Nigeria is a country in West Africa, formally the Federal Republic of Nigeria, bordering Niger in the north, Chad in the north-east, Cameroon in the east, and Benin in the west. Its southern coast is on the Atlantic Ocean's Gulf of Guinea. The country is made up of 36 states and 1 Federal Capital Territory, home to the capital, Abuja. Nigeria is described as a democratic secular state by the constitution.

Nigeria has been home to various old and indigenous realms and states throughout the centuries. The cutting edge state started from British pilgrim rule starting in the nineteenth century, and took its present regional shape with the converging of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate and Northern Nigeria Protectorate in 1914. The British set up managerial and legitimate structures while rehearsing backhanded standard through conventional chiefdoms. Nigeria turned into an officially autonomous alliance in 1960. It encountered a common war from 1967 to 1970. It from that point switched back and forth between justly chose regular citizen governments and military autocracies until it accomplished a steady vote based system in 1999, with the 2011 presidential political race believed the first to be sensibly free and reasonable.

Nigeria is regularly alluded to as the "Monster of Africa", attributable to its huge populace and economy. With 186 million occupants, Nigeria is the most crowded nation in Africa and the seventh most crowded nation on the planet. Nigeria has the third-biggest youth populace on the planet, after India and China, with in excess of 90 million of its populace younger than eighteen. Nigeria is the world's twentieth biggest economy starting at 2015, worth more than $500 billion and $1 trillion as far as ostensible GDP and buying power equality, separately. The 2013 obligation to-GDP proportion was 11 percent.

Nigeria is seen as a global state as it is occupied by 250 ethnic gatherings, of which the three biggest are the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba; these ethnic gatherings communicate in more than 500 unmistakable dialects and are related to a wide assortment of societies. The official language of Nigeria is English, picked to encourage semantic solidarity at the national level. Nigeria is separated generally down the middle between Christians, who live for the most part in the southern piece of the nation, and Muslims, who live for the most part in the north. A minority of the populace practice religions indigenous to Nigeria, for example, those local to the Igbo and Yoruba ethnicities.

Nigeria is viewed as a developing business sector by the World Bank; it has been distinguished as a local power on the African mainland, a center power in universal undertakings, and has likewise been recognized as a rising worldwide power. Be that as it may, its Human Development Index, positions 152nd on the planet. Nigeria is an individual from the MINT gathering of nations, which are generally observed as the globe's next "BRIC-like" economies. It is additionally recorded among the "Following Eleven" economies set to become among the greatest on the planet. Nigeria is an establishing individual from the African Union and an individual from numerous other global associations, including the United Nations, the Commonwealth of Nations and OPEC.