The change did not announce itself with violence.
It arrived as an official statement, carried across radios and newspapers, and by the time people across the Eastern Region grasped its meaning, the country they believed they belonged to had already been reorganised.
Overnight, what had existed as a single political space was broken apart. Administrative authority shifted. Control over oil, ports, and revenue moved elsewhere. For ordinary residents, this was not a technical constitutional adjustment. It disrupted markets, unsettled local governance, and deepened an already fragile sense of insecurity after a year marked by bloodshed and displacement.
EXPLORE NOW: Military Era & Coups in Nigeria
On 27 May 1967, General Yakubu Gowon, Head of the Federal Military Government, announced that Nigeria’s four regions would be dissolved and replaced with twelve states. The decree was presented as a stabilising reform, intended to correct imbalances and protect minority interests. In the Eastern Region, it was received as something far more consequential. It marked the point at which a strained relationship between Lagos and the East finally broke.
By this stage, the Eastern Region was already operating at the edge of separation. The military coups of 1966 and the mass killings of Igbo civilians in Northern Nigeria had shattered confidence in federal protection. Hundreds of thousands fled eastward, abandoning property and livelihoods. Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Military Governor of the Eastern Region, effectively administered the region independently, resisting federal directives and prioritising security.
An attempt at reconciliation had taken place months earlier. In January 1967, Nigeria’s military leaders met in Aburi, Ghana. The Aburi Accord proposed a loose federal arrangement that granted substantial autonomy to the regions while keeping Nigeria intact. For a brief period, it appeared to offer a way out of confrontation.
That hope faded quickly.
Once the parties returned to Nigeria, the accord became a source of dispute rather than unity. Ojukwu maintained that it curtailed the authority of the federal centre and safeguarded regional self-government. The Federal Military Government viewed those same provisions as a threat to national cohesion. Each side accused the other of acting in bad faith. By May, the Eastern Region had begun withholding federal revenue, and negotiations stalled.
The twelve-state decree was the federal government’s decisive response.
For the East, it was not simply a redrawing of boundaries. It was the dismantling of the region itself. The former Eastern Region was split into three states. East Central State contained the Igbo heartland. Rivers State and South Eastern State were carved out of the Niger Delta and the Calabar area, regions with significant minority populations.
The political logic was clear. By separating minority areas from the Igbo majority, the federal government aimed to weaken the East’s internal cohesion and address long-standing minority grievances. But the material consequences were profound. Oil producing territories and key coastal ports were no longer under the control of East Central State. Port Harcourt and Calabar, along with vital oil revenues, were removed from the economic base of Eastern leadership.
To Ojukwu and those around him, this was not neutral governance. It was a unilateral decision taken without consultation and at a moment when negotiations might still have been revisited. The restructuring confirmed the belief that the federal centre intended to strip the East of its political and economic leverage before any settlement could take effect.
The available records offer limited insight into how civilians processed the announcement at the local level, and it would be speculative to describe individual reactions. What is documented is that authority over administration, security, and resources changed almost immediately. Communities that had once answered to Enugu now found themselves governed from new state capitals. Economic expectations and political relationships were abruptly rewritten.
Three days later, the response came.
On 30 May 1967, Colonel Ojukwu declared the Eastern Region an independent state, the Republic of Biafra. The declaration framed secession as an act of survival, necessary to protect Easterners from continued marginalisation and what was described at the time as existential threat. The twelve-state decree was cited as evidence that coexistence within Nigeria, under existing structures, was no longer possible.
The declaration was not an isolated act. It followed months of violence, failed agreements, and deepening mistrust. But the timing mattered. The restructuring announced on 27 May did not delay secession. It accelerated it. Faced with a rapidly shrinking territorial and economic base, Eastern leadership acted before it could be dismantled from within.
The consequences followed swiftly. On 6 July 1967, full-scale war began.
In one respect, the creation of twelve states achieved its stated objectives. Minority groups gained states of their own, and the dominance of large regions that had shaped early post-independence politics was broken. At the same time, the decree entrenched the military as the central architect of Nigeria’s political structure, a role it would retain for decades.
What it did not do was prevent conflict.
Instead, the redrawing of Nigeria’s internal map marked the collapse of compromise. Lines drawn in Lagos translated into a war that reshaped lives, authority, and allegiance across the East. When the guns finally fell silent years later, Nigeria was still living with the consequences of that announcement, when a single decision turned tension into rupture and pushed a fractured nation into open war.
EXPLORE: Nigerian Civil War
Author’s Note
This article examines how the 12-state decree of May 1967 transformed political tension into irreversible rupture. By dismantling the Eastern Region at a critical moment, the federal government unintentionally accelerated secession and set the stage for civil war, reshaping Nigeria’s political structure and regional relations for generations.
References
- Tekena N. Tamuno, The Nigerian Civil War and the National Question
- Alexander A. Madiebo, The Nigerian Revolution and the Biafran War
- John de St. Jorre, The Nigerian Civil War
