The colonists defaulted to violence in response to protest because they lacked legitimacy with the natives. Ninety-five years after the colonial regime massacred Opobo women in Ikot Abasi at the onset of the Aba Women’s Uprising, the response of Independent Nigeria to the idea of dialogue with its people under the government of Bola Ahmed Tinubu remains largely un-evolved and, if anything, even more lethal. Today, as then, whenever government does that, it is because it suffers a costly crisis of legitimacy.
115 years ago, in 1909, Walter Egerton, the barrister-turned-colonial administrator, and then governor, introduced the Sedition Ordinance into the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. This drew a sharp response from Christopher Sapara Williams, Nigeria’s first lawyer, the son of an Egba mother and an Ijesha father, who challenged the Ordinance, describing it with considerable prescience as “a thing…