint to Nkrumah's Casablanca Conference — that produced the founding compromises of the Organisation of African Unity.

He was assassinated by junior military officers in the coup of the fifteenth of January 1966. His body was found in a roadside ditch outside Lagos five days later. He was fifty-three. The coup precipitated the Nigerian Civil War.

He is honored here as the first Prime Minister of Nigeria, whose six-year compromise held the country through independence.