Edeson Online News: November 16, 1904 First Nigerian President Nnamdi Azikiwe Was Born

Thursday 16 November 2017

November 16, 1904 First Nigerian President Nnamdi Azikiwe Was Born

Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe, P.C. (16 November 1904 – 11 May 1996), usually referred to as Nnamdi Azikiwe or Zik , was a prominent Nigerian nationalist and statesman who served as the first President of Nigeria from 1963 to 1966, holding the presidency throughout the Nigerian First Republic . He is popularly considered a driving force behind the nation's independence and came to be known
as the "father of Nigerian Nationalism". Born to Igbo parents in Zungeru , present-day Niger State, Azikiwe learned to speak Hausa , the main indigenous language of the Northern Region at an early age.
He later lived in Onitsha , his parental homeland where he was raised by his aunt and grandmother and learned the Igbo language.

A sojourn in Lagos exposed him to the Yoruba language and he was in college, he had been exposed to different Nigerian cultures. Motivated to get a university education, he traveled to U.S. and attended various colleges including Storer College, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and Howard returning to Africa in 1934 to start work as a journalist in the Gold Coast . In British West Africa, Azikiwe was an important advocate of Nigerian and African nationalism , first as a journalist and later as political leader.

After a successful journalism enterprise, Azikiwe entered active politics, co-founding the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) alongside Herbert Macaulay in 1944. He became the secretary-general of the National Council in 1946.

On 16 November 1960, he became the Governor General , with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as Prime Minister . On the same day became the first Nigerian named to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom. With the proclamation of a republic in 1963, he became the first President of Nigeria . In both posts, Azikiwe's role was largely ceremonial.

During the Biafran (1967–1970) war of secession, Azikiwe became a spokesman for the nascent republic and an adviser to its leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu . He switched allegiance back to Nigeria during the war and publicly appealed to Ojukwu to end the war in pamphlets and interviews published at the time.
After the war, he served as Chancellor of University of Lagos from 1972 to 1976. He joined the Nigerian People's Party in 1978, making unsuccessful bids for the presidency in 1979 and again in 1983. He left politics involuntarily after the military coup on 31 December 1983. He died on 11 May 1996, at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, in Enugu , Enugu State, after a protracted illness. He was buried in his native Onitsha .
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