Construction of the Kainji Dam began in 1964 under a contract awarded by the Federal Ministry of Mines and Power (through the Niger Dams Authority, established by the Niger Dams Act 1962) to the Italian–Dutch consortium Impregilo–NEDECO. The dam was commissioned by Head of State General Yakubu Gowon on 26 February 1969; the reservoir began impoundment in August 1968.
The project required the resettlement of roughly 44,000 people from about 200 villages on both banks of the Niger between Foge Island in the north and Yelwa in the south. The administrative centrepiece of the resettlement was the drowned town of Bussa — the historic seat of the Emirate of Borgu and the place associated with the death of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park in 1806 — which was relocated to a planned township called New Bussa, about 10 km from the dam wall.
The Kainji Resettlement Scheme was implemented by the Niger Dams Authority (later absorbed into the National Electric Power Authority, NEPA, in 1972) in coordination with the Northern Nigeria regional government, the Sokoto Province administration and traditional rulers of Borgu, Yauri and Kontagora. It was the subject of contemporaneous academic monitoring by Roland and Phyllis Roder (NISER), Anthony Adegbola, and a Federal Department of Antiquities salvage-archaeology programme that recovered material from sites before they were submerged. The published evaluations — most fully Roland Roder, The Kainji Lake Research Project (1970) and the NEDECO resettlement reports — record genuine grievances: inadequate compensation, poor soils at some resettlement sites, the loss of fishing grounds, and the cultural devastation of losing ancestral land and graves. None of the contemporaneous published sources, government reports, NISER studies, or subsequent peer-reviewed work documents a massacre, mass shooting or forced evacuation at gunpoint.
The persistent oral tradition that residents who refused to leave were shot is widely repeated in popular accounts and on social media, but no credible source — primary or secondary — supports it. The documentary record describes a slow, contentious, often corrupt but ultimately non-violent resettlement, with the Borgu and Yauri traditional councils playing a mediating role. New Bussa today is the headquarters of Borgu Local Government Area of Niger State.
The genuine and well-documented violence connected to Kainji is environmental and economic: the loss of riverine livelihoods, the disruption of seasonal flooding downstream that hurt fadama farming, the silting of the reservoir, and the chronic underperformance of the powerhouse — Kainji's installed capacity of 760 MW has rarely been matched in actual generation since the 1980s.