Between June 2023 and January 2024, the naira lost roughly 70 percent of its value against the dollar. In 2024 alone it fell another 40.9 percent, the worst single-year depreciation in a decade. The official rate closed 2024 at ₦1,535 to the dollar, compared to ₦907 at the end of 2023. On the parallel market it was even worse: ₦1,660 per dollar.
For most Nigerians, this is lived catastrophe. Food prices more than doubled. Petrol quadrupled after subsidy removal. Household consumption expenditure, the amount ordinary Nigerians are actually spending collapsed by 42.28 percent in Q1 2024 and by a staggering 61.18 percent in Q2 2024 compared to the same periods in 2023. To put that in plain terms: Nigerians were buying nearly 40 to 60 percent less stuff than they were a year earlier. Not by choice because they couldn’t afford it.
But here is the question nobody asks loudly enough: while ordinary Nigerians were getting poorer, who was getting richer? Because in every currency crisis, money doesn’t disappear. It moves. And in Nigeria’s case, it moved in very specific, very traceable directions.
“The naira fell 40.9% in 2024. Household consumption collapsed by over 60% in Q2. The pain was real. So was the profit just not for the same people.”
₦1,535/$
Official naira rate at end of 2024 down from ₦907 at end of 2023
70%
Total naira value lost vs the dollar since June 2023
-61.18%
Fall in real household consumption expenditure, Q2 2024 vs Q2 2023
35%
Nigeria’s headline inflation rate at end of 2024 — a 28-year high
How the Naira Got Here
To understand who wins and who loses from a naira crash, you first need to understand why it crashed in the first place.
For years before President Tinubu took office in May 2023, the naira was artificially pegged at a rate the government couldn’t sustain. The Central Bank of Nigeria operated multiple exchange rates simultaneously, an official rate for some transactions, a different rate for others, and an unofficial parallel market where the real price was determined. The result was a system ripe for exploitation: people with access to the official (cheaper) dollar rate could buy dollars low and sell them at the parallel market rate for instant profit. This is not a conspiracy theory. It was widely known, widely practiced, and enormously lucrative for those with the right connections.
When Tinubu removed the peg and floated the naira in June 2023, the currency found its real level almost immediately and that level was brutal. The adjustment that should have happened gradually over years happened in weeks. Businesses that had priced their goods and services based on a subsidised exchange rate were suddenly importing at two to three times the cost. Prices surged. Inflation hit a 28-year high.
The official story is that this was necessary medicine, painful but corrective. The World Bank backed the reforms, noting that a misaligned exchange rate had actually cost Nigeria’s budget more than the fuel subsidies it replaced. Nigeria’s current account swung to surplus. Foreign reserves climbed above $40 billion. Portfolio investors returned. On paper, the macro story improved.
On the ground, it was a different story entirely.
Who Lost: The Middle Class, the Importer, the Salaried Worker
The most direct losers from naira depreciation are Nigerians whose income is in naira but whose costs are tied to the dollar. That is most of the country.
Salaried workers, particularly in the public sector, saw their real wages eviscerated. A civil servant earning ₦200,000 a month in 2022 worth roughly $260 at the then-prevailing rate was earning the equivalent of around $130 by the end of 2024. Their salary in naira hadn’t changed. Their purchasing power had halved. For a family spending 65 percent of income on food, a figure cited in a 2024 BusinessDay report, there was nowhere left to cut.
Consumer goods companies felt the squeeze almost immediately. Eight major consumer goods firms listed on the NGX saw their total operational costs surge from ₦952 billion in the first half of 2023 to ₦1.58 trillion in the first half of 2024 — a 67 percent rise. The reason: most of them depend heavily on imported raw materials priced in dollars. When the naira halves, your cost base roughly doubles.
The corporate casualties were high-profile. PZ Cussons; the British FMCG giant behind products like Robb, Morning Fresh, and Joy soap, cut its dividend by 44 percent and warned investors about the impact of Nigeria’s currency crisis. Unilever Nigeria went further: it discontinued its entire Home Care and Skin Cleansing product lines, shifted focus to more profitable segments, and leased its factory buildings to a third party under a 10-year agreement. In other words, Unilever effectively stopped manufacturing in Nigeria.
For ordinary consumers, the crisis showed up in the supermarket, the fuel pump, and the school fees invoice. Education costs rose for 72 percent of Nigerian households in 2025. Transport costs climbed for 66 percent. The prices of staple foods rice, beans, and bread which had already risen fivefold between 2020 and 2024, continued to squeeze family budgets with no end in sight.
“Unilever stopped manufacturing in Nigeria. PZ Cussons cut dividends by 44%. Eight consumer goods firms saw costs jump 67% in one year. The naira crash didn’t just hurt consumers, it hollowed out the companies selling to them.”
Who Won: Exporters, Dollar Earners, and the Well-Connected
In a currency depreciation, the winners are almost always the same type of people: those whose income is in a strong currency while their costs are in the weak one.
1. Dollar-earning Nigerians and the diaspora
Nigeria received an estimated $20 billion in diaspora remittances in 2024. Every dollar sent home from the UK, US, or Canada was worth significantly more naira than it was the year before. A Nigerian abroad sending $500 a month to family was effectively sending the equivalent of an extra ₦300,000 more than they would have been in 2022, simply because the exchange rate moved in their favour. For families dependent on diaspora transfers, the naira crash was not entirely bad news, it was a de facto income increase in local currency terms.
2. Non-oil exporters
A weaker naira makes Nigerian goods cheaper for foreign buyers. Cocoa, sesame seeds, cashews, and processed agricultural products all became more price-competitive internationally. According to data cited by analysts, non-oil exports grew by roughly 20 percent after the initial devaluation in late 2023, and by a further 12 percent by end of 2024. Exporters collecting payment in dollars and spending in naira saw their margins widen significantly — a genuine windfall.
3. Real estate investors pricing in dollars
As covered in our previous article on Nigeria’s housing market, prime real estate in Lagos; Ikoyi, Banana Island, Eko Atlantic is largely priced and transacted in US dollars. Landlords collecting dollar rents while paying naira costs for maintenance, staffing, and utilities saw their effective income rise dramatically. Properties that appreciated 20 to 60 percent in index value in 2024 while being priced in dollars were effectively appreciating even faster in naira terms. For dollar-denominated property owners, the naira crash was a wealth-creation event.
4. Banks and FX traders
Banks that held dollar positions before the devaluation made enormous FX revaluation gains as the naira weakened. Nigeria’s major listed banks reported record profits in 2023 and 2024, partly driven by these FX gains. Zenith Bank, Access Bank, GTBank, and others posted headline earnings figures that looked extraordinary until you understood that a significant portion came not from lending or services, but from the accounting effect of holding assets in a currency that had appreciated against their liabilities. Nigeria’s exchange rate gain revenue for the first half of 2024 reached ₦2.2 trillion by H1 2025, which had collapsed to ₦589 billion as the naira stabilised, making the windfall nature of those gains explicit.
5. Those who accessed cheap official FX before the float
This is the most uncomfortable category and the least discussed. Under the old multiple exchange rate system, access to official CBN dollars at the subsidised rate was a privilege largely controlled by bureaucratic and political networks. People and companies that secured official-rate dollars in the months before the float, then converted them back at the new market rate, made extraordinary returns with essentially zero risk. The naira crash was not just an economic event — it was, for those with the right access, a transfer of wealth at national scale.
What the Inflation Rebasing Story Really Tells You
In January 2025, Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics announced that headline inflation had dropped from 34.80 percent to 24.48 percent overnight. The government presented this as progress. The reality was more complicated.
The drop was almost entirely statistical. Nigeria had rebased its Consumer Price Index updating the basket of goods and services used to calculate inflation from a 2009 base year to a 2024 one. This is legitimate and overdue. But it did not mean prices had actually fallen. Staple foods were still expensive. Transport costs were still high. The NISER institute noted that Nigeria’s drop of 10.32 percentage points was colossal compared to similar rebasing exercises in Kenya (-1.5pp), Ghana (-1.6pp), and South Africa (+0.2pp). The scale of the Nigerian adjustment raised serious questions about whether the new methodology was capturing cost-of-living realities or smoothing them over.
For businesses making pricing and investment decisions, this matters enormously. If inflation appears lower than it actually is, wages lag further behind, consumer purchasing power remains suppressed, and demand for goods stays weak regardless of what the official number says.
What This Means for Businesses Selling to Nigeria
If you are running a business selling to Nigerian consumers in 2026, the naira story has three direct implications.
First, your customer’s purchasing power is structurally weaker than it was three years ago even if the official inflation data suggests otherwise. Pricing strategies that worked in 2021 will not work today. The companies winning in Nigeria’s consumer market in 2025 are those that have downsized packaging, created entry-level SKUs, and built products around the ₦500–₦2,000 price point that middle-income Nigerians can still reach for regularly.
Second, revenue in naira is worth less internationally. If you are reporting to investors in dollars or planning to repatriate profits, the naira’s trajectory matters. The CBN’s foreign exchange reserves above $40 billion and the current account surplus are genuine stabilising factors but the naira remains vulnerable to oil price shocks, global dollar tightening, and election-cycle fiscal pressures.
Third, the winners from Nigeria’s currency volatility have capital to deploy. Dollar earners, exporters, and diaspora investors are sitting on naira purchasing power that is now relatively cheap by recent standards. Real estate, domestic manufacturing, and naira-denominated businesses that survived the crash are attractively priced for anyone coming in with foreign currency. The arbitrage window is real and it will not stay open forever.
The Bottom Line
Nigeria’s naira crisis was not an equal-opportunity disaster. It was a massive redistribution from naira earners to dollar earners, from importers to exporters, from the salaried middle class to the asset-holding elite, from ordinary consumers to those with access to the systems that manage currency.
Understanding who won and who lost is not just an academic exercise. It tells you where the money went, where it is sitting now, and where the next wave of investment in Nigeria’s economy is most likely to come from. The businesses and investors who read the naira story clearly rather than through the distorting lens of official statistics are the ones best positioned for what comes next.
