Path Dependency and Institutional Lock-In in Nigeria’s Railway Sector: A Historical Institutionalist Analysis (1898 to 2024)

Nigeria's railway sector has experienced over a century of alternating ambition and decline, a trajectory not adequately explained by technical or financial factors alone. This study applies historical institutionalism to explain the mechanisms of path dependency and institutional lock-in that have shaped railway sector performance in Nigeria from the construction of the first colonial railway in 1898 to the contemporary standard gauge rehabilitation programme. The research employs process tracing methodology across seven identified critical junctures in Nigerian railway history: colonial network design, post-independence nationalisation, structural adjustment divestment, successive rehabilitation failures, the 2012 Chinese concessioning, the Abuja-Kaduna opening, and the 2023 security crisis. Data are drawn from the Nigerian Railway Corporation archives, National Archives of Nigeria, colonial records from the United Kingdom National Archives, and 55 retrospective interviews with former railway officials, transport economists, and historians. The study demonstrates how colonial network design decisions, by prioritising resource extraction over population connectivity, created an institutional template that constrained subsequent reform options through sunk cost effects, political economy dependencies, and network externality lock-in. Contrary to modernisation narratives, the contemporary standard gauge programme reproduces several structural features of colonial railway path dependency, including external financing dependence and metropolitan corridor bias. Original contributions include a Nigerian Railway Institutional Change Typology, a process tracing methodology adaptation for long-run transport sector analysis, and a critique of discontinuous reform strategies that ignore institutional inheritance. Keywords: path dependence, railway sector, historical institutionalism, Nigeria, institutional lock-in.