Towards a Theoretical Framework for Understanding the Sociology of Post-Colonial Urban Poverty in Nigerian Metropolitan Centres

Urban poverty in Nigerian cities is inadequately explained by universalist poverty theories that fail to account for the post-colonial structural conditions, informal economy dynamics, and contested citizenship that characterise Nigerian metropolitan life. This doctoral study develops an original theoretical framework for understanding post-colonial urban poverty in Nigerian metropolitan centres, drawing on three years of multi-site ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lagos, Kano, and Enugu. The framework synthesises post-colonial theory, Lefebvre's right to the city concept, and informal economy sociology into a coherent original model termed Post-Colonial Urban Precarity. This model conceptualises Nigerian urban poverty not as an absence of market integration but as a structurally produced condition of conditional, contested, and frequently revocable urban inclusion shaped by colonial inheritance, ethnic political economy, and state informality. Fieldwork combined participant observation in three low-income settlements over twelve months per site with life history interviews with 64 residents, documentary analysis of urban planning records, and discourse analysis of state poverty reduction communications. The framework accounts empirically for the paradox of rising mobile phone ownership alongside deepening food insecurity in the same households, the role of ethnic patron-client networks in mediating poverty experiences, and the moral economies of mutual aid that substitute for absent formal social protection. The doctoral contribution advances Nigerian urban sociology through an original explanatory framework that is both theoretically innovative and empirically grounded in the lived realities of metropolitan poverty across Nigeria's geopolitical zones. Keywords: post-colonial urban poverty, theoretical framework, informal economy, metropolitan Nigeria, precarity.