The Enugu Government Colliery — the engine of Nigerian railways — employed about 8,000 hewers, tubmen and surface workers, the largest concentration of African industrial labour in West Africa. The 1947 Trade Union (Amendment) Ordinance had recognised the right to strike; the Colliery Workers' Union under Okwudili Ojiyi pressed throughout 1949 for the payment of 'rostering allowance' (back-pay for casual workers reclassified as daily-paid) totalling £150,000.
On 18 November 1949 the colonial authorities, fearing the men would seize the explosives store at Iva Valley to support the strike, ordered an Emergency Police detachment under Senior Superintendent F.S. Philip (on secondment from the Gold Coast) to confiscate the dynamite. The miners — armed with sticks and shovels — gathered at the mine entrance singing the colliery work-songs. Philip ordered his men to open fire. Twenty-one miners were killed on the spot and fifty-one wounded, several mortally.
The news travelled by the West African Pilot wire to Lagos, Kano and Kaduna in 36 hours and produced the first cross-regional 'November Riots' (the 'Zikist' protests of 19–22 November 1949) in which a further 50 died. Nnamdi Azikiwe demanded a Royal Commission of Enquiry. The Fitzgerald Commission (1950) censured the Colonial Administration but exonerated Philip personally; no officer was prosecuted; the Colliery was renamed but its management structure preserved. The political consequence was decisive: the four regional Premiers were forced to converge with Azikiwe to demand constitutional reform, producing the Ibadan General Conference of 1950, the Macpherson Constitution (1951), and ultimately Nigerian independence in 1960. The Iva Valley template — peaceful workers, state shoots, commission whitewashes, no prosecutions, institution renamed — is the precise template of the Lekki Toll Gate shooting of 2020.