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Can you locate all nine provinces of South Africa?
Can you place all 342 Dutch gemeenten?
Can you locate all 50 provinces of Spain?
Can you locate all 34 provinces of Vietnam?
Nigeria writes the answer on the back of its cars. Every Nigerian plate carries the state it was registered in, spelled out in words along the bottom edge, so a vehicle in shot hands you the state and leaves you one question: where is that state? This page is the whole set, zone by zone, and the game asks you to put each name on the map.
Nigeria is a federation of 36 states and one federal capital territory, and unlike most administrative maps this one is only thirty years old. The country began independence in 1960 with three regions, split into twelve states in 1967, and then split again in 1976, 1987, 1991 and finally 1996, which is when the present 36 were fixed. Nothing has moved since. That history is why the shapes are blocky and why so many of the names are unfamiliar even to people who know the country: seventeen of the thirty-seven were created in 1987 or later, which makes them younger than a good share of the people driving through them.
The Federal Capital Territory is the odd one out and Nigerians are precise about it. It is not a state, it has no governor, and it exists because the capital was moved out of Lagos: the territory was carved out of the middle of the country in 1976 and Abuja formally took over as capital in 1991. On the map it is the small wedge in the geographic centre, wrapped by Niger, Kaduna, Nasarawa and Kogi.
The plate is the clue. A modern Nigerian plate is white with a blue strip at the top reading FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA, a registration in the middle in the form ABC-123DE, and the state's name along the bottom, usually beside that state's slogan. Lagos plates say Centre of Excellence, Benue plates say Food Basket of the Nation, Kogi plates say The Confluence State, and Abuja plates say Centre of Unity. You do not need the slogans: the state name is written there in full. What you need is the map, and that is the whole reason this trainer exists. The three letters at the front of the registration encode a local government area rather than the state, so they are more precise and much harder to read without a table.
The other place the name is written is the road. Nigerian signs are in English, and a boundary sign welcomes you to the state you are entering by name, often with the same slogan underneath.
The traps are mostly names. Niger is a state in the middle of the country, the country to the north, and the river that runs through both, and only one of those three is being asked for here. Kogi and Kwara sit next to each other in the middle belt and are easy to swap. There are six states beginning with K: Kano, Katsina and Kaduna are neighbours in the north west, Kebbi is off to the west on the Benin border, and Kogi and Kwara are in the North Central. The South West has four states beginning with O (Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Oyo) packed into one corner, plus Ekiti and Lagos.
Several states are named after their largest city, which is a useful shortcut where it holds: Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, Kaduna, Bauchi, Gombe and Enugu are all states whose capital is the city of the same name. It does not hold everywhere, so do not lean on it. Oyo state is run from Ibadan, Ondo from Akure, Abia from Umuahia and Lagos state from Ikeja, and in each of those the city you have heard of is not the state's namesake or not its capital.
Those are the six geopolitical zones. They were drawn in the mid 1990s and they have no constitutional standing at all: no governor, no assembly, no budget. What they have is everything else. Federal appointments are balanced across them, party tickets are zoned between them, election results are read out by them, and a Nigerian describing where somebody is from will very often name the zone before the state. They are the grouping worth learning first, and each can be switched on and off on its own in the game's start dialog, which makes the South East a five state drill and the North East an evening.
Two of the six names surprise people. South South is not a typo: it is the Niger Delta, the oil producing coast that runs from Edo round to Cross River, and its name is a compromise, because unlike the South East and the South West the region has no single people to be named after. North Central is the middle belt, and it is the zone that carries the Federal Capital Territory, which is why it has seven members while the two other northern zones have six and seven states of their own.
The smallest state on this map and the one with the most people in it: a coastal strip in the far south west, wrapped around a lagoon, with the Republic of Benin a few kilometres to the west. It is the only state you might reasonably fail to click rather than fail to name, so zoom in before you tap. Lagos was the federal capital until 1991 and the plates still say Centre of Excellence.
The Federal Capital Territory, the wedge in the middle of the country that holds Abuja. It was cut out of the surrounding states in 1976 precisely because it belonged to none of them, which is the same reason it is the hardest target here to place from memory: there is no city, river or coast attached to it that you would recognise from the outside. Find the geographic centre of the country and it is the small shape just south west of it.
One of the two largest states by area, and the one in the far north east corner, against Lake Chad, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Sahel country: thorn scrub, sand and long flat horizons, nothing like the south. Borno is worth knowing as a shape rather than a name, because it is the one state on this map you can identify from the outline alone, and because anything that looks that dry is either Borno or its neighbour Yobe.
36, plus the Federal Capital Territory, which is not a state and is usually counted separately. The present set was fixed in 1996 and has not changed since. They are conventionally grouped into six geopolitical zones, and the game lets you drill one zone at a time.
North West, North East, North Central, South West, South East and South South. They were drawn in the mid 1990s and have no constitutional status, but federal appointments, party tickets and election results are all balanced and reported across them, so they are the grouping Nigerians actually use. North Central, the middle belt, is the one that contains the Federal Capital Territory.
The state. A modern Nigerian plate is white with a blue strip reading FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA at the top and the state's name written out along the bottom, usually next to that state's slogan. The registration itself is three letters, three digits and two letters, and the leading three letters encode a local government area rather than the state, so the words at the bottom are the part worth reading.
Lagos is the largest city and its own state, on the south west coast. Abuja is the capital, built from scratch in the centre of the country inside the Federal Capital Territory, and it took over from Lagos in 1991. On this map they are about 500 kilometres apart and in different zones: Lagos is South West and the FCT is North Central.
Niger state with the country Niger to the north and with the river of the same name. Kogi with Kwara, which are neighbours in the middle belt. The six states starting with K, since Kano, Katsina and Kaduna are neighbours while Kebbi, Kogi and Kwara are nowhere near them. And the four O states of the South West, Ogun, Ondo, Osun and Oyo, which are packed into one corner of the map.
Work north to south first. The far south is delta and rainforest, the middle belt is open savanna with scattered trees, and the far north is dry Sahel. Then use the language on shopfronts and informal signage: Yoruba in the south west, Igbo in the south east, Hausa with some Arabic script in the north. A plate or a boundary sign will then usually give you the state outright, which is the point at which knowing this map pays.
The other African trainers here are South Africa Provinces and South Africa Dialing Codes. For administrative maps of a similar size, try Turkey Provinces, India States and Brazil Dialing Codes.
