By Owei Lakemfa
The world witnessed an awakening, on May 8,1945. The nightmarish Second World War virtually ended.
In Nigeria, the immediate fall-out of this was that freedom bells tolled for an implacable enemy of colonialism, Michael Aithokhaimen Omiunu Imoudu. He had been detained by “freedom loving” Britain for twenty-nine months.
Imoudu’s release came on May 20, 1945.
The day on June 2 when Imoudu set foot on Lagos soil after his release, was perhaps the biggest anti-colonial rally ever held in the country.
A night vigil was kept by Lagosians and at his train stops in places like Oshogbo and Lafenwa, huge crowds formed guards of honour.
He rode on horseback into central Lagos to a jammed reception in the Oko Awo playground. with an unprecedented crowd of some 50,000 people attending.
The father of nationalism in Nigeria, Herbert Macaulay said with Imoudu’s release: “there is not the slightest doubt that the liberation of this country is very near”.
Pan-Africanist, Nnamdi Azikwe, in his oration said: “Imoudu paid the penalty of leadership. He trod the stony road of Golgotha. He bore the cross of calvary. He was crucified. He was resurrected. He returned to us in flesh”
Imoudu told the gathering: “I have gone into exile for training. I have done very little towards trade unionism. Without the confidence of the workers, I would not have triumphed. I am prepared to die for Nigerian trade unionism, for the working class.”
Imoudu was born in Oke Ora in the then Afemai Division, Benin Province. He finished his primary school education in 1927 and, moved to Lagos the following year where he worked with the Post and Telegraphs Department as a linesman. He moved in 1929 to the Nigeria Railway as a labourer.
In his first major victory on the trade union turf, he in 1941 led 3,000 protesting railway men in a demonstration to the colonial Government House then occupied by Sir Bernard Bourdillon. On this occasion, the protesting workers won their major grievance for de-casualization in the railways and, succeeded in forcing the hated Chief Mechanical Engineer Mr. W. G.W. Wilson to resign.
Two years later, the colonialists decided that Imoudu’s cup had overflowed. Here was a chief agitator against British colonialism when the colonial master was engaged in a life or death struggle against Hitlerite Germany.
To check freedom agitators like Imoudu, the British government imposed in 1941, a Nigerian General Defence Regulation under which agitators could be detained. A 1942 order under this regulation made strikes and lockouts illegal in the entire duration of the war.
“Then stories circulated that railway workers under the powerful influence of Imoudu were planning to begin a new agitation for wage increase. Rumors of plans to derail trains and remove vital railway stores if the demands were not granted leaked into official quarters and the administration suspected Imoudu to be behind these plans”
Based on these unsubstantiated rumors, the colonialists made a pre-emptive move. The date chosen was on January 23, 1943. First the railway authorities struck by dismissing him from service for alleged misconduct and insubordination.
A few hours later, as Imoudu contemplated this development and what his next move should be, agents of the colonial authority swooped on him at his Ebute Metta, Lagos home, forced him into a black car and sped off.
While sandwiched in the car, his captors brandished before him a detention order signed by Governor Bourdillon which read, “I am satisfied that it is necessary to prevent you, Michael Aithokhaimen Omiunu Imoudu, acting in a manner prejudicial to public safety and defence”.
The next time anything was heard of Imoudu was at the Benin prisons. A week after he got there, he organized prisoners to protest over poor feeding and living conditions.
The colonialists realised that his spirit could not be confined within prison walls and that if anything, he could spread the anti-colonial message amongst prisoners. So, he was taken from prison and deported into internal exile in Auchi, the local headquarters of his birth place.
In later years, apartheid South Africa perfected this system of internal banishment of freedom fighters to home regions called Bantustans.
When Imoudu returned to Lagos, there was a groundswell of opposition to colonial rule. Amongst workers, this took the form of an agitation for a Cost-of-Living Allowance, COLA. The unions claimed that between 1942 and when the war ended in 1945, cost of living had risen by 200 per-cent.
The British colonialists in their characteristic duplicity, had paid European civil servants increased bonuses immediately after the war while leaving unchanged, the income of African civil servants.
Imoudu’s release was part of the colonialists’ plan to defuse the crisis. Rather than this, Imoudu merely swam along with the strike current. An attempt by some leaders of the labour movement to halt the strike take-off was effectively crushed during two mass meetings on June 21, 1945.
With those rallies, the moderates lost control and Imoudu with the radical wing of the labour movement seized the leadership.
On June 21 and 22, 1945, the strike began in the railways, public works, printing and marine departments and the Lagos Municipal Council. It lasted forty-four days with over twenty-two unions participating.
The strike was a success; strikers returned to work only after the colonialists had: “… conceded to their demand that there should be no victimisation, that the contemplated legal proceedings against arrested strike leaders should be withdrawn, that the newspaper (WEST AFRICAN PILOT), ban should be lifted, and that an impartial inquiry should be set up to consider their grievances”.
Imoudu was in 1942, joint founder of the Federated Trade Unions, the first central trade union in the country which the following year changed its name to the Trade Union Congress, TUC.
He was on August 26, 1944, co-founder of the National Council of Nigeria and Camerouns, NCNC, the first pan-Nigeria political party. He led the 1945 General Strike, the first in Nigeria and was a major leader of the second General Strike in 1964.
Imoudu led various labour centres and struggles which made the jittery military dictators under the Obasanjo regime in 1977, to ban him for life, from trade unionism.
In the Second Republic, he led one of the two factions of the Peoples’ Redemption Party, PRP the party that produced Governors Balarabe Musa of Kaduna State and, Abubakar Rimi of Kano State.
In 2005, Imoudu, the symbol of labour in Nigeria, marched on. The Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC and the Imoudu Family are jointly holding the twentieth commemoration of his exit this Saturday, December 20, 2025, in Lagos, the workers capital.
There was never and has not been in Nigeria, a labour leader like Michael Imoudu.
