Tafawa Balewa
1912 — 1966 · First Prime Minister of independent Nigeria; assassinated in the January 1966 coup
Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was born in December 1912 in the town of Tafawa Balewa, in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Of modest origins in the Bauchi Emirate, he rose through the one path then open to gifted northern youths: the schoolhouse. He trained at Katsina Higher College between 1928 and 1932, became a teacher, and was later among the first northern Nigerians sent to study at the University of London's Institute of Education, returning home with a broadened vision and an unbroken bond to his people.
He entered public life in 1947, elected to the Northern Region's House of Assembly, and soon carried the North's voice into the central legislature in Lagos. A founding pillar of the Northern People's Congress, he served as a minister in the 1950s and, in 1957, was made the first federal Prime Minister of Nigeria while the country still stood under colonial rule.
When Nigeria won its independence on the first of October 1960, Balewa retained the office, guiding the young federation through its fragile early years and speaking for it upon the world stage with a dignity that earned him the name "the Golden Voice of Africa." He was returned to power in the elections of 1964, holding the union together amid deepening regional and ethnic strain.
On the fifteenth of January 1966, a military coup swept away the First Republic, and Balewa was seized and killed, his body found days later by a roadside near Lagos. A teacher who became a nation's first steward, humble in bearing and steadfast in purpose, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa is honored as a founding father of Nigeria. May his name endure with the dignity he gave his young nation.
References
- Abubakar Tafawa Balewa - Wikipedia
- Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (1912-1966) - Central Bank of Nigeria
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