Coal Before Oil: Nigeria’s Energy Template
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55640/jsshrf-06-09-02Keywords:
Coal, colonialism, Enugu, Nigeria, energy transitionAbstract
Nigeria's energy paradox is usually told as a story about oil: a country that sits on some of the world's richest hydrocarbon reserves yet cannot keep the lights on for most of its own people. The story conventionally opens in 1956, at the Oloibiri well. This article argues that the opening scene is misplaced. Four decades earlier, coal discovered at Enugu in 1909 and mined commercially from 1915 had already produced the template that the oil economy would later occupy: a railway built to move fuel rather than people, an electricity grid wired to enclaves rather than to the population, a legal order that vested the subsoil in the state rather than in those who lived above it, and a labour regime that met resistance with coercion. Drawing on labour historiography, statutory analysis, and environmental and energy scholarship, the article traces this template from its colonial origins through its survival into the petroleum age, arguing that Nigeria's twin crises of energy poverty and environmental injustice are not two problems but one arrangement, fixed before the first barrel of oil was ever pumped.
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