Nigeria

by E. D. Morel

Lagos town would continue to be what the expenditure of much money, and the enterprise of the Yorubas, have made it, the commercial emporium of at least the western portion of the Protectorate, and the headquarters of the small surrounding area known as the “Colony” (vide Part II.), administered by a “Lagos Council,” which would replace the present “Lagos Legislative Council,” and be composed of much the same elements as the latter now consists of, presided over by a Resident. The functions of the Lagos Council would be confined to the Colony.

The headquarters of the Governor-General and the central seat of Government would be the high plateau immediately behind Lokoja, known as Mount Patte, situated in the very centre of the Protectorate, commanding the Niger and the Benue, within easy steam of Baro the starting-point of the central railway, and linked up with the western railway by a branch line to Oshogbo as indicated on the map. The Governor-General would be assisted by an Executive and Legislative Council. Of the former the Lieutenant-Governors and Senior Residents would be ex officio members, together with the Chief Justice, the Colonial Secretary, the Financial Secretary, and the officer commanding the troops. The official members of the Legislative Council would include the Directors of rail and river transport, of public works, of agriculture, of forestry and of commercial intelligence; the Director of mining; and the Principal Medical Officer. The unofficial members would include selected representatives of the educated native community, and, later on, one or two distinguished Mallams, and selected representatives of the European commercial and mining communities.

Possibly, in course of time, the work of the Council could be carried out in conjunction with periodical Durbars attended by all the important Emirs, but in no case would the functions of the Council be allowed to conflict with the Native Administrations of the Mohammedan Provinces.

SKETCH MAP OF NIGERIA, SHOWING SUGGESTED REARRANGEMENT OF PROVINCES.

The method of handling the finances of the Protectorate would depend to a large extent upon the capacity of the Home Government, in conjunction with the potential Governor-General and other advisers, to map out ahead a considered scheme of railway construction and improvement of fluvial communications, which would proceed from year to year and for which provision would be made. The whole problem of communications, both rail and river, ought to be placed under a special department, subject to periodical inspection by an independent expert sent out from home by the Colonial Office, and the services of consulting engineers in England disposed of if possible. The situation financially lends itself, in a general sense, to a certain boldness of treatment and departure from ordinary British West African precedent. Two distinct classes of budgets might with advantage, perhaps, be evolved, viz. a Colonial budget and the Provincial budgets. In other words, there would be a central budget and four local budgets, one for each Province. The Colonial budget would be fed by the customs revenue, the whole of which would be credited to it. (It may be estimated that two or three years hence the total customs revenue collected in Nigeria will amount to £2,500,000.) It would be augmented by the profits on the railways, the mining royalties, harbour dues, and pilotage fees (there should be a system of public pilotage on the waterways). The Protectorate could be authorized to raise a loan on its own recognizances of £5,000,000 redeemable in a term of years. This loan would be expended in a succession of public works—some of the necessary lines of rail are indicated in the map—in accordance with the scheme of construction mapped out as previously suggested. The Colonial budget would determine the successive instalments of expenditure out of loans, and would provide the interest on the new loan and on the existing loan of £5,000,000 contracted by Southern Nigeria (for public works in Southern and Northern Nigeria). The revenues of the Colonial budget from whatever source derived, other than from loans, would be distributed by the Governor-General in council for the administration of the four Provinces in accordance with their respective needs. These needs would show marked variation for some years to come. For instance, the hypothetical Northern and Central Provinces (i.e. the territory which now comprises the bulk of Northern Nigeria), relying upon the increasing regularity and juster assessment of internal direct taxation, the nature of which may roughly be termed a graduated property tax, might be expected to advance steadily towards the self-supporting stage. When that stage had been reached, the surplus would be set aside under the Provincial budget for extending the system of fixed salaries to native officials, for expenditure on provincial public works and economic research, improvements in sanitation, and so on, in collaboration with the native authorities of its various sections. A portion of my hypothetical Northern or Sudan Province is already self-supporting, viz. Kano. Indeed, but for the military establishment the whole of that Province would be showing to-day a handsome surplus and, apart from the public works to be met out of loans, would require—even if it continued to be debited with the military establishment—very little assistance from the Colonial budget. The hypothetical Central Province would require more assistance for a time, but, as in the Northern Province, the basis of an expanding land revenue is securely laid and a not inconsiderable mineral development bringing revenue, apart from royalties, is assured to it. On the other hand, most of the hypothetical Western Province and almost the whole of the Eastern Province—i.e. in combination, Southern Nigeria of to-day—produces no internal revenue whatever except licences, the amount derived from which will assuredly grow but will not become really large for many years. Therefore, until and unless the delicate problem of introducing direct taxation among peoples—the majority of whom we have been in touch with for years without requiring of them the payment of any form of tribute—were approached, the Colonial budget would have to furnish these Provinces with most of their administrative revenues.

An alternative scheme would be to abandon the idea of a Central Legislative Council for the whole Protectorate and of a new administrative headquarters, the Governor-General spending a certain time at the headquarters of each Province. Lagos would, under such a scheme, become the capital of the extended Western Province (see map), and the action of the Lagos Legislative Council would extend to the whole of that Province. A Legislative Council would be created for the extended Eastern Province. The administrative machinery of the new Central and Northern Provinces would be left as it is now. On the finance side the alternative scheme to the one I have sketched would be to let each Province contribute to the Colonial budget in accordance with its capacities upon a definite proportionate basis, the sums thus accruing to the Colonial budget, plus the loan funds, being utilized in the creation of public works on the lines already sketched. This alternative scheme, amalgamation on federation, would possess some advantages over the first, and compares unfavourably with it in others.

It will be objected that these suggestions do not take into account the present military expenditure of the Protectorates and are dumb with regard to the Imperial grant to Northern Nigeria. I have left a consideration of these two questions until now because they can, I think, be taken together. The military establishment of Southern Nigeria costs £100,000 per annum. That of Northern Nigeria costs £160,000 per annum. Neither is excessive in itself, although in the latter case it amounts to no less than 33 per cent. of the total expenditure of the Protectorate! It is not one penny too much, and to reduce the number of troops would be folly, having regard to the immensity of the country and the kind of political problem facing us. And yet could anything be more topsy-turvey? Here is a financially struggling Protectorate urgently in need of the most vital necessities; incapable even of building decent houses for its over-worked and short-handed staff; forced to deprive the latter of even their travelling allowances, and to sacrifice considerations of reasonable comfort and, therefore, of health for its personnel; in a position to pay so little for posts of enormous responsibility that the entire political expenditure is only some £70,000 per annum; able to devote but a miserable £1300 a year upon economic forestry, but saddled with this incubus of £160,000 upon a military establishment which has already been called upon (in the case of the last Ashanti war) to provide contingents for service outside the Protectorate, which would infallibly happen again, in the by no means remote contingencies of a further outbreak in Ashanti or disturbances in the Sierra Leone hinterland. This situation needs to be examined in conjunction with the Imperial grant about which so much fuss is made.

The nation imagines that Northern Nigeria is costing the Imperial Treasury something like £250,000 to £300,000 per annum. Nothing of the kind. The grants in aid from 1906 to 1909, inclusive, amounted to £1,220,000, or an average of £305,000. But against this must be set the direct profit to the revenues of the United Kingdom derived from the profit which the Mint makes upon the silver coin exported, in ever increasing quantities (and the process will go on extending), to the two Nigerias. The average yearly cost of silver in the last nine years has, I believe, varied between 2s. 0¾d. and 2s. 6⅞d. The coin at par value is issued at 5s. 6d. an ounce, and I am credibly informed that the profit to the Mint is considerably more than half the net import by Nigeria, seeing that half the face value of the coinage is greater than the cost of minting, plus maintenance of gold reserve and provision for remitting. The net export of coinage, virtually the whole of it silver, to the two Nigerias (i.e. the total exported minus the coin returned) amounted from 1906 to 1909 to £981,582. If the profit of the Mint is taken at only 50 per cent., it will thus be seen that the nation is making a direct average profit of nearly £125,000 a year out of the two Nigerias, against an average of £305,000 paid to Northern Nigeria by way of a temporary grant in aid. To say, therefore, that Northern Nigeria is costing the British taxpayer a quarter of a million a year or more, is to make a statement which is not in accordance with fact. What the nation advances directly, it recoups itself for directly in part; without counting that these grants are in the nature of a capital investment. Let this grant under amalgamation be cancelled, and let the Imperial Government, on the other hand, foot the bill for the military expenditure (which, as we have seen, amounts to £260,000), looking upon it, say, for the next ten years as Imperial expenditure. Nothing would so alleviate the whole situation, while at the same time simplifying it, and, as has been shown, the actual disbursement of the nation on this item would be considerably less, even now, than what it would appear nominally to be, owing to the profit made by the Mint on the silver coin sent out.

As already explained, the above proposals, illustrated in part by the accompanying map, are put forward merely as a basis for the discussion of a problem of some difficulty but of great urgency. I claim for them nothing more than that, and no conceivable scheme of amalgamation could be set down which would not lend itself to copious criticism. But that the mush of anomalies now obtaining cannot be perpetuated without increasing detriment to Imperial interests in Nigeria, I am fully persuaded. The existence of two public policies side by side in a single territorial area, where internal peace is rapidly fusing the indigenous communities, divided by an imaginary line which does not even correspond to natural boundaries and exhibiting multiple differences of aim and method—in some cases, acutely antagonistic interests—presents many obvious inconveniences and paves the way for future embarrassments of every kind. If these remarks can influence in any way an early and serious examination of the problem by the Colonial Office, they will not, however open to criticism, have been made in vain. Amalgamation must come. All realize that. Unforeseen events might very well, at a given moment, compel decisions of far-reaching moment being precipitately reached without due consideration being given to all the features of the case, such as characterized the amalgamation of the Lagos Colony and Protectorate with old Southern Nigeria in 1899. The advantages of clear thinking out ahead, and of taking the inevitable step before the situation has got tied up into more knots than it already contains, with calm deliberation, after a full and serious study of all the facts, surely needs no emphasizing. As to the man, a last word. The responsibility of selecting the official to be in supreme control over the amalgamated Nigerias is no light one. The task confronting a Governor-General, especially in the first five years, will be replete with difficulties. The post will need heavy calls upon tact, patience, and a peculiarly high type of constructive statesmanship. The only remark I would venture to make on the point is this. Any serious administrative error perpetrated in handling affairs in the north would be attended with consequences of exceeding gravity. That is a proposition I think no one will be inclined to dispute. It suggests either that the Governor-General himself should be personally acquainted with the political conditions of what is now known as Northern Nigeria, or, at least, that the Lieutenant-Governors of the hypothetical Northern and Central Provinces should be chosen from among the most experienced of the existing Senior Residents.