Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, with about 237 million people in 2025 and the sixth-largest population in the world, spread over 923,768 km² of West Africa between the Sahel and the Gulf of Guinea. Its capital is Abuja, which replaced Lagos on 12 December 1991; English is the official language, but more than 500 languages are spoken, led by Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. The country is a federation of 36 states plus the Federal Capital Territory, and its name comes from the Niger River, which meets its great tributary, the Benue, in the middle of the country. This guide starts in Abuja and works outwards, region by region.
Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory and Zuma Rock
Abuja was built as a new capital at the geographic midpoint of the country, inside a Federal Capital Territory (FCT) that belongs to no state and is run by a federal minister. The move from Lagos became official on 12 December 1991. At the 2006 census the city had 776,298 people, and the United Nations counted it among the fastest-growing cities in the world, with growth of 139.7% between 2000 and 2010.
The setting is unusual for a capital. Aso Rock, a 400 m monolith shaped by water erosion, rises behind the Presidential Complex, the National Assembly and the Supreme Court, which all sit south of it. Just outside the territory, in Niger State beside the Abuja–Kaduna expressway near Madalla, stands Zuma Rock, a gabbro and granodiorite inselberg that reaches about 725 m above sea level and is sometimes called the “Gateway to Abuja from Suleja”.
Abuja is one of the few purpose-built capitals in Africa, and its landmarks reflect the country’s religious balance: the Nigerian National Mosque and the Nigerian National Christian Centre face each other across Independence Avenue. The city is served by Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport and has hosted major international meetings, including the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2003 and the World Economic Forum on Africa in 2014.
The FCT sits at the top of a layered federal system. Below the federal government come the 36 states, each with a governor and a one-chamber assembly, and below them 774 local government areas. For many purposes the states are grouped into six geopolitical zones: North West, North East, North Central, South West, South East and South South. Changing the 1999 Constitution requires the approval of two-thirds of the 36 state legislatures.
Lokoja, where the Niger and Benue meet
The two rivers that define Nigeria’s map form a Y. The Niger, about 4,180 km long and the third-longest river in Africa after the Nile and the Congo, rises in the Guinea Highlands and enters Nigeria from the northwest. The Benue, about 1,400 km long, rises on the Adamawa Plateau in northern Cameroon and flows west past Jimeta and Makurdi. They meet at Lokoja, the capital of Kogi State, a trading post founded in 1857 by the British explorer William Balfour Baikie.
The country is named after the larger river. The British journalist Flora Shaw coined the name “Nigeria” on 8 January 1897, beating rival proposals such as “Central Sudan” and “Niger Sudan”. The origin of “Niger” itself is uncertain; the most likely source is the Tuareg phrase egerew n-igerewen, “river of rivers”. The Benue is almost entirely navigable during the rainy months, and its catchment covers 319,000 km².
Southeast of the Benue the land climbs to the Mambilla Plateau on the Cameroon border. There, in Taraba State, Chappal Waddi reaches 2,419 m, the highest point in both Nigeria and West Africa. Southwest of the Niger lies a rugged upland, while the valleys of the two rivers form the country’s largest physical region.
The Niger Delta: 70,000 km² and oil since Oloibiri in 1956
Below the confluence the Niger runs south to the Gulf of Guinea and spreads into one of the largest river deltas in the world. As officially defined by the Nigerian government, the Niger Delta covers over 70,000 km², about 7.5% of the country’s land, across nine coastal states. It was once called the Oil Rivers because of its palm-oil trade, and the British ran it as the Oil Rivers Protectorate from 1885 to 1893.
The oil that matters today is crude. After decades of exploration, Shell-BP made Nigeria’s first commercial discovery at Oloibiri, in present-day Bayelsa State, on 15 January 1956. Production followed within a couple of years, and in 1960, the year of independence, the country exported 847,000 tonnes of crude. Nigeria is now Africa’s largest producer of oil and gas and a member of OPEC, although by February 2021 the oil sector made up only about 9% of GDP. The industry has also left the delta badly polluted by spills, and Oloibiri itself remains a small fishing and farming community.
The coast is lined with mangroves, and the rainforest near the Cameroon border around Calabar in Cross River State is a biodiversity hotspot. It is the only wild home, along with neighbouring Cameroon, of the drill, a large primate, and it is believed to hold the world’s greatest diversity of butterflies. Rainfall in the far south reaches 1,500 to 2,000 mm a year.
Kano, Sokoto and the savannah north
North of the rivers, rainforest gives way to savannah and then to the Sahel. Rainfall drops to between 500 and 1,500 mm a year across the Guinean, Sudan and Sahel savannah belts. This is where Nigeria meets its longest neighbours: the border with Niger runs 1,497 km, and the short 87 km border with Chad lies in the far northeast near Lake Chad. In all, Nigeria’s land borders measure 4,047 km, including 773 km with Benin and 1,690 km with Cameroon.
The north has deep urban roots. The Kano Chronicle traces the Hausa city-state of Kano back to around 999 AD, and Kano is today the second-largest of Nigeria’s five cities with more than a million people. In the early 19th century the Fulani jihads culminated in the Sokoto Caliphate, which ruled much of the north until British conquest.
Older still is the Nok culture of central Nigeria, which flourished between about 1500 BC and AD 200. Its life-sized terracotta figures are among the earliest known sculptures in Africa, and its people smelted iron by about 550 BC. The modern borders date from 1914, when Britain merged the Northern and Southern Nigeria Protectorates; independence followed on 1 October 1960. A civil war from 1967 to 1970 and a long series of military governments, broken only by an elected civilian government from 1979 to 1983, followed before stable civilian rule returned in 1999.
Lagos and the Nollywood boom that began in 1992
Lagos, the former capital, sits on the lagoons and barrier islands of the southwest coast. In November 2025 its population was estimated at between 17 and 21 million, which makes it the most populous urban area in Africa. With three ports (Apapa, Tin Can Island and the Lekki deep-sea port), the city handles 88% of Nigeria’s exports, and it is the leading financial centre of West and Central Africa, home to the Nigerian Exchange Group. Expressways run from the city to Badagry, Abeokuta and Ibadan, a coastal expressway to Calabar has been under construction since 2023, and a standard-gauge railway links Lagos with Abeokuta and Ibadan.
Lagos is also the cradle of Nigeria’s film industry. The first films were shown at Glover Memorial Hall in August 1903, and the first feature shot in Nigeria, Palaver, followed in 1926. The modern boom came on video: Kenneth Nnebue’s Living in Bondage (1992) is usually credited with launching it, and traders at Lagos’s Alaba Market became its distributors. At the height of the video era around 2008, the industry released roughly 200 films a month, making Nigeria the world’s second-largest film producer by number of titles, behind India and ahead of the United States. The nickname Nollywood was first used in The New York Times in 2002.
Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and 500 other languages
Nigeria is home to more than 250 ethnic groups. The three largest, the Hausa in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest and the Igbo in the southeast, together make up over 60% of the population. Religion splits roughly in half: estimates put Muslims at about 53.5% and Christians at about 45.9%, with followers of indigenous religions a small minority, and the constitution guarantees freedom of religion.
English, inherited from colonial rule, is the official language and the main language between people of different backgrounds; around 60 million Nigerians speak it. Nigerian Pidgin, an English-based creole, is spoken by over 60 million people and is the most common everyday lingua franca, with distinct local varieties in cities such as Warri, Benin City and Port Harcourt. Beyond these, Nigeria has over 520 native languages drawn from all three of Africa’s major language families, Afroasiatic, Nilo-Saharan and Niger-Congo, with some, such as Centúúm, still unclassified.
That diversity is mapped onto the federal structure, which is why Nigeria’s state boundaries have been redrawn several times since independence. A full breakdown is in our guide to how many states Nigeria has, the planned capital has its own page on Abuja, and the linguistic map is explored further in the languages spoken in Nigeria.