Nigeria has kept a foreign policy running for sixty-six years through 21 substantive ministers, 13 governments and two long stretches of military rule. The desk changes hands, on average, every 2.9 years.
Ministers arrive with a posture and leave before it settles. The register below is the closest thing Nigeria has to a continuity record for its own foreign policy.
Bar length is years in office. Colour is the era that appointed them.
Civil War FM. Managed Biafra's international isolation. OAU strategy.
Later UN Under-Secretary-General. Managed Buhari's military transition diplomacy.
The register lists substantive foreign ministers only — acting appointments and ministers of state are excluded, which is why the record shows 1 undocumented years rather than a continuous line. Tenure is calculated from the published start and end years, so a minister who served from 1975 to 1978 is counted as three years even where the exact handover date is unrecorded.
The current minister is measured to 2026. Era labels — independence, military, democracy — follow the constitutional status of the government that made the appointment, not the minister's own politics. Government IDs match The Republic's governments register, so any row here can be joined back to the presidency that appointed it.