Sir Frederick Lugard (Second Tenure)

Lugard returned to Nigeria in 1912 to execute the project Sir Walter Egerton had begun — administrative unification. On 1 January 1914 the Colony of Lagos, the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria and the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria were merged into the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, with Lugard as Governor-General. The name 'Nigeria' — coined by his wife Flora Shaw in The Times of 8 January 1897 — became official. The amalgamation was an accountancy measure (the rich palm-oil South would subsidise the loss-making North), not a nation-building one, and the divisions it papered over have shaped Nigerian politics ever since. See 1914 Amalgamation.

His second tenure also saw the suppression of the Egba Uprising of 1918 (Adubi War — over the imposition of direct taxation in Abeokuta, in violation of the 1893 treaty), in which 564 Egba were killed. He retired in 1919; his wife's name for the country survived him.