Nigeria
Updated: Sep 20, 2022
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Country Name
Nigeria, or officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Location
Nigeria is located in western Africa. Nigeria is bordered by the Gulf of Guinea, Benin to the west, Niger to the north, and Chad and Cameroon to the east.
Capital
Abuja.
The reason for naming the country
The name Nigeria was taken from the Niger River running through the country. British journalist Flora Shaw issued this name on January 8, 1897. The neighboring Niger takes its name from the same river.
Flag
The flag of Nigeria was adopted on 1 October 1960.
The Nigerian flag was adopted after gaining independence from Britain in 1960. The flag consists of three vertical stripes; green, white, green, two green on the sides, and one white in-between. The two green stripes represent Nigeria's natural wealth, while the white band represents peace.
Another interpretation says the flag should evoke the river Niger undulating between the greenery of Nigerian fields and forests.
Language
English is the official language in Nigeria. English is widely used for education, business transactions, and for official purposes.
There are also 521 languages that have been spoken in Nigeria; nine of them are now extinct.
The French spoken in Nigeria may be mixed with some native languages but is mostly spoken like the French spoken in Benin.
The major languages spoken in Nigeria represent three major families of languages of Africa: the majority are Niger-Congo languages, such as Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw, Fulfulde, Ogoni, and Edo. Kanuri, spoken in the northeast, primarily in Borno and Yobe State, is part of the Nilo-Saharan family, and Hausa is an Afroasiatic language.
Religion
The most widespread religions in Nigeria are Islam and Christianity
Nigerians are nearly equally divided into Muslims and Christians, with a tiny minority of adherents of Traditional African religions and other religions
Nigeria has the largest Muslim population in the sub-Sahara, and the vast majority of Muslims in Nigeria are Sunni belonging to the Maliki school; however, a sizeable minority also belongs to Shafi Madhhab.
Protestantism is also widely practiced in Western areas, while Roman Catholicism is a more prominent Christian feature of South Eastern Nigeria.
Currency
Naira (NGN).
Time Zone
+01:00 GMT.
Government Regime
A Federal presidential constitutional republic.
Climate
In Nigeria, the climate is tropical, semi-arid in the far north, and progressively rainier as you move southward. In fact, there is a rainy season due to the African monsoon, which is progressively longer and more intense from north to south. In the north the rainy season lasts only four months, from June to September; in the center, it goes from April to October; while in the south, it goes from March to October; and finally, in the south-east, which is the wettest area, it goes from March to November.
In the north, winter is warm and dry; it can get uncomfortably hot during the day, up to 40 °C (104 °F), but it's usually cool at night, and it can even get cold in the northern hilly areas, where cold records are around freezing (0 °C or 32 °F). By February, the heat increases in all the inland areas, and it becomes scorching in the center-north from March to May, when temperatures can easily reach 40 °C (104 °F). On the contrary, in the south, the increase in temperature is limited, both because of the proximity to the ocean and because the rain showers begin earlier.
From June to September, the air is humid and the sky is usually cloudy throughout the country; temperatures are uniform, and are everywhere around 28/30 °C (82/86 °F); the daytime temperatures are lower than in winter, but relative humidity is higher.