Nigeria
How to use Kausate in Nigeria — what you can call, and which identifiers it uses
New to the API? Start with the jurisdictions overview, which explains how ordering, identifiers and documents work everywhere.
Company data here comes directly from CAC and CAC BOR.
What you can call here
What each operation does is the same everywhere and is explained on the jurisdictions overview.
| Operation | Status |
|---|---|
| Company search | Live |
| Company report Includes: Registered details. | Live |
| Beneficial owners | Live |
How to search
Start with company search and jurisdictionCode: "ng". Pass the name as companyName, a registration number as companyNumber, or both to narrow the result. Here companyNumber is read as rcNumber.
Fields
To say exactly what you mean, send an advancedQuery instead. Nigeria understands these fields:
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
name | Approved entity name to search for. |
rcNumber | CAC registration number, e.g. '208767' or 'KD023538'. Not unique on its own — the same number can be held by entities of different classifications, so a search may legitimately return more than one entity. |
avCode | CAC availability code issued during name reservation. |
classificationIdinteger | Restrict to one entity classification: 1 business name, 2 company, 3 incorporated trustee, 4 limited partnership, 5 limited liability partnership. |
Examples
{ "jurisdictionCode": "ng", "advancedQuery": { "name": "DANGOTE CEMENT" }}Nigeria also accepts classificationId + rcNumber and avCode.
Company identifiers
Search by passing the registration number as companyNumber — it is matched against the schemes this register can search on, so you do not name the scheme yourself. Not every scheme below is searchable; the rest label the values returned in a company’s identifiers.
| Identifier | Appears as | Format |
|---|---|---|
| CAC Company ID Corporate Affairs Commission internal entity id. The only stable join key across the CAC public search and the Beneficial Ownership Register, and the only identifier that disambiguates entities sharing an RC number. | ng_company_id | ^\d{1,10}$ |
| RC Number Nigerian registration number (RC for companies, BN for business names, IT for incorporated trustees). NOT unique on its own: the same RC number is reused across entity classifications (RC 938384 is both DANGOTE CERAMICS LIMITED, a company, and ARROWSON NIG. ENTS., a business name), so it identifies an entity only when paired with the classification. | ng_rc_number | ^[A-Z]{0,3}[0-9]{3,12}$ |
| Nigerian Tax Identification Number Tax Identification Number (TIN) published for an entity by Nigeria's Corporate Affairs Commission | ng_tin | No fixed format |
Local notes
Gotchas
A report can mint a TIN
| Trap | What happens |
|---|---|
| UBO records without a name | Nigeria's Beneficial Ownership Register frequently records a controlling interest with no owner name at all — roughly a quarter to half of beneficial-owner records carry neither a person name nor a company name. These are not lookup failures: the register genuinely filed a control relationship (and often a specific type of control, sometimes with a percentage) without identifying who holds it. Treat a beneficial-owner entry whose person and company details are both absent as a real, expected outcome, not an error to retry or discard. |
| Percentages can be share counts | Ownership and voting-rights percentages filed against Nigerian beneficial owners are sometimes share counts rather than percentages — values like 5,974 or 800,000 turn up in the percentage field. A value that cannot actually be a percentage is left off the interest rather than shown as a number, so you can see a declared shareholding or voting-rights interest with no percentage attached even though the register did file a figure for it. Don't read a missing percentage as "nothing was declared" — check whether the interest type itself is present. |
| First and last names swapped | Individual beneficial owners' first and last names are sometimes swapped, with no way to tell which records are affected. Use the full name field rather than reassembling it from first/last name fields. |
| A quarter carry no legal form | About one in four registered companies have no legal-form suffix (PLC, LTD, LTD/GTE, ULTD), so no specific legal form — public, private, guarantee-limited or unlimited — is returned; the register itself doesn't record it. |
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