Nigeria Ministers & their Portfolios

Nigeria's Federal Executive Council has 45 ministers as of May 13, 2026 — 32 substantive ministers and 13 ministers of state. The number is not fixed by the Constitution: the President decides how many ministers to appoint, subject only to the requirement that every state is represented, so the size of the cabinet changes with each administration and with reshuffles within an administration.

Yes. Section 147(3) of the 1999 Constitution requires the President to appoint at least one minister from each of the 36 states, and that person must be an indigene of the state they represent. This is why the cabinet has more members than there are ministries — the federal character requirement sets a floor of 36 appointments before portfolios are even shared out, and the surplus is absorbed by creating ministers of state alongside substantive ministers — currently 13 of the 45.

The President nominates ministers and the Senate screens and confirms them; no nominee takes office without that confirmation. Once appointed, ministers serve at the President's pleasure and can be redeployed to a different portfolio or dropped in a reshuffle at any time. The President chairs the Federal Executive Council, which all ministers sit on.

Nyesom Wike is the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory. Because the FCT is not a state it has no governor, so the FCT minister performs the executive role that a governor would perform elsewhere, running Abuja and the wider territory on behalf of the federal government.