Nigeria vs Brazil: 10 Numbers That Separate Two Atlantic Giants

Brazil is more than nine times the size of Nigeria and about eight times richer per person, but Nigeria has more people. Brazil covers about 8.51 million km² to Nigeria’s 923,769 km², yet Nigeria’s population was estimated at about 243 million in 2026 against Brazil’s 214 million. That makes Nigeria the world’s sixth most populous country and Brazil the seventh. The IMF puts Brazil’s GDP per person at about $12,300 for 2026, against about $1,600 for Nigeria. Brazil’s capital is Brasília and its language is Portuguese; Nigeria’s capital is Abuja, its official language is English, and around 500 languages are spoken there. The ten figures below set out the gaps, and each section after the table explains one of them.

Nine Times the Land: Brazil’s Amazon Against the Niger–Benue Y

The area gap is the easiest to see on a map. Brazil is the fifth-largest country in the world and the largest in South America. It spans four time zones, from UTC−5 in Acre to UTC−2 on its Atlantic islands. It holds about 60 per cent of the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon carries more water than any other river on Earth, and Brazil’s other major rivers include the Paraná, São Francisco, Madeira, Xingu and Negro. Even so, its highest point is modest: Pico da Neblina reaches 2,994 m, less than 600 m above Nigeria’s summit.

Nigeria’s land is organised around a letter Y. The Niger, the third-longest river in Africa at about 4,180 km, enters from the north-west, the Benue comes in from Cameroon to the east, and the two meet before running south into the Niger Delta. Around that Y the country changes from south to north: mangrove and freshwater swamp along the Gulf of Guinea, rainforest receiving 1,500 to 2,000 mm of rain a year, then savanna, and finally Sahel in the far north-east around Lake Chad, where rainfall drops below 500 mm. The Mambilla Plateau on the Cameroon border holds the highest point, Chappal Waddi, at 2,419 m.

Both landscapes are under pressure. Since 1970 more than 600,000 km² of the Amazon rainforest has been cleared, an area about two-thirds the size of all Nigeria, and more than a fifth of the rainforest in Brazil has now been destroyed. In northern Nigeria the pressure comes from the other direction: in the Sahel, where rain is scarce, the Sahara is encroaching. Further south, in central states such as Kaduna, Plateau, Taraba and Benue, conflicts between Fulani herders and farmers have flared repeatedly.

Because Nigeria has more people on a ninth of the land, it is about ten times as crowded: roughly 250 people per km² against Brazil’s 24. Both countries responded to crowded coastal capitals the same way, by building new ones inland. Brasília, planned by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, was inaugurated on 21 April 1960 to replace Rio de Janeiro. Abuja, sited in the centre of the country as a neutral choice between the major ethnic groups, replaced Lagos on 12 December 1991. Our guides to Brasília and Abuja look at how each city was laid out.

Moving the capital did not move the people. Lagos is estimated to have 17 to 21 million residents, the largest urban population in Africa, and it handles about 88 per cent of Nigeria’s exports. São Paulo plays the same role in Brazil as the largest city in the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, followed by Rio de Janeiro.

250 Ethnic Groups and a Median Age of 18

Nigeria’s population is not only larger but far younger and more varied. In 2017 its median age was 18.4, about 42.5 per cent of Nigerians were 14 or younger, and the average woman had just over five children. More than 250 ethnic groups live there, speaking around 500 languages. The three largest, the Hausa in the north, the Yoruba in the south-west and the Igbo in the south-east, together make up over 60 per cent of the population. The country is split roughly in half between Muslims and Christians. That diversity shaped its politics: tensions among the three regions led to the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 to 1970, when the Eastern Region broke away as Biafra, and a series of military governments, broken by a civilian interlude from 1979 to 1983, lasted until 1999. The languages behind those groups are covered in our guide to the languages spoken in Nigeria.

Brazil’s diversity comes from migration and mixing rather than from many separate languages. Nearly everyone speaks Portuguese. In the 2022 census 45.3 per cent of Brazilians described themselves as pardo (brown or mixed), 43.5 per cent as white, 10.2 per cent as Black and 0.6 per cent as Indigenous. About five million immigrants arrived between 1808 and 1972, from Portugal, Italy, Spain, Germany, Japan, the Arab world and elsewhere. The 2022 census counted 203.1 million people, against 9.9 million at the first census in 1872. On current trends Nigeria’s lead is likely to widen.

Oil Against Soy, Iron Ore and Aircraft: an Eightfold Income Gap

The income gap comes down to how each economy earns its money. Nigeria joined OPEC during the oil boom of the 1970s, and petroleum still provides about 80 per cent of government revenue. The country is the world’s 15th-largest oil producer and sixth-largest exporter, with the ninth-largest proven reserves. That dependence has costs. Theft of crude oil in the Niger Delta, estimated at more than 120,000 barrels a day, and illegal refining have polluted the region, and the budget moves with the oil price. After petroleum, the biggest source of foreign currency is money sent home by Nigerians abroad. Cocoa is the main farm export, but Nigeria, self-sufficient in food before the oil boom, now spends about $6.7 billion a year on food imports (2022). Nigeria does have newer strengths: its film industry, Nollywood, is the second-largest producer of films in the world, and five of Africa’s seven tech “unicorns” are based there. It is one of Africa’s largest economies, alongside South Africa and Egypt.

Brazil has the largest economy in Latin America, the tenth largest in the world in nominal terms. It has been the world’s largest coffee producer for 150 years and also leads in sugarcane, soybeans and oranges. It is among the biggest producers of iron ore, and its exports run from soy, beef and chicken to pulp, cars and aircraft. The B3 in São Paulo is Latin America’s largest stock exchange. The weakness shows in the Gini index: at 50.3, Brazil’s income is much more unequally shared than Nigeria’s 35.1. Poverty in Nigeria is more widespread, while wealth in Brazil is more concentrated.

The last row of the table matters too. Brazil has been independent for more than two centuries. Its independence was declared on 7 September 1822, and it became a republic on 15 November 1889. Nigeria was assembled by Britain only in 1914, when the northern and southern protectorates were joined, and became independent on 1 October 1960 and a republic three years later. Both are now federal presidential republics, Brazil with 26 states and a Federal District under its 1988 constitution, Nigeria with 36 states and a Federal Capital Territory under its constitution of 1999. The difference in their Human Development Index scores, 0.786 for Brazil and 0.560 for Nigeria in 2023, reflects gaps in health and schooling as well as income.

Lagos to Salvador: the Atlantic Crossing That Links Them

The two countries are joined by the Atlantic slave trade. From the 16th century Portuguese traders were active at Lagos, and Lagos, Badagry and Calabar on the Nigerian coast became major slaving ports. Many of the people taken from what is now Nigeria were shipped to Brazil, especially to the state of Bahia. Salvador became capital of the colony in 1549, just as cane sugar was becoming Brazil’s main export, and enslaved Africans worked the plantations until the Golden Law of May 1888 finally abolished slavery.

Yoruba religion survived the crossing. Candomblé, which developed in Brazil in the 19th century, blends the traditions of the Yoruba, Bantu and Gbe peoples with Roman Catholicism. Its spirits, the orixás, take their names from West African deities and serve a creator god, Olodumaré. Some freed Afro-Brazilians made the return journey in the 19th century and settled in Lagos, where they became known as Agudas and built a Brazilian quarter. A British census of Lagos in 1888 counted 3,221 Brazilians.

The modern relationship grew out of that history. Brazil was the only South American country invited to Nigeria’s independence ceremony in October 1960. It opened an embassy in Lagos in 1961, and Nigeria opened one in Brasília in 1966. João Figueiredo became the first Brazilian president to visit Nigeria in 1983. In 2005 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited, Brazil moved its embassy to Abuja, and Olusegun Obasanjo became the first Nigerian head of state to visit Brazil. Since then the two governments have discussed cooperation on trade, defence and agriculture, but the deepest ties are still cultural, running from Candomblé houses in Bahia to the Brazilian quarter the Agudas founded in Lagos.