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Biography of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Sir
Name: Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Sir
Birth Date: 1912
Death Date: January, 1966
Place of Birth: Tafawa Balewa, North East State, Nigeria
Nationality: Nigerian
Gender: Male
Occupations: prime minister
Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Sir
Alhaji Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (1912-1966) was the first prime minister of independent Nigeria, serving from 1957 to 1966.Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was born in Tafawa Balewa, North East State, Nigeria. Unlike the majority of Northern Nigerian political leaders, he was of humble background, his father having been a client to a district head. After attending Katsina Teacher Training College (1928-1933), he was a teacher and later headmaster of the Bauchi Middle School. He studied at the London University Institute of Education (1945-1946), where he received a teacher's certificate in history.During World War II Tafawa Balewa had become interested in political activities. In 1943 he founded the Bauchi Discussion Circle, an organization interested in political reform. In 1948 he was elected vice president of the Northern Teacher's Association, the first trade union in Northern Nigeria. In 1949 he helped organize the Northern People's Congress (NPC), originally conceived as a cultural organization but by 1951 a political party.In 1946 …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…discussions on constitutional reform which ultimately led to independence. Nevertheless, Tafawa Balewa often seemed limited in his own personal power, because as vice president of the NPC he was answerable theoretically to Sir Ahmadu Bello, premier of the Northern Region and president of the NPC. Some observers have concluded that this relationship with Bello hindered Tafawa Balewa in handling the major crises which arose in the first years of Nigeria's independence. It was one of these crises, the Western Region elections of 1965, which led to chaos in the Western Region and was the immediate cause of the downfall of Tafawa Balewa's government. In January 1966 a discontented segment of the army attempted a coup d'etat in which Tafawa Balewa was kidnaped and murdered. Further Reading There is no biography of Tafawa Balewa, but one can read of his activities in Richard Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation (1963).
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