In Nigeria as elsewhere, the giant multinational corporations are the basic units of imperialism in its contemporary neocolonial stage. The analysis of these monopoly sharks is critical to the understanding of the mechanisms through which Third World countries are exploited, manipulated, and perpetuated as the collective wretched of the earth. This paper is essentially an attempt to document the character and role of these multinational agents of imperialism in Nigeria. In effect, it tries to provide empirical validation for the basic Marxist thesis that the serious problems of Third World countries like Nigeria can be traced directly to the operations of imperialist forces whose most powerful catalysts are the colossal multinational enterprises. These activities are closely coordinated with such other imperialist mechanisms as foreign investment, export-import trade, and foreign aid. They have generated and perpetuated the seemingly intractable problems of mass poverty, stifling foreign domination, savage exploitation, open starvation, debilitating disease, pervasive illiteracy, widening inequality, irrational waste, cultural degradation, and political instability in Nigeria and other Third World countries within the imperialist orbit. The historical origin of this collective malaise is nineteenthand twentieth-century colonialisation of Nigeria by British