Southern Nigeria Protectorate (1900 - 1914)

Southern Nigeria was a British protectorate in the coastal areas of modern-day Nigeria formed in 1900 from the union of the Niger Coast Protectorate with territories chartered by the Royal Niger Company below Lokoja on the Niger River.

In parallel, the Niger Coast Protectorate was a British protectorate in the Oil Rivers area of present-day Nigeria, originally established as the Oil Rivers Protectorate in 1885 and expanded and renamed the Niger Coast Protectorate on 12 May 1893.


On 1 January, 1900, the chartered territories of the Royal Niger Company merged with the Niger Coast Protectorate to form the Southern Nigeria Protectorate. The Lagos colony was added in 1906, and the territory was officially renamed the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria.

As consolidation and British influence increased, Southern Nigeria was joined with Northern Nigeria Protectorate to form the single colony of Nigeria in 1914. The unification was done for economic reasons rather than political — Northern Nigeria Protectorate had a budget deficit; and the colonial administration sought to use the budget surpluses in Southern Nigeria to offset this deficit.

Sir Frederick Lugard, who took office as governor of both protectorates in 1912, was responsible for overseeing the unification, and he became the first governor of the newly united territory. Lugard established several central institutions to anchor the evolving unified structure. A Central Secretariat was instituted at Lagos, which was the seat of government, and the Nigerian Council (later the Legislative Council), was founded to provide a forum for representatives drawn from the provinces. Certain services were integrated across the Northern and Southern Provinces because of their national significance—military, treasury, audit, posts and telegraphs, railways, survey, medical services, judicial and legal departments—and brought under the control of the Central Secretariat in Lagos.

The process of unification was undermined by the persistence of different regional perspectives on governance between the Northern and Southern Provinces, and by Nigerian nationalists in Lagos. While southern colonial administrators welcomed amalgamation as an opportunity for imperial expansion, their counterparts in the Northern Province believed that it was injurious to the interests of the areas they administered because of their relative backwardness and that it was their duty to resist the advance of southern influences and culture into the north. Southerners, on their part, were not eager to embrace the extension of legislation originally meant for the north to the south.