Colonel Muammar Gaddafi paid a state visit to Nigeria in April 1983 as the guest of President Shehu Shagari, eight months before Shagari's government would be overthrown by Muhammadu Buhari. The visit was politically delicate: Nigeria was a leading member of the multinational force that had intervened in the Chad civil war against Goukouni Oueddei's Libyan-backed faction, and Shagari himself had publicly criticised Libya's intervention. The Lagos visit was conceived by the Shagari–Audu Ogbeh axis as an effort to defuse the Chad tension and to interest Tripoli in financing Nigerian agricultural projects under the Green Revolution programme.
Gaddafi arrived in his characteristic green military uniform with a delegation that included his then-deputy Major Abdessalam Jalloud and a small Amazonian Guard. He was received at State House, Marina, by Shagari and Vice-President Alex Ekwueme. The substantive talks, conducted at Aso Villa Lagos rather than at the Tripoli-style 'tent' Gaddafi famously preferred, produced a joint communiqué on Chadian de-escalation that proved short-lived: by mid-1983 Libyan forces were once again advancing in the Aozou Strip, and by late 1983 Shagari was no longer in office. The visit was Gaddafi's only state visit to civilian Nigeria.