HERA · Human Entity Reference Atlas by Masego Inc

Long before the name Nigeria existed, the territory hosted some of Africa's most sophisticated societies: the Nok culture was producing celebrated terracotta sculpture centuries before the common era, and the ages that followed saw the rise of the Kanem-Bornu empire around Lake Chad, the walled Hausa city-states of the north, the Yoruba kingdoms of Ife and Oyo, and the Kingdom of Benin, whose bronze artistry stunned the Europeans who later looted it. In the early nineteenth century the Fulani scholar Usman dan Fodio's jihad forged the Sokoto Caliphate, one of the largest states in precolonial Africa. British influence advanced through Lagos (annexed 1861) and the Royal Niger Company until the northern and southern protectorates were amalgamated into a single colony in 1914 — a stroke of administrative convenience that bound together vastly different societies. Independence came on 1 October 1960, but the young federation was soon tested: a 1966 coup and counter-coup spiraled into the 1967–70 civil war, when the southeastern region declared itself the Republic of Biafra and more than a million people died, many from starvation, before reunification. Decades of alternating military and civilian rule followed until 1999, when the country returned to elected government under a new constitution — the longest unbroken democratic stretch in its history, now more than a quarter-century old.

Nigeria is a cultural superpower whose exports now reach every continent. Its film industry, Nollywood, is among the most prolific in the world by number of films produced — a rapid-turnaround, direct-to-audience machine that grew from Lagos market stalls into a multi-billion-dollar industry whose dramas are watched across Africa and its diaspora. Its literature reshaped how the world reads Africa: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) became one of the most widely read African novels ever written, and Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African laureate, with later generations — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ben Okri, Buchi Emecheta — extending the tradition. In music, the global Afrobeats wave carried Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Davido from Lagos clubs to Grammy stages and sold-out stadiums in London and New York. Beneath the contemporary glamour lies deep artistic inheritance: the Benin bronzes, Ife heads, Igbo-Ukwu metalwork, and the masquerade traditions of the Yoruba, Igbo, and Ijaw remain touchstones of African art history. Traditional institutions — emirs, obas, and hundreds of chieftaincies — retain real cultural authority alongside the modern state, and everyday Nigerian culture is famously exuberant: loud, entrepreneurial, argumentative, and warm.

Nigerians take vocal pride in being Africa's most populous nation and one of its largest economies, a country whose diaspora punches far above its weight in medicine, technology, literature, and business worldwide. Nollywood is a special badge of honor — a homegrown industry, built with little state support, that out-produces almost every film industry on the planet. Wole Soyinka's 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature remains a landmark for the entire continent, and Achebe's global stature gives Nigerians a claim to having redefined the modern African novel. On the field, the Super Eagles' gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics — beating Brazil and Argentina back-to-back — is retold like folklore, and the Super Falcons' unmatched trophy haul makes Nigeria the undisputed dynasty of African women's football. The Afrobeats takeover of global pop is celebrated as proof that Lagos now sets trends the world follows. Add the country's staggering linguistic wealth of 500-plus languages, jollof rice supremacy (fiercely asserted against Ghana), and a tech scene that leads the continent in start-up investment, and the national confidence is easy to understand.

Nigeria is less a melting pot than a vast federation of cultures negotiating a shared roof: more than 250 ethnic groups and over 500 languages coexist within one state, with the Hausa-Fulani north, Yoruba southwest, and Igbo southeast forming the three historic poles around which hundreds of smaller nations — Tiv, Kanuri, Ibibio, Ijaw, Efik, Nupe, and many more — orbit. The great religious traditions meet here on a continental fault line: a majority-Muslim north shaped by centuries of trans-Saharan trade and the Sokoto Caliphate, and a heavily Christian south transformed by missionary schooling, with indigenous religious practice woven through both — Yoruba orisha traditions, for instance, survived the Atlantic crossing to become Santería in Cuba and Candomblé in Brazil. English is the official glue, but the true lingua franca of the street is Nigerian Pidgin, a supple creole that lets a Kano trader, a Port Harcourt dockworker, and a Lagos musician banter in the same tongue. Interethnic marriage, internal migration to Lagos and Abuja, and shared national obsessions — football, Nollywood, jollof — continually stitch the federation together, even as politics often pulls along ethnic and religious seams. The result is one of the most intense laboratories of pluralism anywhere in the world, with a huge diaspora feeding global influences back home in turn.

Nigeria's soundscape is arguably Africa's most influential. In the 1970s Fela Anikulapo-Kuti fused highlife, jazz, funk, and Yoruba rhythm into Afrobeat — long, hypnotic, politically fearless compositions performed at his Lagos 'Shrine' that made him both a musical legend and a thorn in the side of successive military governments. Alongside Fela flourished juju, the guitar-and-talking-drum style perfected by King Sunny Adé; fuji, the percussion-driven sound of the Yoruba Muslim heartland; and highlife, the horn-led dance music shared with Ghana that Igbo bands made their own. Traditional forms run deeper still: the 'talking' dundun drum that mimics the tones of Yoruba speech, Igbo ogene bell ensembles, Hausa court praise-singing, and masquerade dances in which drummers and masked spirits perform in call and response. The twenty-first century brought Afrobeats (with an 's') — the glossy, percussive pop of Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, Tiwa Savage, and Rema — which leapt from Lagos to global streaming dominance and collaborations with the world's biggest stars. Dance drives it all, from ancient ceremonial steps to viral crazes that begin on Lagos streets and circle the globe within weeks.

Nigerian food is bold, peppery, and built for communal joy. Its centerpiece is jollof rice — rice simmered in a smoky tomato-pepper base until every grain glows orange — a dish whose origins trace to the Wolof people of the Senegambia region (the very name 'jollof' derives from 'Wolof'), but which West Africans have transformed into a friendly continental rivalry: the 'jollof wars' between Nigeria and Ghana over whose version reigns supreme are fought with memes, celebrity taste-tests, and unshakeable conviction. Egusi soup, thickened with ground melon seeds and laced with bitterleaf and assorted meats, is a national staple eaten with pounded yam, eba, or fufu — 'swallows' that are dipped and swallowed, never chewed, by proper technique. In the north, suya — beef skewers rubbed with yaji, a fiery peanut-spice blend — is grilled over open flame by roadside mai suya and wrapped in newspaper with raw onions, the definitive Nigerian street food. The repertoire runs on: pepper soup sharp enough to cure any ailment, moin-moin (steamed bean pudding), akara fritters at breakfast, and puff-puff sweetening every party, while cocoa remains one of the country's signature agricultural exports. Nigerian dining is social by design — big pots, shared plates, and the firm belief that a guest must never leave hungry.

Nigerian dress is peacock-proud, and every region contributes its own splendor. The garment most associated with the country is the agbada — a voluminous, richly embroidered flowing robe worn by Yoruba men (and adopted nationwide) with a fila cap for weddings, chieftaincy ceremonies, and any occasion demanding gravitas; its northern cousin, the Hausa babban riga, is equally grand and often paired with an embroidered cap. Yoruba women crown their outfits with the gele, an elaborately folded headwrap whose architectural pleats are an art form in themselves, worn over blouse-and-wrapper ensembles cut from aso-oke, the prestige handwoven cloth of the southwest, or indigo-dyed adire. Igbo men favor the isiagu, a velvet tunic patterned with lion heads and worn with a red chieftaincy cap, while heavy embellished 'george' wrappers mark celebration across the southeast and Niger Delta. Everywhere, vibrant ankara wax prints supply everyday fashion, and the tradition of aso ebi — coordinated 'family cloth' worn by all guests at a celebration — turns Nigerian weddings into seas of matching color. Lagos designers now carry these traditions onto global runways, making Nigerian fashion one of the continent's most watched.

Football is Nigeria's true national religion. The men's national team, the Super Eagles, have won the Africa Cup of Nations three times (1980, 1994, 2013) and produced generations of stars — Jay-Jay Okocha, Nwankwo Kanu, Rashidi Yekini, Victor Osimhen — but the achievement etched deepest in national memory is the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when Nigeria's 'Dream Team' came from behind to beat Brazil in the semi-final and Argentina in the final, seizing Africa's first Olympic football gold. The women's side is even more dominant: the Super Falcons are the unrivaled queens of African women's football, having won the Women's Africa Cup of Nations more times than every other nation combined and appeared at every FIFA Women's World Cup since the tournament began in 1991. Beyond football, Nigeria has produced Olympic medalists in athletics, boxing, and wrestling — Chioma Ajunwa's long-jump gold at those same 1996 Games made her the country's first individual Olympic champion — and the D'Tigress basketball team has become a serial African champion. Sport is also everyday culture: viewing centers packed for European league Saturdays, street football on every patch of open ground, and traditional Dambe boxing still drawing crowds in the north.

Nigeria operates one of Africa's largest education systems, organized under the Universal Basic Education (UBE) program, which since 1999 has guaranteed nine years of free, compulsory schooling — six primary and three junior secondary — administered federally and by the 36 states. The tertiary sector is the continent's biggest by institution count, anchored by historic universities such as the University of Ibadan (founded 1948) and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and supplemented by a fast-growing private sector; the National Youth Service Corps, created after the civil war, still posts every graduate to a year of service in a different region as a deliberate exercise in national integration. The challenges are as large as the system: Nigeria has one of the world's highest populations of out-of-school children, concentrated in the insecure north where poverty, early marriage, and attacks on schools depress enrollment, and there is a persistent north-south gap in literacy and girls' schooling. Government responses include school-feeding programs, conditional cash transfers for girls' attendance, and integration of Qur'anic schools into the formal curriculum, with UN-supported and international partners backing teacher training and safe-schools initiatives. Meanwhile Nigeria's universities and a thriving self-taught tech culture feed one of Africa's most dynamic talent pipelines, powering the Lagos start-up ecosystem and a global professional diaspora.

As of 21 September 2026, every one of Nigeria's principal security theatres remained active: the north-east had just recorded its costliest reported attack on a military position in weeks, Plateau State had endured a second consecutive weekend of killings, the Borgu captives seized on 21 August were still unaccounted for, and IPOB's ultimatum over Nnamdi Kanu's appeal had expired without the appeal being listed. In the north-east, Sahara Reporters (18 September 2026) and TheCable (September 2026) reported that fighters of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) attacked the forward operating base at Gajiram, headquarters of Nganzai local government area in northern Borno about 82 km from Maiduguri, at about 7.10 p.m. on Thursday 17 September; both outlets, citing sources in the area, said seven soldiers were killed — TheCable reported that the dead included a colonel commanding the base — and that gun trucks were set ablaze. The military's own account differs sharply: outlets citing Defence Headquarters (Vanguard, TVC News, Authority Newspaper, 18 September 2026) said troops at Gajiram detected the approaching fighters early, held defensive positions with air support from the Air Component of Operation Hadin Kai, and forced the attackers to withdraw, with a separate ISWAP attack the same night on FOB Mairari in Guzamala similarly repelled; those reports describe four terrorists' bodies recovered along with weapons and ammunition, and do not mention any soldiers killed. No independent, on-the-record casualty figure for Gajiram reconciling the two accounts was found in the reports reviewed. Ten days earlier the army had said its positions at Pulka in Gwoza held against a coordinated ISWAP assault on 7 September, with one soldier wounded and the attackers withdrawing with casualties it did not quantify (Vanguard and allAfrica, 8 September 2026). The military's own claims of success continued: it said air strikes on 11 September, following two days of surveillance, hit what it described as terrorist logistics hubs at Tumbunma Baba in the Tumbun area of Borno, killing more than 18 fighters by its count and destroying structures used as a gathering and supply base (Rio Times Online, September 2026); and at the Defence Headquarters weekly briefing covering 11-17 September, Director of Defence Media Operations Major-General Michael Onoja said troops nationwide had rescued abducted victims — reported as at least 58 by Tribune, 66 by Vanguard and 50 by This Day — killed a dozen fighters, arrested suspected informants, collaborators, kidnappers and an alleged IED fabricator, recovered firearms, ammunition and motorcycles, and defused 12 improvised explosive devices along supply routes in Niger and Kwara states, nine of them on the Machan-Gyada-Masaka route (Tribune, Vanguard, This Day and Voice of Nigeria, 18-19 September 2026). All such figures are the military's own and cannot be independently verified. The insurgency waged since around 2009 by Boko Haram and ISWAP, which brought bombings back to Maiduguri itself in March when three suspected suicide attacks killed at least 23 people by the police count (Al Jazeera, 17 March 2026; Human Rights Watch, 26 March 2026), shows no sign of ending. The roughly 200 US personnel deployed in February for intelligence-sharing, training and counter-terrorism support remain due to leave by the end of September; Defence spokesman Major-General Samaila Uba said intelligence cooperation, training, information-sharing and technical assistance would continue and that the drawdown should not be read as a breakdown of the partnership (Associated Press via U.S. News and WTOP, 1 September 2026; Vanguard and allAfrica, 2 September 2026). No confirmation that the withdrawal had been completed was found as of 21 September. The Borgu captives: the worshippers seized from Dekara, Kpenya, Sabon-Gida and Gidan-Zana in Niger State's Borgu area during Friday prayers on 21 August — a number the state government has never fixed, with residents' estimates ranging from more than 60 to several hundred (Premium Times and Sahara Reporters, August 2026; P.M. News, 25 August 2026) — had not been reported released or rescued by any outlet reviewed, a month after President Tinubu ordered a coordinated rescue. The attackers are widely described as linked to the Lakurawa or the 'Mahmuda' group, armed bands contesting the forested border zone with Benin (allAfrica, 28 August 2026; Truth Nigeria, September 2026). Separately, the army said troops on an intelligence-led fighting patrol rescued 22 kidnap victims at Muchiya village in Niger State's Rafi area (allAfrica and NewsDiaryOnline, 17 September 2026); no report linked them to the Borgu abduction. In the Middle Belt, Plateau State's violence did not pause. After the attacks of 12-13 September that killed at least 13 people in Jos South, Mangu and Riyom (Vanguard and Pulse Nigeria, 14-15 September 2026), local reports said three members of a community vigilante group were killed while keeping watch over the NTV community in Barkin Ladi on 17 September (Blueprint, September 2026), and Truth Nigeria (September 2026) reported a security alert warning of possible attacks on markets, churches and mining sites across the state. Then, between the night of Saturday 19 September and the morning of Sunday 20 September, at least nine people were killed in separate attacks in Barkin Ladi and Riyom: five travellers to Gana-Ropp in Barkin Ladi when their vehicle was fired on on Saturday night, a pastor and one other person at Dorowa Babuje on their way to church on Sunday morning, a woman at Baten Wereng in Riyom on Saturday night and one person at Ratyidi in Fan district, while cattle were killed or stolen at Dorowa Maranba and along the Kantoma axis at about 3 a.m. on Sunday; troops of Operation Enduring Peace said they arrested 11 suspected kidnappers and rescued two victims in operations across the state over the same period (Leadership, Vanguard, Legit.ng, Pulse Nigeria and allAfrica, 20-21 September 2026). Herders have also been killed: community leaders said gunmen shot dead three herders and about 50 cattle near Aloghom in Mangu, a day after a herder was killed near Nyerwe in Barkin Ladi (Parrot Nigeria, 13 September 2026; The Journal, September 2026). None of the attacks had been claimed; each community attributes them to the other, and casualty figures remained under reconciliation by police and community leaders. In the north-west, banditry continued at scale. In Katsina State's southern belt, residents said at least 15 villages in Dandume local government area had been deserted after weeks of near-daily raids, with attacks also intensifying in Funtua and Bakori, nine travellers abducted on the Funtua-Dandume highway, and community leaders alleging more than 100 people abducted within two weeks (Leadership and allAfrica, 7 September 2026; Daily Trust, September 2026, which put the dead at 13); Guardian Nigeria (September 2026) separately reported 15 killed in attacks on Farun Bala, Falale and Kadobe villages in Jibia local government area that residents said broke a year-long local peace agreement. In Sokoto State, residents said armed men attacked Girkau and neighbouring settlements in Girkau ward of Kebbe local government area on a Thursday evening, killing five people and wounding three by one account and killing six by another, with abductions and cattle rustling also reported and one outlet linking the raid to a 40 million naira levy the attackers had demanded of the community (ANNAHDA and National Accord, September 2026). In Zamfara, the military said troops on 11 September intervened when fighters attacked a Canter truck on the Anka-Gummi road, forcing them to flee, rescuing three abductees and recovering communication equipment (West African Pilot News, 15 September 2026); Saidu Abubakar, the aide to a governorship candidate seized on the Tsafe-Magezu axis on 25 August, remained in captivity as of the last report (Sahara Reporters, 13 September 2026), and no release of the 27 villagers taken in Kaduna's Giwa area on 7 September (The Journal, September 2026) had been reported in the outlets reviewed. In the Niger Delta, organised militancy has largely given way to industrial-scale crude theft: the navy said personnel of NNS Soroh, operating under Operation Delta Sentinel, uncovered about 119,850 litres of suspected stolen crude oil at an illegal refining site at Ogbogolo in Rivers State's Ahoada West area on 17 September, together with about 350 litres of suspected illegally refined petrol and 25 parcels of suspected cannabis (Premium Times, The Tide and QNC News, September 2026), on top of the roughly 43,000 litres recovered in Rivers and Delta in the first week of the month (Leadership and PRNigeria, September 2026); the Director of Naval Information said the logistics involved point to well-organised and sophisticated syndicates (P.M. News, 3 September 2026). In the south-east, IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu remains imprisoned following his November 2025 terrorism conviction and life sentence, and the 14-day ultimatum IPOB issued on 1 September for the government to list and hear his appeal or face a boycott of the 2027 elections across the south-east (Sahara Reporters, Vanguard and P.M. News, 1 September 2026) has expired without the appeal being listed: as of 10 September his lawyer said the Court of Appeal had not fixed a hearing and the federal government had not filed its respondent's brief within the prescribed period (Leadership, September 2026), and IPOB's directorate of state said on 6 September that the boycott was 'not a threat' but a promise (VerseNews, September 2026). IPOB argues the conviction rests on the repealed Terrorism Prevention (Amendment) Act 2013, superseded by the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act 2022 (Vanguard, September 2026); the federal government maintains that Nigeria's territorial integrity is not negotiable. No hearing date, no formal boycott declaration and no organised IPOB action following the ultimatum's expiry had been reported in the outlets reviewed as of 21 September.

Nigeria's most consequential territorial dispute is now a closed chapter, and a widely cited example of peaceful settlement. Sovereignty over the Bakassi Peninsula — a fishing-rich, oil-adjacent finger of land on the Gulf of Guinea — was contested with neighbouring Cameroon for decades, flaring into armed clashes in the 1990s. Cameroon took the case to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in its favour in 2002, grounding the decision largely in colonial-era boundary agreements. Rather than defy the judgment, Nigeria negotiated: the UN-brokered Greentree Agreement of 2006 set a phased handover, and Nigeria completed the transfer of sovereignty to Cameroon in 2008. A joint UN-supported commission has since worked to demarcate the roughly 2,000-kilometre land boundary between the two countries. The episode is frequently held up as a rare case of a major African territorial dispute resolved through adjudication and diplomacy rather than war, though some displaced Bakassi residents in Nigeria continue to press grievances over resettlement.

Nigeria covers about 924,000 square kilometres and is organised by a strong north-south climatic gradient and by two rivers. The Niger and the Benue meet at Lokoja in a Y that divides the country into three, and the Niger Delta in the south is one of the largest river deltas in the world, a dense maze of creeks and mangrove that is also the centre of the oil industry and badly degraded by spills and gas flaring. The coast has lagoons and rainforest; inland the forest gives way to Guinea savanna, then Sudan savanna, then Sahel scrub near the borders with Niger and Chad, where desertification and the shrinking of Lake Chad are severe. The Jos Plateau rises in the centre, and the highest ground is on the Cameroonian border in the Mambilla highlands, where Chappal Waddi reaches about 2,400 metres. The climate is tropical: the south has a long wet season with well over 2,000 millimetres of rain a year on the coast, while the north has a single short and unreliable rainy season and the dry, dust-laden harmattan blowing off the Sahara from December.

Nigerian leisure runs at full volume. The owambe — the lavish weekend party of matching aso ebi outfits, live bands, and celebratory money-spraying — is the great social institution, and Lagos's 'Detty December' season of concerts and beach parties now draws the global diaspora home every year. The festival calendar is spectacular: the Durbar of Kano, a centuries-old parade of armored horsemen marking the Islamic Eids, joined UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2024; the Argungu fishing festival of Kebbi State, inscribed in 2016, climaxes with thousands of fishermen plunging into the river at once; the white-clad Eyo masquerade takes over Lagos Island on rare ceremonial occasions; and the annual Osun-Osogbo festival animates a UNESCO World Heritage sacred grove. The Calabar Carnival each December bills itself as Africa's biggest street party. Everyday pleasures are simpler: viewing centers roaring for Premier League Saturdays, suya stands after dark, boat trips to Tarkwa Bay beach, and draughts and Ludo contested with championship seriousness.

Nigeria holds several of Africa's greatest art traditions. The Nok culture of the central plateau was firing expressive, near-life-sized terracotta heads by around 500 BCE — among the oldest sculpture in sub-Saharan Africa. Ninth-century Igbo-Ukwu produced bronze vessels of astonishing intricacy by lost-wax casting; the naturalistic brass and terracotta heads of Ife (twelfth–fifteenth centuries) rank with the finest portraiture anywhere; and the Kingdom of Benin's brass plaques and commemorative heads — thousands of which were looted in the British punitive expedition of 1897 and scattered to Western museums — are now the subject of a landmark restitution movement, with returns underway from European collections. Modern Nigerian art carries the lineage forward: Ben Enwonwu's sculpture Anyanwu stands at the National Museum in Lagos and at the United Nations, and his rediscovered portrait Tutu — dubbed the 'African Mona Lisa' — set auction records in 2018; the Nsukka school led by Uche Okeke drew Igbo uli design into contemporary practice, and Lagos's galleries and art fairs now power one of Africa's liveliest markets.

Nigeria's roster of world figures is long. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the journalist-statesman who became the first president in 1963, joins Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello in the founding trio of the independence generation. Chinua Achebe and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka redefined African literature, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie carries that global standing today. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti invented Afrobeat and remains an icon of musical defiance decades after his death. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, twice finance minister, became Director-General of the World Trade Organization in 2021 — the first woman and the first African to hold the post. Aliko Dangote, the cement-and-refining industrialist, has topped Forbes' ranking of Africa's richest people for more than a decade. Lagos-born Hakeem Olajuwon won back-to-back NBA championships with the Houston Rockets and entered basketball's Hall of Fame. Add Nollywood star Genevieve Nnaji, Grammy-winning Burna Boy, and world-record hurdler Tobi Amusan, and the pattern holds: whatever the field, Nigeria supplies protagonists.

Nigeria's scientific story starts with metallurgy: the Nok culture was smelting iron by roughly 500 BCE, among the earliest dates in West Africa, and the ninth-century bronze-casters of Igbo-Ukwu commanded lost-wax techniques of a sophistication that startled the archaeologists who uncovered them. Monumental engineering followed — the walls and moats of Benin City and the vast Sungbo's Eredo earthwork in Yorubaland rank among the largest pre-mechanical construction projects anywhere on Earth. The modern record is anchored in medicine and technology. In 2014, Lagos physician Ameyo Adadevoh and her colleagues held Nigeria's index Ebola patient in isolation despite intense pressure, a stand credited with containing the outbreak in a megacity of some 20 million; Adadevoh died of the disease, and the WHO hailed Nigeria's response as a piece of world-class epidemiology. Nigerian researchers lead global study of sickle-cell disease, of which the country is the world epicenter, and the Lagos tech ecosystem — Africa's most funded, producing fintech successes like Paystack and Flutterwave — now exports financial-technology infrastructure across the continent.

Nigeria has the largest technology start-up sector in Africa, clustered in the Yaba district of Lagos, and it has produced several financial-technology companies of continental scale, including Interswitch, Flutterwave and Paystack, which Stripe acquired in 2020; the sector grew around a young, mobile-first population underserved by conventional banking. The National Space Research and Development Agency has operated satellites since 2003, with the NigeriaSat Earth-observation series built and launched in partnership with British firms and the NigComSat communications satellite with Chinese partners. Public-health capability was demonstrated in 2014, when an imported Ebola case reached Lagos and was contained within weeks by contact tracing run through the emergency operations structure built for polio surveillance, a response the World Health Organization highlighted; that same polio programme led to certification of the African region as free of wild poliovirus in 2020, with Nigeria the last country in the region to interrupt transmission. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture at Ibadan breeds cassava, yam, cowpea and maize for the humid tropics.