In May–June 2023 Nigeria removed the petrol subsidy and unified the official and parallel foreign-exchange rates. People disagree sharply about whether the country is better or worse off since. This page does not settle that argument. It takes the platform's own aggregated data and splits every headline indicator into before (Jan 2020 – May 2023) and after (Jun 2023 – latest) and reports the plain average of each side, computed live from the database below. A critic and a supporter of the reform can both point to real numbers on this page — read them and judge for yourself.
Averages computed over each window's own observations. n is the number of observations behind each average — a small n (e.g. annual GDP growth) means the average is less stable than a large one (e.g. monthly inflation).
| Indicator | Before (to May 2023) | After (Jun 2023–) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Computing from live data… | |||
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Chained from the same year-on-year inflation series as the calculator on the Inflation page — each step compounds the actual reported rate, not an estimate.
Same before/after split, restricted to 2020–2023 vs 2023–now so the comparison isn't diluted by decades of unrelated history. This is real output volume, not naira value — a sector can grow here while the naira earned from it buys less (see purchasing power above). Sectors with no recent data are omitted.
| Sector | Before (2020–May 2023) | After (Jun 2023–) | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Computing from live data… | |||
The reform didn't hit everyone the same way. This is general economic reasoning applied to the numbers above, not a live computation — read it as context, not a verdict.
Before unification, Nigeria ran several exchange rates at once, which made FX risk almost impossible for a fund to model or hedge. One market-determined rate is easier to invest around, even a much weaker one. The Monetary Policy Rate shown above is now high enough to interest carry-trade investors, and the FX reserve recovery is the concrete evidence a skeptical institutional investor would want before trusting that repatriation is actually possible.
Hit hardest of any group, structurally. Most small businesses have no FX hedge, so a currency move lands on their import costs immediately; at the same time, higher interest rates made borrowing to absorb that shock more expensive, not less. The exception is the same pattern as the sector table above — MSMEs that substitute for imports or earn in dollars were relatively insulated.
This split on what people held, not who they were. Naira cash and naira fixed-income lost real value at the rate shown in the purchasing-power figures above. Real assets — equities, property, dollar-denominated instruments, or a business with genuine pricing power — held up considerably better, since those tend to re-price with inflation instead of sitting fixed like cash.
Counterintuitive but standard emerging-market logic: the reform removed the single biggest structural objection investors had, which was unpredictability, not the exchange rate's level. On top of that, Nigerian assets, wages and production are now roughly two-thirds cheaper in dollar terms than before the reform — a real discount for anyone investing in dollars. The honest counter-side is that inflation volatility, security concerns and policy unpredictability elsewhere in government are risks this specific reform didn't touch.
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