International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science Vol. 5 No. 9 December 2017 Revisiting the Budgetary Deficit Factor in the 1914 Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Protectorates: A Case Study of Zaria Province, 1903-1914 Dr Attahiru Ahmad SIFAWA Department of History, Faculty of Arts and social sciences, Sokoto State University Sokoto, Nigeria Email:
[email protected] Dr SIRAJO Muhammad Sokoto Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies Sokoto State University, Sokoto, Nigeria Murtala MARAFA Department of History Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sokoto State University, Sokoto, Nigeria Email:
[email protected] Corresponding Author: Dr Attahiru Ahmad SIFAWA Sponsored by: Tertiary Education Trust Fund, Nigeria 1 International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science ISSN: 2307-924X www.ijlass.org Abstract One of the widely propagated notion on the British Administration of Northern Nigeria, and in particular, the 1914 Amalgamation of Northern and Southern protectorates was that the absence of seaboard and custom duties therefrom, and other sources of revenue, made the protectorate of Northern Nigeria depended mostly on direct taxation as its sources of revenue. The result was the inadequacy of the locally generated revenue to meet even the half of the region’s financial expenditure for over 10 years. Consequently, the huge budgetary deficit from the North had to be met with grant – in-aid which averaged about a quarter of a million sterling pounds from the British tax payers’ money annually. Northern Nigeria was thus amalgamated with Southern Nigeria in order to benefit from the latter’s huge budgetary surpluses and do away with imperial grant –in- aid from Britain.