Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Nigeria, this region’s cornerstone, is home to 187 million people. This is by far the largest population of any African country, and within the region more people live in Nigeria than in all the other countries of West Africa combined. Moreover, in 2014 Nigeria surpassed South Africa to become the largest economy in the realm. But this country is also bisected by one of the most contentious segments of the Islamic Front, which in this decade has unleashed the vicious Boko Haram insurgency based in the northeast. And another current security crisis affects the exporting of Nigeria’s most valuable resource, oil; pirate attacks are on the rise along the Gulf of Guinea coast, aimed at the main sea lane used by tankers to transport oil to Global Core countries from the extensive fields that lie beneath the Niger River Delta in the southeastern corner of the country. Nigeria achieved independence from Britain in 1960, but its new government faced the herculean task of managing a European political creation containing three major nations and nearly 250 other peoples. For reasons obvious from the map, Britain’s colonial imprint was always stronger in the two southern subregions than in the north." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 302-3]