The seat.
And the market.

Aba is the largest manufacturing cluster in the South East and the state's tax base; Umuahia was chosen in 1991 as a neutral administrative seat. Aba's roads have been a campaign issue in every cycle since.

Warri is the oil, port and refinery city — and the site of the most sustained inter-ethnic contest in the Delta. Asaba, across the Niger, was picked in 1991 precisely because it is not Warri.

Dutse was a small town when it was made a capital in 1991. Hadejia, an old emirate and the trading centre of the Hadejia–Jama'are floodplain, kept the market and lost the secretariat.

Lokoja carries the confluence and the colonial administrative memory; Okene carries Ebira commerce and population. The split maps onto the state's three-way Igala–Ebira–Okun politics.

The secretariat moved to Ikeja in 1976 but the money never left the Island and the Lekki corridor. Lagos is the clearest case of a capital that is administratively real and commercially secondary.

Suleja sits on Abuja's edge and absorbs its overflow economy; Minna, 100km away, holds the government. Niger State's fastest-growing city answers to a capital it barely trades with.