Between 1978 and 1999 the Nigerian Railway Corporation went from carrying 3 million tonnes of freight a year to carrying less than 200,000. The collapse was structural, political and almost wilful — and it ran in exact synchrony with the rise of the trucking economy that has owned Nigerian goods transport ever since.
The numbers. Freight tonnage: 3.1m (1964) → 1.1m (1978) → 0.49m (1985) → 0.21m (1991) → 0.06m (1999). Passenger journeys: 11.3m (1964) → 5.4m (1980) → 1.8m (1991) → 0.7m (1999). Active route-km: 3,505 (1965) → 3,505 nominal, ≈1,800 operable (1999). Locomotive availability: 78% (1972) → 22% (1995). By 1996 the NRC operated on the Lagos–Kano main line three return services a week, when locomotives were available, at an average commercial speed of 25 km/h — slower than the original 1911 timetable.
Why it collapsed. Five reasons, all simultaneous. (1) The oil-decade road-construction boom built the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway (1978), the Benin–Sapele Expressway (1982) and the Lagos–Benin highway (1985), and crowded passenger and freight onto the new corridors. (2) The 1978 Greater Nigerian Peoples' Party and 1979–83 Shagari governments captured the federal Ministry of Transport for the road lobby; rail capital allocation fell from 18% of transport spending in 1973 to 4% by 1982. (3) The SAP devaluation of 1986 made imported spare parts — for English Electric, General Motors, Henschel and Krupp locomotives, none manufactured in Nigeria — five to ten times more expensive in naira terms, killing the maintenance budget. (4) Strikes — twelve major NRC strikes between 1983 and 1994, mostly over unpaid salaries — eroded the timetable until the timetable disappeared. (5) The trucking lobby itself: between 1978 and 1990 the federal government registered 240,000 new long-haul trucks; the Nigerian Union of Road Transport Workers became, by 1995, more politically powerful than any rail union had ever been.
The institutional consequences of the collapse extended far beyond the railway. The annual road death toll, which in 1965 had been around 4,500, was passing 30,000 a year by 2000 — most of it on the same routes the railway had previously served. Kano-to-Lagos freight, which had cost ₦80 per tonne by rail in 1975 (inflation-adjusted), cost ₦7,200 per tonne by truck in 2000 — partly fuel, partly bribes at the 47 'police checkpoints' between the two cities. The death of NRC was not the death of a sentimental colonial artefact. It was the moment Nigerian goods transport became roughly 15× more expensive per tonne-kilometre, and roughly 50× more dangerous per passenger-kilometre, than it needed to be — a tax the entire economy continues to pay.
Figure 1
Nigerian Railway: route-km in service, 1901–2024
The colonial network was finished in 1927 and not extended for ninety years. The standard-gauge era began in 2016.
Figure 2
NRC annual passengers, 1955–2024 (millions)
From 17 million riders a year in the 1960s to under a million by 2015. The Abuja-Kaduna and Lagos-Ibadan SG lines have only partly reversed it.