Word: obafemi
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Hired Thugs. The campaign they conducted-to elect the 312-seat national House of Representatives-was anything but a model for democracy. The most attractive opposition leader, Western Region Premier Obafemi Awolowo, had been sentenced to a ten-year jail term for supposedly attempting to overthrow the federal government. On both sides, hired thugs (known as "party stalwarts") invaded enemy political rallies with rocks, machetes, guns, even bows and arrows...
...overthrow the government of Nigeria by violence, for Nigeria has been one of the most stable of Africa's new nations. But it seemed almost incredible that the ringleader could have been the bespectacled chief prisoner in the dock of a Lagos courtroom last week-the respected Chief Obafemi Awolowo...
Political Play? Nigeria's complex crisis is being played out in the scrupulously decorous High Court in the federal capital of Lagos. There, in the course of a trial that has dragged on for four months, the leader of the opposition, Obafemi Awolowo, last week opened his own defense against a government indictment charging him and 24 other leading politicians with conspiracy to overthrow the government. Nearly all the defendants are members of Awolowo's Action Group, the party that rules Western Nigeria and represents it in the federal Parliament. Chief Awolowo is not alone in branding...
...Rebel's Conversion. By then Nigerian politics had taken on a permanent three-way stretch. In the Ibo East, Zik's National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons held sway. In the West, the Action Group, headed by shrewd, stodgy Chief Obafemi Awolowo (pronounced Ah-Wo-lo-wo), spoke for the Yoruba people. Northern power then (as now) meant tall, solemn Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna (commander) of Sokoto and boss of the Northern Peoples Congress...
...handed out by supporters of Eastern Region Premier Nnamdi ("Zik") Azikiwe, or noisily deflated colored toy balloons producing the sound of a crowing cock, symbol of Zik's N.C.N.C. Party. Overhead, imported skywriters drew a palm tree in the sky, symbol of Zik's free-spending opponent, Obafemi Awolowo, premier of the Western Region. Twelve busloads of ringers from Ghana were discovered just in time, and turned back at the border before they could vote. In one outlying area, four chiefs were arrested for registering 500 children under ten years old. In Lagos, pols tried to register...