An independent guide site for Nigerian documents and services

Our mission

Most Nigerian readers we hear from arrive after a frustrating afternoon — a portal that wouldn't load, a form that asked for something they didn't expect, an agency rule that sounded different to the one a friend described last year. Our mission is simple: take the dense official information that already exists, confirm what is current, and explain it in language a non-specialist can act on.

We are not trying to replace official portals. We are trying to make the path to them shorter, with fewer dead ends.

What we cover

Our guides focus on the documents, registrations and services that ordinary Nigerians and the diaspora deal with most often:

• Passport and immigration — applying, renewing, replacing, tracking.
• NIN and identity — enrolment, retrieval, modifications, SIM linking.
• BVN and banking identity — getting, linking and retrieving a Bank Verification Number.
• Banking — account opening, tier upgrades, domiciliary accounts, diaspora accounts, common fixes.
• Driver's licence, CAC business registration, JAMB, NYSC, civil documents and more.
• Diaspora services — the parts of the Nigerian system that work differently when you are abroad.

What we do not do

To keep this site genuinely useful, there is a list of things we deliberately stay out of:

• We do not process applications on your behalf.
• We do not sell forms, slots, or appointments.
• We do not take payments for any official service.
• We never ask for your NIN, BVN, passport number, bank account details or card details. No page of this site, and no email from this site, will ever request that information.
• We do not give legal, financial, immigration, tax or medical advice. For an individual situation, talk to a qualified professional.

How we work

Every guide goes through the same loop:

1. Research. We start from primary sources — the relevant agency portal, official press releases, gazetted documents and regulator publications.
2. Draft. A primary author writes the guide in plain English, organised around the questions a reader is most likely to ask.
3. Fact-check. A second editor checks every fee, deadline, eligibility rule and link against a primary source. Where sources disagree, we flag the disagreement inside the article instead of picking a winner silently.
4. Publish with dates. Each guide is stamped with a visible last-updated date. YMYL-adjacent clusters are also stamped with a last-reviewed date so you can see when an editor last walked the whole page.
5. Maintain. When an agency changes a fee, a portal URL, or a procedure, we update the affected pages and log material changes in a public corrections record.

The full process is written up in our editorial policy, and the way we handle mistakes is on the corrections page.

Who we are

NigeriaHowTo is produced by a small editorial team and edited by our founder and editor. We are deliberately not putting fictitious bylines or invented experts on the site. Guides are attributed to the NigeriaHowTo Editorial Team and edited by Nikita Bystrykh, so there is a real, named person accountable for every page.

You can see who writes and edits the site on our team page. We do not claim expert or professional review: guides are editorially researched against official sources, not independently reviewed by a subject-matter expert, and we say so plainly rather than implying a review that has not happened.

How guides are written and edited

The editorial team researches and writes each guide from official Nigerian government sources, and our founder and editor edits it and maintains the editorial standards. The research process is documented in our methodology.

Independence

NigeriaHowTo is an independent publisher. To say it plainly:

• We are not a government agency, ministry, parastatal, embassy or consulate.
• We are not affiliated with any political party.
• We do not receive government funding.
• Editorial decisions — what to cover, how to cover it, which sources to cite — are made independently of any commercial relationship.

How we make money

NigeriaHowTo is free to read and we plan to keep it that way. Our intended revenue mix is:

• Contextual advertising displayed alongside (not inside) editorial content.
• Sponsorships and partnerships with organisations whose services are genuinely useful to our readers. Sponsored placements are clearly labelled.
• Reader support — voluntary contributions from readers who want to keep the guides growing.

Commercial relationships do not influence which topics we cover, which sources we cite, or what we say about a regulator, bank or service. Our editorial policy spells out the firewall in more detail.

Who we serve

Our readers are Nigerians applying for documents and using public services at home, and Nigerians abroad navigating the parts of the system that work differently from outside the country. We try to write so that a first-time applicant and a returning diaspora reader can both find what they need on the same page.

Ownership

NigeriaHowTo is independently owned and operated by its founder. It is not a registered company; it is run individually and funded by its founder.

• Publisher: NigeriaHowTo
• Operating model: individually operated
• Founded: 2026-05-31
• Founder: Nikita Bystrykh, Founder & Publisher (LinkedIn)

Nikita Bystrykh is the Founder & Publisher of NigeriaHowTo.com, an independent information website created to make Nigerian documents, portals, and everyday service procedures easier to understand. Based in Dubai, he oversees the site’s editorial structure, user experience, SEO strategy, and content quality standards. NigeriaHowTo focuses on clear explanations, official-source references, and transparent disclaimers, while final applications and payments must always be completed on official portals.

Conflict-of-interest policy

We hold a firewall between our commercial relationships and our editorial judgement:

• Advertisers and sponsors get no say over which topics we cover, how we cover them, or what we say about any regulator, bank or service.
• Sponsored or affiliate placements, if any, are clearly labelled as such and kept separate from editorial content.
• If an editor or reviewer has a personal or financial interest in a topic, they recuse themselves from that guide, and we disclose the interest where it is relevant to the reader.
• We do not accept payment to add, alter, suppress or remove factual coverage.

Get in touch

For corrections, partnerships, press queries or general feedback, see the contact page. To report a factual error in a specific guide, use the corrections process.