The 1945 General Strike was the first nationwide industrial action in Nigerian history, the largest labour mobilisation the British colony had ever seen, and the moment when the post-war wage question became inseparable from the independence question.
The trigger. Wartime inflation had cut the real wages of Nigerian workers by more than half between 1939 and 1945. The colonial Cost-of-Living Allowance (COLA) introduced in 1942 had not kept pace with prices. In April 1945 the African Civil Servants Technical Workers Union, the Railway Workers Union, the Posts and Telegraphs Union and the Marine African Workers Union — co-ordinated by the new Nigerian Trade Union Congress (TUC, founded 1943) under Michael Imoudu — demanded a 50 per cent COLA increase and a minimum-wage floor. The acting Governor, Sir Arthur Richards, refused.
The walkout. On 21 June 1945, roughly 30,000 government workers in 17 unions walked out. Within a week the figure rose to over 150,000 — railwaymen, dockworkers, posts and telegraphs, public-works labourers, the marine department — paralysing the railway from Lagos to Kano, closing the ports of Lagos, Port Harcourt and Burutu, and shutting the telegraph that connected the colony to London. The strike lasted 44 days, ending on 4 August 1945 after the Tudor Davies Commission was announced. It was the longest and largest co-ordinated stoppage in West African colonial history to that date.
The press. Nnamdi Azikiwe's *West African Pilot* and *Daily Comet* were the strikers' loudspeakers. On 8 July the colonial government banned both papers under the Defence Regulations. Azikiwe went into hiding, telegraphed to London that an assassination plot was under way against him, and turned the press ban into an international story. The papers reopened on 21 August. The ban radicalised an entire generation of Lagos journalists and bound the labour movement to the emerging nationalist parties — chiefly Azikiwe's NCNC, founded a year earlier in August 1944.
The settlement. The Tudor Davies Commission (Sir Walter Tudor Davies, KC, sent from London) sat from October 1945 and reported in June 1946. It awarded a 50 per cent COLA increase backdated to 1 January 1945 — substantially what the unions had originally demanded. The government quietly conceded, and the precedent of binding arbitration on wages was set.
What it changed. Four things, none of which the Colonial Office had intended:
- A national labour movement. Before 1945 unions were craft-based, local and weak. After 1945 the TUC (and its successors) bargained nationally. Every later wage commission — Harragin (1946), Miller (1947), Phillipson (1948), Gorsuch (1955), Mbanefo (1959), Morgan (1964), Adebo (1971), Udoji (1974) — flowed from the precedent that wages were a federal, negotiated question.
- Labour-nationalism fusion. Imoudu shared platforms with Azikiwe; the Zikist Movement (1946) recruited heavily among railway and posts workers. The British distinction between 'industrial' and 'political' action collapsed.
- The Richards Constitution was already obsolete. Promulgated in March 1946, eight months after the strike, the Richards Constitution offered no electoral concession to the workers who had just shut down the colony. Nationalist agitation against it began the day it was published.
- The first colonial-era reversal. The press ban was lifted. The COLA was paid. The Colonial Office accepted that mass labour action could and would extract concessions — a lesson the post-colonial Nigerian state has never been allowed to forget.
Michael Imoudu was arrested in 1949, detained without trial, and emerged as 'Labour Leader Number One' — the title is still carved on his tomb in Sabon-Gari, Jos.