Nigeria’s foreign exchange reform began on June 14, 2023, when the Central Bank of Nigeria adopted a willing-buyer, willing-seller model and unified the foreign exchange market by collapsing the old, segmented windows into the Nigerian Foreign Exchange Market.

Three years later, the questions that matter are no longer about the mechanics of the reform but about its consequences.

Has it mainly exposed Nigerians to a weaker currency and higher costs? Did the millions of Nigerians in the diaspora finally get a fair deal for the money they send home?

How has it reshaped the balance sheets of the companies that employ and feed millions of Nigerians?

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What has it done to government tax revenues and who, when all the numbers are counted, actually won?

The answer to all those questions begins with the rate itself and what happened to it.

The naira’s journey

The naira was trading at N465.50 to the dollar on June 14, 2023; the last day of the old regime. The following morning, markets opened under the new framework and by June 16, the rate stood at N656.50; a 41% devaluation in a single trading day.

By June 23, it had reached N823; a 77% collapse in nine days. No corporate treasurer, no importer, no manufacturer had time to hedge. The damage was instant and, for many balance sheets, irreversible.

A fragile calm followed as the rate held between N750 and N800 through the second half of 2023. Then on December 28, year-end dollar demand broke the N900 barrier in a single session, the rate jumping from N764.50 to N897.50 overnight. Nigeria entered 2024 with its currency accelerating.

What followed was the most damaging phase. The naira collapsed through N1,000, N1,200, N1,400, and hit N1,660 in the first week of December 2024; a 257% total depreciation from pre-reform levels.

This was the period that destroyed corporate balance sheets, eliminated dividends, and wiped-out government tax revenues from the manufacturing sector.

The CBN’s tightening measures- MPR at 27.5%, CRR at 50%, and the introduction of the Electronic Foreign Exchange Matching System in December 2024; finally turned the tide.

From mid-2025, the naira began its first sustained appreciation since the reform. It closed 2025 at N1,429 and trades at N1,360 as of June 9, 2026; an 18% recovery from the peak. The worst, it appears, is over. But the scars on household budgets, corporate balance sheets, and government revenues remain.

The losers

Initially, the biggest casualties of this reform were not households; they were corporate financial health.

Between 2023 and 2024, twelve companies absorbed a combined N3.97 trillion in FX losses. This is the accounting cost of holding dollar-denominated obligations; trade payables, letters of credit, intercompany loans; on balance sheets that were built when the naira was worth more than twice what it became.

MTN Nigeria bore the heaviest burden, recording N740.4 billion in FX losses in 2023 and N925.4 billion in 2024.

  • Its 2024 loss alone exceeded its entire annual revenue in 2020. A company that paid N170 billion in corporate tax in 2022 received a tax credit of N149.9 billion in 2024.
  • Its equity swung from positive N262.5 billion to negative N458 billion.

The rest; Nestlé Nigeria, Dangote Cement, Dangote Sugar, BUA Foods, Nigerian Breweries, BUA Cement, Cadbury Nigeria, WAPCO-Lafarge, Aradel, Unilever Nigeria, and International Breweries, absorbed the remainder.

  • Nestlé’s FX losses exceeded its entire profit before tax.
  • Dangote Sugar slipped into negative equity.
  • Cadbury generated N5.9 billion in operating profit in 2024 and still posted a loss after tax of N22.2 billion. Its British parent forgave $20 million in intercompany debt a lifeline most Nigerian manufacturers never received.

Across every company in this cohort, the pattern is identical: operations largely functional, naira revenues growing, but dollar-linked obligations had become weapons of balance sheet destruction.

Every single company received a tax credit rather than paying tax in 2024. These businesses, which would have contributed hundreds of billions in corporate tax annually before liberalization, paid almost nothing to government and thus government became another major loser.

Government equally suffered

Beyond lost taxes, the naira’s depreciation inflated the naira value of Nigeria’s dollar-denominated external debt, increasing the cost of servicing obligations that had been contracted at far stronger exchange rates.

  • Debt service consumed an increasingly large share of federation revenues through 2023 and 2024, crowding out capital expenditure and social spending.

Equity investors equally absorbed losses

Shareholders in MTN Nigeria, Nestlé, Nigerian Breweries and others watched companies that had been consistent dividend payers go silent. Some of them returned to dividend payment in 2026, while some have not recovered fully

  • Institutional and retail investors who had bought into these stocks on the strength of historical earnings and dividend yields found themselves holding positions in technically insolvent or deeply loss-making businesses through no fault of the underlying operations.

The public bore the most diffuse but most consequential losses

The substantial increase in exchange rate coupled with volatility consequently had inflation running wild above 30% in 2024.

  • Real wages fell sharply across the formal and informal economy. For the millions of Nigerians who earn in naira, spend in naira, and have no dollar assets to revalue upward, the reform’s first two years were an unambiguous reduction in living standards.

The winners

For years, Nigerians sending money home from outside watched the official rate absorb 40–60% of the value of their remittances before it reached their families.

Most routed money through informal channels; bureau de change operators, ajo networks, trusted middlemen; because the official system was simply not competitive.

Liberalisation changed that, with formal remittance volumes surging as the official and parallel rates converged.

  • Nigeria’s remittance inflows, already the largest in sub-Saharan Africa, grew an estimated 25–30% in dollar terms between 2023 and 2025, with a significantly larger share now flowing through licensed banks and fintech operators.
  • For families here in Nigeria, receiving N1,550 per dollar instead of N465 meant three times the naira purchasing power from the same transfer.

Nigeria’s banks recorded windfall

Tier-1 banks holding net long foreign currency positions posted enormous FX revaluation gains as the naira weakened; the mirror image of what destroyed manufacturer balance sheets.

  • Zenith Bank’s trading gains nearly doubled from N566,973 million in 2023 to N1,100,002 million in 2024.
  • Access Holdings tells an even more striking story: net gains on financial instruments surged to N415,804 million in 2024 and accelerated to N1,049,937 million in 2025; a 152% jump even as the naira began to stabilise.

Not every bank followed the same trajectory. UBA’s net trading and FX gains fell sharply from N659,257 million in 2023 to N181,762 million in 2024.

For shareholders of the bigger winners, however, this meant record dividends and strong equity returns — the direct inverse of the experience at MTN and Nestlé.

The bottom line

Partial naira recovery since mid-2025 offers genuine grounds for cautious optimism. But the tax revenues lost during the most damaging phase have not been recovered.

Manufacturers have not rebuilt their equity. The millions of Nigerians whose real wages fell sharply are still waiting for the reform’s promised dividends to reach them.

Nigeria has done the hard part. The question the next three years must answer is whether the gains from a more honest exchange rate will be broadly shared — or remain concentrated in the balance sheets of those already strong enough to benefit.