by Olaitan Babatunde
On the morning of September 20, 1923, something historic happened on the narrow streets of Lagos and the coastal town of Calabar. For the first time in the history of what would one day become Africa’s most populous nation, ordinary men walked toward a polling station to cast a vote. But before any Nigerian could celebrate this milestone as a triumph of democracy, one question demanded an honest answer: whose democracy was it, really? The 1923 election was conducted under the newly enacted Clifford Constitution of 1922, which introduced limited elective representation confined to the urban centers of Lagos and Calabar, while excluding the northern provinces from any electoral participation entirely. Out of a country of over 18 million people, only around 4,000 people registered to vote in Lagos out of a population of 99,000, while just 453 registered in Calabar. The franchise was designed with walls. Only wealthy men who earned at least £100 per year were allowed to vote. Poor people and women were not allowed. Nigeria had been handed a ballot box, but the British had decided very carefully who was permitted to reach inside it.
Against that suffocating backdrop, one man saw opportunity where others saw obstruction. Olayinka Herbert Samuel Heelas Badmus Macaulay, civil engineer, journalist, grandson of the legendary Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, and the man history would come to call the Father of Nigerian Nationalism, moved fast. Herbert Macaulay founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) on June 24, 1923, as Nigeria’s inaugural structured political organization. The party’s manifesto was incendiary for its time: it demanded local self-government for Lagos, non-discriminatory private enterprise, free primary education, and the Africanisation of the civil service. Macaulay leveraged the Lagos Daily News to publicize these platforms, framing the election as a contest between Nigerian self-determination and colonial paternalism. Standing against the NNDP was Dr. Joseph K. Randle’s People’s Union, a more conservative political association that campaigned openly for the continuation of British rule. Whilst market women could not vote, being women, they were a highly influential force, campaigning vigorously for the NNDP. Ten candidates contested the three Lagos seats in total, and four ran for the single seat in Calabar, with all four Calabar candidates running as independents.
At the end of the poll count, the NNDP swept the polls decisively, with all three of its candidates winning the three available seats: Joseph Egerton-Shyngle, Eric Moore, and Dr. Crispin Adeniyi-Jones. In Calabar, a lawyer named Ata Amonu won the sole seat available on the platform of the Calabar Improvement League. There was no recorded widespread violence surrounding the 1923 election. The contest was not decided on the streets but through the mobilization of Lagos’s educated elite, traders, and professionals who had been stirred by Macaulay’s relentless nationalist campaigning. The new Legislative Council was inaugurated on October 31, 1923, and the NNDP’s dominance was not a one-off. The NNDP secured all four seats in the 1923 elections and repeated this feat in 1928 and 1933, reflecting elite urban influence amid minimal voter turnout due to the narrow franchise. The colonial machinery had designed a system so restricted it assumed a compliant outcome. Macaulay and his party turned that assumption upside down.
What the 1923 election ultimately exposed was a fundamental contradiction at the heart of British colonial administration in Nigeria: a government that claimed to be civilizing a people while simultaneously ensuring those same people had no real power to govern themselves. The North, which held the majority of Nigeria’s population, was not merely underrepresented, it was completely shut out. Women across the country had no vote at all, a situation that would not be formally corrected until 1979. Upon the return to democratic rule in 1999, after the back and forth of military rule in Nigeria, which birthed various forms of human rights abuses, the protection of human rights was initiated but the seeds of those structural exclusions planted in 1923 had grown deep roots. Nigeria’s first election was not a story of democracy arriving in full bloom. It was a story of democracy arriving in chains, and of a group of determined men who, within those chains, planted the first seed of a nation that would one day demand to be free
