Welcome, and thank you for pulling up a chair. This piece is the conclusion of months of research through statute books, ministry pages and conservation reports, sitting on top of years of experience writing about Nigerian identity. It began with my nine-year-old niece in Ibadan, who looked up from her homework and asked, “Uncle, what is Nigeria’s national animal?” I answered quickly, then spent weeks checking whether I was right. The answer lives inside the small family of emblems this country adopted at independence, and it is tidier than the rumours suggest.

It is the eagle.

But I would be short-changing you if I stopped there, because the same homework sheet had three more questions on it, and those three are where most adults (myself included, until recently) go wrong. Is there a lion somewhere in the picture? Do we have a national food? A national tree?

Two of those have answers that will surprise you. One of them has no official answer at all, and I think that absence is worth talking about.

So let us go through it properly, the way I eventually did for my niece, with the sources open on the table.

What Is Our National Animal, and Where Did the Eagle Come From?

Our national animal is the eagle, and it earned that position by sitting on top of the coat of arms.

That is the whole legal basis, and I want to be straight with you about it. I searched for a separate law or gazette notice that says, in so many words, “the national animal of Nigeria shall be the eagle”. I did not find one. What exists is the coat of arms, adopted in May 1960 ahead of independence and governed by the Flags and Coats of Arms Act, and on that coat of arms a red eagle stands above a black shield.

Everything else follows from that picture.

The tourism authority sets it out most plainly. In its official run-through of the country’s national assets, it describes a red eagle sitting on a green and white band above the shield, and states that the eagle represents strength while the two white horses represent dignity. The foreign ministry’s page describing the arms for diplomats and visitors adds the rest: a black shield for fertile soil, and a wavy white pall marking the meeting of the Niger and the Benue at Lokoja.

Strength on top. Dignity on either side. Fertile ground in the middle.

Rather like a family portrait where everyone has been told exactly where to stand, the arrangement is deliberate. A country about to govern itself for the first time wanted the highest point of its emblem to say one thing, and it chose strength.

Here is the detail I enjoy most. The eagle on the arms is not a species. It is a heraldic eagle, which is why it is red, a colour no living eagle has ever managed. If you went looking for it with binoculars you would be disappointed.

You would not, however, go home empty-handed. Nigeria’s skies hold real eagles of real consequence. The martial eagle, the largest in Africa, has a wingspan that approaches 2.6 metres, which is wider than most sitting-room doors are tall. The crowned eagle hunts in our southern forests and regularly takes prey heavier than itself. I once watched a fish eagle work a stretch of the Niger near Lokoja for the better part of an hour, and I remember thinking that whoever designed the arms had probably seen something similar.

The eagle has since escaped the coat of arms entirely.

The senior men’s football team has been the Super Eagles since 1988. The under-twenties are the Flying Eagles, the under-seventeens the Golden Eaglets, and the women are the Super Falcons (close enough). Ask a child in Aba which animal represents Nigeria and you will get the right answer for a footballing reason. I have stopped correcting people on that. A symbol that fills a stadium is doing its job.

A quick word on the other bird you may have read about. Several websites name the black crowned crane as Nigeria’s national bird. I could not trace that to any Nigerian statute or ministry page, so treat it as popular custom, not law.

Design and Styling Tips for Using the Eagle Correctly

Since so many of you will meet this question through a school project, a church banner or a company brochure, some practical guidance.

Keep the eagle red. It is the single most common error I see, usually from designers who assume red was a printing mistake and helpfully turn it brown or gold.

Keep it standing on the green and white wreath, wings spread, above the shield. Do not flip it, crop it, or lift it off the arms to use as a logo by itself. The coat of arms is a protected emblem under the Flags and Coats of Arms Act, and using it commercially without authority sits on the wrong side of that law, however patriotic the campaign.

For a classroom poster on A3 card (297 by 420 millimetres), give the full arms at least 150 millimetres of width and leave a clear margin of roughly 20 millimetres around it so that no text crowds the horses. For the green, printers in Lagos generally work to the flag green that designers know as hex 008751. That value is industry convention, not a published government standard, but it will keep your green from drifting towards lime.

And if all you want is an eagle to decorate a birthday cake for a Super Eagles fan, draw any eagle you like. The rules protect the arms, not the bird.

Does Nigeria Have a Lion, or Is That a Myth?

Yes, Nigeria has lions. Just barely.

This is the question that produced the longest silence when I put it to friends. Half were certain we have none outside the zoo. The other half assumed the north is full of them. Both camps were wrong, and the truth is sadder than either.

Lions once ranged across the whole of northern Nigeria. Today wild lions survive in only two places in the country: Kainji Lake National Park and Yankari Game Reserve in Bauchi State. The Wildlife Conservation Society, which works in both, estimates that fewer than 50 remain.

Fewer than 50. In a country of well over 200 million people.

One conservation group put the figure lower still. A report carried by this newspaper’s environment desk in 2022 quoted LionAid’s count of as few as 34 animals, and its trustee’s blunt view that a population that small is, biologically speaking, already on borrowed time. When researchers surveyed the two sites in 2016, they put roughly 30 lions in Kainji and fewer than five in Yankari. I have not found a more recent published count, which tells its own story.

For scale, Tanzania has about 8,000.

Why so few? The conservationists give the same three reasons every time. Bushmeat hunting has stripped out the antelope that lions eat. Farmland and grazing have pushed into what used to be open savannah. And when a hungry lion takes a cow, the herder’s response is usually poison. Lions across West Africa have lost about 99 per cent of their historic range, and they have vanished altogether from Côte d’Ivoire, the Gambia, Mali and Sierra Leone.

Now, the place itself. The National Park Service describes Kainji Lake as the nation’s premier national park, and its own profile of the park’s location and size gives a total area of 5,340.82 square kilometres across Niger and Kwara states. That is split into the Borgu sector at 3,970.02 square kilometres and the Zugurma sector at 1,370.80. The park lies about 500 kilometres from Lagos and 385 kilometres from Abuja.

Put differently, the country’s main lion refuge is larger than Lagos State, and you could drive across it without seeing a single cat.

There is some movement. In October 2023 the Service signed a 31-year co-management agreement with the West African Conservation Network to restore Kainji Lake. The National Assembly has also passed the Endangered Species Conservation and Protection Bill, the first serious rewrite of our wildlife law in nearly four decades. When I last checked, conservation groups were still pressing for presidential assent, so confirm its status before you quote it.

So why is the lion not on the arms, given how loudly it lives in our languages? Zaki in Hausa, kiniun in Yoruba, odum in Igbo. Chiefs take the name. Schools paint it on their gates.

My honest guess is that it comes down to 1960 and what the arms were for. The lion already belonged to somebody. It stood on the royal arms of the departing colonial power, and a nation walking out from under that emblem was hardly going to pick the same beast.

The eagle was free. So we took the eagle.

So, What Is Nigeria’s National Animal? The Direct Answer

Here is the answer in one paragraph, for anyone who skipped straight to this section (no judgement, I do it too).

Nigeria’s national animal is the eagle. It appears as a red eagle at the top of the national coat of arms, adopted in 1960, where it stands on a green and white wreath above a black shield and represents the strength of the nation. Its status comes from that coat of arms and from long official usage, since no separate statute names a national animal. The eagle shares the arms with two white horses, which represent dignity, and with the Costus spectabilis, the national flower, at the base. The related emblems people ask about in the same breath sit on much softer ground: the lion is a native animal with fewer than 50 left in the wild but has no official standing, jollof rice is the national dish by popular agreement only, and Nigeria has never designated a national tree. In short:

• National animal: the eagle, by virtue of the coat of arms
• Supporting animals on the arms: two white horses, for dignity
• National flower: Costus spectabilis, also on the arms
• National food: none in law; jollof rice by custom
• National tree: none designated at federal level

That last pair is where the pub arguments start, so let me show you the whole picture in one place before we take them in turn.

Nigeria’s National Animal and Related Emblems Compared

Emblem	What it is	Official status	Where you will meet it	Key figure
National animal	Eagle (heraldic, red)	Official through the coat of arms	Top of the coat of arms, passports, court seals	Adopted May 1960
Supporting animals	Two white horses	Official through the coat of arms	Either side of the shield	Stand for dignity
National flower	Costus spectabilis	Official through the coat of arms	Base of the coat of arms	Yellow in nature, often drawn red
Lion	West African lion	No official status	Kainji Lake and Yankari only	Fewer than 50 in the wild
National food	Jollof rice	Customary only, no law	Every party in the country	World Jollof Day, 22 August
National tree	None designated	No federal designation	Iroko, oil palm and baobab are the usual candidates	Iroko grows to about 50 metres

What the table shows is a clean split. Everything official traces back to a single 1960 drawing, and everything Nigerians argue about most fondly, the lion, the food and the tree, has no legal footing whatsoever.

What Is Nigeria’s National Food, Alongside Our National Animal?

Nigeria has no legally designated national food. No Act, no gazette, no ministerial declaration.

I know. I was surprised too.

What we have instead is something stronger than a law, which is consensus. Ask a room full of Nigerians and most will say jollof rice before you finish the question. It crosses every ethnic line we have. It is served at Yoruba owambe, Igbo traditional weddings and Hausa naming ceremonies alike, and the old line that a party without jollof is only a meeting is repeated so often because nobody has ever disproved it.

Our own Life desk covered the first Lagos jollof festival back in August 2017, where one of the chefs summed up the mood by calling it the nation’s favourite dish and something close to a collective obsession. That was nine years ago. The obsession has not cooled.

It has, however, become expensive. The SBM Jollof Index, which tracks what it costs to cook one pot for a family of five, put the national average at ₦29,578 in June 2026. When the unofficial national dish costs nearly ₦30,000 a pot, it starts to tell you things about the economy that the official statistics take longer to admit.

Now for the part that starts arguments. Jollof is not Nigerian by origin. The dish traces to the Wolof people of the Senegambia region, and Senegal’s version carries international heritage recognition. What Nigeria made its own is party jollof: firewood, smoke, and that prized burnt layer at the bottom of the pot.

So is jollof truly the best candidate?

There is a respectable case for egusi soup with pounded yam instead. Both the melon seed and the yam are indigenous, the dish is eaten from Sokoto to Calabar under different names, and nobody in Accra is going to contest it. My late grandmother in Ondo would have settled the matter in four words: “Rice is for visitors.”

She had a point. But I would not want to defend it at a wedding.

If you are putting together a school project or a cultural day table and want to represent the national food honestly, my advice is to label jollof as “popularly regarded as” the national dish, and set a second, indigenous dish beside it. A pot of jollof next to a bowl of egusi tells the truth better than either does alone.

What Is Nigeria’s National Tree, and Should We Choose One?

Nigeria does not have an official national tree.

This is the one that produced the most confident wrong answers when I asked around. People told me iroko, oil palm, baobab, mahogany and, memorably, mango. Every one of them was certain.

None of them is designated. I went through the arms, the Act and the ministry pages, and trees simply do not feature. The only plant on the coat of arms is the Costus spectabilis, a low yellow wildflower, and even that is frequently drawn in red by artists who never saw one.

The closest thing to a precedent comes from a state. In March 2022 Ekiti adopted the obeche as its official state tree, and the governor at the time said Ekiti was the first state in the federation to do such a thing. If that claim holds, then as recently as four years ago not one of our 36 states had an official tree, never mind the country.

So who are the real candidates?

Iroko is the sentimental favourite. It is a forest giant, reaching about 50 metres in height and up to 10 metres around the trunk, and the Yoruba have long held it sacred. Farmers clearing land would leave an iroko standing out of respect (and a little fear). It is also slow. Foresters at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan reckon it can take around 130 years to reach 80 centimetres in diameter, and the species is now listed as Near Threatened.

The oil palm is the practical choice. It is native to this region, it gives us the red oil that half our cooking rests on, and it feeds palm wine, brooms, baskets and roofing as well. If usefulness were the test, the argument would be over.

The baobab is the north’s answer: enormous, drought-proof, and the source of the kuka leaves that go into miyan kuka.

Three trees, three regions. You can see why no government has been keen to pick.

Meanwhile the forests are shrinking under all three. The Vice President announced last year that the federal government intends to plant 25 billion trees under a programme called Green Legacy, in a statement our news desk reported as a deliberately ambitious response to deforestation, modelled on Ethiopia’s planting drive. Whether that number is ever reached is a separate article. The intention is the right one.

My own view, for what it is worth, is that we should choose a national tree and that the choosing would do us good. But you do not need to wait for Abuja.

How to Plant an Indigenous Tree for Nigeria in Seven Steps

I planted an iroko seedling behind my late father’s house in 2019, made most of the available mistakes, and have since done it properly four more times. Here is the method I now use.

1. Choose a native species suited to your zone. Iroko, obeche or oil palm in the south, shea or locust bean in the middle belt, baobab or desert date in the far north. Ask the state forestry office or a Forestry Research Institute of Nigeria outstation before you buy.
2. Buy a healthy seedling of 30 to 60 centimetres in height. Expect to pay somewhere around ₦1,000 to ₦2,500 at a nursery, depending on species and city.
3. Site it generously. A tree that will reach 50 metres needs at least 15 metres between it and any building, soakaway or boundary wall. Smaller species can sit 5 metres away.
4. Dig a hole 60 centimetres wide and 60 centimetres deep at the start of the rains, ideally between April and June in the south and June and July in the north.
5. Mix the soil you removed with two headpans of well-rotted compost or poultry manure, refill halfway, set the seedling so the top of its root ball sits level with the ground, then fill and firm the soil with your foot.
6. Water with 10 litres straight away, then 10 litres twice a week through the first dry season. Lay mulch 10 centimetres thick around the base, keeping it a hand’s width clear of the stem.
7. Protect it. A simple cage of four stakes and chicken wire, about 1.2 metres tall, keeps goats off for the two years the seedling needs to get above browsing height.

That is one Saturday morning and a few thousand naira. Rather like opening a savings account for a grandchild, you will not see the full return yourself, and that is exactly the point.

Final Thoughts on What Nigeria’s National Animal Tells Us

So, back to my niece’s homework.

The eagle is our national animal, and the answer has been sitting on every passport and courtroom wall since 1960. The lion, for all its pride of place in our proverbs, is a real Nigerian animal reduced to a few dozen survivors in two protected areas. The national food is jollof by acclamation and nothing by law. And the national tree is a blank that nobody has got round to filling in.

I find that mixture rather encouraging.

It means our symbols are not finished. The founding generation chose an eagle, two horses and a wildflower. The food, the tree and the fate of the lion were left for the rest of us, and those decisions are still open. A country that still has choices to make about what represents it is a country that is still being built.

Here is what I would do with all this.

• Teach the eagle properly. Tell the children it is red because it is a symbol, that it stands for strength, and that the horses beside it stand for dignity. Then tell them about the Super Eagles, because that is the part they will remember.
• Visit a protected area while there is still something to protect. Yankari is the more accessible of the two lion sites, and gate fees paid by Nigerians are one of the few arguments for conservation that budget offices understand.
• Plant one indigenous tree this rainy season, using the measurements above. If enough of us plant the same species, the question of a national tree may quietly answer itself.

Related Articles

If the eagle has left you curious about the rest of the emblems it shares the arms with, my earlier piece on what symbolizes Nigeria walks through the flag, the coat of arms, the naira, the anthem and the pledge, including the story of the student who designed the flag for a £100 prize.

And if the jollof question is the one still bothering you, I spent a long time on exactly that in what food did Nigeria create, which separates the dishes we invented from the ones we adopted and made unmistakably ours.

Key Takeaways

• Nigeria’s national animal is the eagle, shown in red at the top of the coat of arms adopted in 1960, where it represents strength; no separate law names it, so its status rests on the arms.
• Nigeria does have wild lions, but fewer than 50, and only in Kainji Lake National Park and Yankari Game Reserve, so visit and support those two sites if you want that to remain true.
• There is no official national food or national tree, so describe jollof rice as the popular national dish, not the legal one, and plant an indigenous tree instead of waiting for one to be chosen.

Frequently Asked Questions About What Nigeria’s National Animal Is

What is Nigeria’s national animal?

Nigeria’s national animal is the eagle, which appears in red at the top of the national coat of arms. It was adopted with the arms in 1960 and represents the strength of the nation.

Why is the eagle Nigeria’s national animal?

The eagle was placed at the highest point of the coat of arms to stand for strength as the country prepared for independence in 1960. Its status as national animal comes from that emblem and from long official use, since no separate law declares it.

What kind of eagle is on the Nigerian coat of arms?

It is a heraldic eagle, a symbol drawn in red, and it does not depict any particular living species. Real eagles found in Nigeria include the martial eagle, the crowned eagle and the African fish eagle.

Does Nigeria have a lion?

Yes, Nigeria still has wild lions, although conservationists estimate that fewer than 50 remain. They were once widespread across the north and now survive in only two protected areas.

Where can you see lions in Nigeria?

Wild lions survive only in Kainji Lake National Park, which spans Niger and Kwara states, and in Yankari Game Reserve in Bauchi State. Sightings in the wild are rare, so most Nigerians who have seen a lion saw it in a zoological garden.

Is the lion Nigeria’s national animal?

No, the lion has no official status as a Nigerian national symbol and does not appear on the coat of arms. The eagle holds that position, with two white horses as the supporting animals.

What is Nigeria’s national food?

Nigeria has no legally designated national food. Jollof rice is treated as the national dish by popular agreement because it is eaten across every ethnic group and region.

What is Nigeria’s national tree?

Nigeria has not designated an official national tree at federal level. The iroko, the oil palm and the baobab are the trees most often suggested, and Ekiti State adopted the obeche as its own state tree in 2022.

What is Nigeria’s national flower?

The national flower is the Costus spectabilis, a low-growing yellow wildflower found across the country. It appears at the base of the coat of arms, where artists often render it in red.

What do the horses on the Nigerian coat of arms mean?

The two white horses stand on either side of the black shield as its supporters, and they represent dignity. Together with the eagle, they are the only animals on the national arms.

Why are Nigeria’s football teams called the Super Eagles?

The name comes from the eagle on the coat of arms, and the senior men’s team has carried it since 1988, having previously played as the Green Eagles. The youth sides follow the same theme as the Flying Eagles and the Golden Eaglets.

How many national parks does Nigeria have?

The National Park Service lists seven national parks: Chad Basin, Cross River, Gashaka Gumti, Kainji Lake, Kamuku, Okomu and Old Oyo. Yankari was removed from the list in 2006 when it was handed back to Bauchi State as a game reserve.