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Nigeria, which elects a new president on February 16, is the most populous country in Africa and the largest oil producer, but suffers from poverty and insecurity.
More than 190 million people live in this country of West Africa. The UN estimates that it will become the third most populous country in the world by 2050.
Nigeria has about 250 ethnic and linguistic groups, the three most prominent being the mainly Muslim Hausa in the north, the predominantly Christian Igbo in the southeast and the Yoruba in the southwest.
The population is about half Muslim and half Christian.
According to the World Poverty Clock, Nigeria surpbaded India as the most populous country of extreme poverty last year, with 87 million people living on less than $ 1.90 a day.
The region of present-day Nigeria was historically home to independent kingdoms and city-states affected by the slave trade in Europe from the end of the 15th century.
The British settlers merged their north and south protectorates into one entity – Nigeria – on 1 January 1914 and ruled until independence in 1960.
After independence, Nigeria experienced six successful coups since January 1966, leading to decades of essentially military rule until civil government was reestablished in 1999.
A secession bid in Igbo-dominated Biafra led to a civil war that killed an estimated one million people as a result of fighting, disease and famine between 1967 and 1970.
Outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari, himself a former head of the coup, became in 2015 the first opposition candidate in Nigeria to overthrow a sitting president.
The radical Islamist group Boko Haram, whose insurgency has devastated the north-east since 2009, has posed a great threat, killing at least 27,000 people and more than 1.8 million internally displaced people.
Buhari was elected on a commitment to defeat the group, after his predecessor Goodluck Jonathan did not do it.
In 2014, the kidnapping by the group of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok drew the world's attention to violence.
By the end of 2015, the army managed to drive the jihadists out of the ground.
But since July 2018, ISWAP, the Boko Haram faction supported by the Islamic State, has intensified its deadly attacks on military bases.
Nigeria is also marked by a conflict of land and resources between mainly Christian farmers and nomadic herders, mainly Muslims, in which thousands of people have died in recent years.
The country is Africa's largest oil producer, accounting for nearly 83 percent of its government's revenue.
It is also on the continent's largest natural gas reserves.
However, it is slowly emerging from the recession between 2016 and 2017, as a result of the drop in the price of crude oil and attacks on its oil infrastructure.
In 2019, it is expected to grow by 2%, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Decades of military rule have led to underinvestment in many sectors and have allowed corruption to flourish, leaving much of Nigeria with inadequate and substandard infrastructure.
Efforts are being made to catch up, but rapid population growth, poor implementation of policies, lack of good governance and persistent corruption make it a daunting task.
Nigeria has produced such great writers as Wole Soyinka, the first Nobel Laureate in Literature in Africa (1986), internationally acclaimed Chinua Achebe and feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Its film industry, "Nollywood", generates billions of dollars and produces some 2,000 films a year, mostly small DVD productions sold by street vendors.
With the increasing quality of local productions and the availability of satellite channels, Nigerian cinema is being exported across Africa.
Nigeria is also home to Afrobeats, originally popularized by singer and activist Fela Kuti, as well as by a host of internationally renowned artists. Football is the national sport.
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