Why Nigeria’s Interstate Boundaries Are Still Disputed
Most Nigerian state boundaries were created on paper, often reusing colonial-era descriptions, long before anyone planted beacons on the ground. One academic assessment counts 86 interstate boundaries, 46 of them disputed. The National Boundary Commission is now tracing and pillaring them one at a time, so never assume a map layer shows the true line.
Why this happens
Many internal boundaries trace back to colonial-era instruments. The Edo/Kogi boundary, for example, goes back to Legal Notice 126 of 1954, which defined the line between the former Northern and Western Regions. When states were later created, twelve in 1967 and thirty-six by 1996, they inherited those descriptions and the lines were gazetted. Physical demarcation, with beacons and coordinates, is a separate job, and for many boundaries it was never finished.
A legal description is not a boundary on the ground
A description is only as good as the features it points to. In my experience, older descriptions often lean on rivers, ridges and control points fixed with the technology of their day. Rivers move. Markers get farmed over or built on. The control that anchored those surveys predates satellite positioning, and Nigeria’s national datum, the Minna datum, is itself a legacy datum. That is why modern GNSS work on old boundaries needs careful transformation and documentation.
What the consequences look like
When a line is ambiguous, the disagreement doesn’t stay on paper. Farmland, markets and revenue can sit on a line nobody agrees on, and a new survey can contradict what communities have treated as the boundary for decades. I’ve personally stood on three different “official” boundary lines between the same two states, each supported by a different document.
Which boundaries are being demarcated now
The National Boundary Commission (NBC) leads this work with the Office of the Surveyor-General of the Federation and the states concerned. Two recent public examples:
Abia/Anambra (July 2026): about 15 km of the 23 km boundary has been jointly traced and provisionally demarcated, and the remaining 8 km is under discussion. The NBC’s Director-General said the outstanding stretch should be settled using archival records, field evidence and court judgments, and that state-produced maps should not be the basis for deciding an interstate boundary.
Edo/Kogi (February 2026): the boundary has been traced and provisionally demarcated. The next phase is roughly 100 primary pillars at 2 km intervals and about 900 intermediate pillars at 200 m intervals.
In December 2023 the commission reported about 30 interstate boundaries demarcated, some completed. These are public examples, not a complete list.
What this means for your work
A boundary layer is a representation, not the legal line. If your work sits near an interstate or LGA boundary, check the gazette and the legal instrument, ask the NBC or the state surveyor-general’s office where that boundary currently stands, and treat “provisionally demarcated” as provisional. Record where your layer came from, and commission a verification survey if the stakes are high. The map is an opinion until you’ve seen the beacons.
A. B. Wayforward