Nigeria's Stories

Nok terracotta, the Benin bronzes, the Hausa city-states, the Sokoto Caliphate, the Old Oyo Empire, the kingdoms of the Niger Delta — every polity that the colonial map would later erase into a single colour.

Flora Shaw, future Lady Lugard, coins 'Nigeria' in a Times of London essay, 8 January 1897. By 1914 it is a country.

Aba, 1929. Igbo and Ibibio women organise across markets and clans against the warrant chiefs and the threat of taxation on women. At least 55 dead.

The Union Jack is lowered at the Race Course (now Tafawa Balewa Square), Lagos. Three regions, one federation, an outgoing Queen-in-Parliament.

Majors Nzeogwu, Ifeajuna, Onwuatuegwu and the Five Majors. Balewa, Akintola, Ahmadu Bello killed. The First Republic ends.

30 May 1967 — 15 January 1970. Estimated one to three million dead, predominantly of starvation and disease. Aburi, the war, the Three Rs.

Indigenisation. Second National Development Plan. FESTAC '77. Mass urbanisation of Lagos, Port Harcourt, Warri.

1986 SAP under Babangida. Devaluation, deregulation, austerity. Wage erosion that has, in real terms, never recovered.

M.K.O. Abiola wins the 12 June 1993 presidential election — widely judged the freest and fairest to that date. Babangida annuls the results on 23 June.

NADECO. The Ogoni Nine. The Abacha years. Death by dialysis, death by hanging, death by parcel bomb.

Abdulsalami's transition. Obasanjo elected. The 1999 Constitution promulgated by military decree on 5 May.

14 April 2014: 276 schoolgirls abducted from Government Secondary School, Chibok. As of recording, 91 still unaccounted for.

October 2020. National protest against the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. 20 October at the Lekki Toll Gate. Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry, October 2021.

29 May 2023: fuel subsidy removed at inauguration. June 2023: naira floated. Inflation at multi-decade highs.

Because the documents survive. Because a citizen should be able to verify a claim in under sixty seconds. Because the Republic deserves a record built to evidence standards.