Topic: “Impact of Nigerian Civil War on the Nigerian Railway.”

By Tokunbo A. Ayoola

In the 1990s and in the first decade of the 21st century, Africa witnessed many violent civil, ethnic, regional, communal, and class wars (Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda Genocide, and Darfur). As a result of these conflicts, many people lost their lives and socio-economic infrastructure worth billions of dollars were either damaged or completely destroyed.
Scholars have studied and written about the impact of this second wave of continent-wide postcolonial conflicts in Africa on society and economy. However, it seems little or no study has been carried out on social and economic impact of similar conflicts and wars on Africa’s infrastructure during the first wave of wars and conflicts in postcolonial Africa. This latter set of conflicts occurred in the first decade of independence. Prominent among such conflicts were the Congo crisis, armed struggles by liberation movements in Portugal’s African colonies, in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Apartheid South Africa, Ethiopia (Eritrea), and Uganda; ethnic clashes and civil wars in Chad, Ethiopia, Sudan, Nigeria, and violent overthrow of civilian governments.
This paper therefore seeks to examine how one such conflict in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Nigerian Civil War (1967 – 1970), affected a major pillar of Nigerian political economy, the  Nigerian Railway system, from 1967 to the late 1970s.

Dr. Tokunbo  A. Ayoola
Department of African American and African Studies
The Ohio State University
486 University Hall
230 North Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210-1319
Phone: 614 292 9298
E-mail: toks_ayoola@hotmail.com