The Bakolori Irrigation Project, built between 1974 and 1978 on the Sokoto–Rima river system, displaced about 13,000 farming families in 25 villages across what is now Zamfara State. Compensation and resettlement were promised by the Sokoto–Rima River Basin Development Authority but were either never paid or were grossly inadequate. By early 1980 displaced farmers had blocked access roads to the project headquarters and engaged in a continuous sit-in.
On 25 April 1980, on the orders of the Sokoto State Government under the Shagari-era NPN administration of Governor Garba Nadama, the Nigeria Police Mobile Force ('Kill-and-Go') and supporting army units carried out a clearance operation. Witness counts of the dead range from the official figure of 25 to credible academic estimates of 380 or more, with eyewitness accounts (later collected by the academic Yusufu Bala Usman and journalists at the New Nigerian) suggesting figures over a thousand when accounting for those drowned in the river while fleeing and the missing.
No officer was prosecuted. Bakolori became a defining text of the radical Nigerian left — Y.B. Usman's Beyond Fairy Tales: Selected Historical Writings (2006) returns to it repeatedly — and a permanent indictment of large-dam development policy.