A historical and sociological study of the Nigerian Air Force (1962–1970) : politics, ethnicism and army influence

Omeni, Akali

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Date

17/11/2022

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Abstract

The Air Force in Nigeria is a compelling subject for sociological enquiry, with an entirely different formative process to the Army. At its inception in 1964, Army officers, not career airmen, commanded the force until 1975. However, whereas the Army cast a long shadow over NAF identity, the Air Force had other institutional pathologies. The “Quota System” of ethnicized recruitment within the military, introduced to balance out ethnic representation, was one such issue. The paper examines how this system, along with the tumultuous politics of 1960s Nigeria, ethnicism and Army influence, shaped the NAF’s formative years.

Citation

Omeni , A 2022 , ' A historical and sociological study of the Nigerian Air Force (1962–1970) : politics, ethnicism and army influence ' , African Security , vol. 15 , no. 4 , pp. 340-359 . https://doi.org/10.1080/19392206.2022.2145830

Publication

African Security

Status

Peer reviewed

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/19392206.2022.2145830

ISSN

1939-2206

Type

Journal article

Rights

Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Collections

University of St Andrews Research

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10023/26485