A Stronger Naira, A Struggling Street

Nigeria’s currency has found its footing on the trading floor. It has not yet found its way into the pockets of the people who need it most — and that gap is the real test of this recovery.

For the first time in years, the naira is a good news story. Through the first half of 2026, Nigeria’s currency has held broadly steady, trading in a band around ₦1,350 to ₦1,400 to the dollar in the official market — a level of calm that would have seemed implausible during the volatility of 2024 and early 2025. It has been ranked among Africa’s better-performing currencies this year, supported by a tighter Central Bank of Nigeria monetary stance, improved oil production, stronger dollar inflows, and a narrowing gap between the official and parallel markets. Foreign portfolio investors have taken notice, and the government has been quick to present the stability as proof that its reforms are working.

That framing is not wrong. But it is incomplete. A stable exchange rate is a macroeconomic achievement, not a lived one. For it to mean something on the streets of Lagos, Kano, or Port Harcourt, stability has to travel — through prices, through wages, through the everyday cost of surviving in Nigeria. Right now, that transmission is broken, and the accountability question CSR Reporters keeps returning to is this: who is the naira’s recovery actually for?

The Disconnect

Currency stability is supposed to work like this: a predictable exchange rate lowers the cost of imported inputs, eases business planning, and — over time — takes pressure off inflation. Investors read stability as a signal of competence and commit more capital. Some of that has visibly happened. Foreign investment interest in Nigeria has picked up in 2026, and analysts point to improving reserves and narrowing FX spreads as evidence the reforms are structurally sound.

Yet the International Monetary Fund still assesses the naira as undervalued by more than a quarter, and inflation, though easing from its peak, remains high enough that a stable exchange rate has not yet translated into stable household budgets. Transport, food, and electricity costs rose sharply after the 2023 subsidy removal and have not meaningfully retreated. A currency can be stable and a population can still be getting poorer in real terms — those two facts are not in tension, and pretending otherwise is where CSR rhetoric usually loses its credibility with ordinary Nigerians.

Macroeconomic stability that never reaches payroll is not a policy success story — it is a policy communication problem wearing a success story’s clothes.

Where the Minimum Wage Promise Breaks Down

This is where government’s obligation gets concrete. Nigeria’s national minimum wage has stood at ₦70,000 a month since July 2024 — legally binding on both public and private employers. On paper, that is the floor. In practice, it is a ceiling for millions of Nigerians who never see it.

The law itself carves out the exemption that swallows the rule: establishments with fewer than 25 employees are not bound by the minimum wage at all. In an economy where the informal sector employs the majority of the workforce, that exemption covers exactly the businesses where wage abuse is most common and least visible. The Nigeria Labour Congress has documented workers earning ₦15,000 to ₦45,000 a month in unorganised private-sector jobs — a third or less of the legal floor — with no realistic path to enforcement because reporting a violation risks the job itself.

Large, formal employers — banks, telecoms, multinationals, oil and gas majors — were already paying well above ₦70,000 before the law changed, so compliance there was never really the issue. The strain sits with small and medium enterprises and informal employers, where the Ministry of Labour’s inspection capacity is thin relative to the number of workplaces it is meant to cover, and where no centralised wage-monitoring system currently exists. Even at full compliance, labour unions argue the ₦70,000 floor itself has already been eroded by inflation and no longer represents a livable wage in Lagos or Abuja — a case for a shorter, more responsive review cycle than the current three years.

What Government Can Actually Do

None of this is intractable. The gap between currency stability and street-level benefit is a policy design problem, and it responds to policy design. Four areas deserve priority.

• Close the enforcement gap, not just the wage gap. A wage floor without inspection capacity is a press release. Government should fund and staff the Ministry of Labour’s monitoring function, and give the National Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission real teeth to act on informal-sector violations rather than leaving redress to individual workers who cannot afford to lose their jobs.
• Revisit the 25-employee exemption. The businesses most likely to underpay are precisely the ones this threshold excludes. A phased extension of wage-floor coverage to smaller employers, paired with tax or levy relief to offset the cost, would close the loophole without collapsing small business viability.
• Make FX stability visible in household costs, not just trading data. Government should be publishing — clearly and regularly — how naira stability is translating into import costs for food, fuel, and fertiliser, and holding sectors accountable when pass-through to consumer prices lags behind currency gains.
• Shorten the feedback loop on wage review. A three-year statutory cycle cannot keep pace with an inflation environment that reprices staples every few months. An annual review mechanism, tied to a transparent cost-of-living index, would do more for public trust than any single wage increase.
• Tie investment promotion to labour compliance. Nigeria is actively courting the same foreign capital that stability has started to attract. Government has leverage here it is not using: incentives, contracts, and procurement access can be conditioned on demonstrable wage compliance, turning FX-driven investment into a lever for better labour practice rather than a bystander to it.

What deserves commendation: the Central Bank’s discipline has produced something Nigeria has not had in years — a currency that businesses and households can plan around instead of merely survive. That is not a small achievement, and it should be acknowledged as one.

What deserves the call-out: stability at the trading desk is not the same as stability at the dinner table, and government has not yet built the bridge between the two. A ₦70,000 minimum wage that a fifth of employers can lawfully ignore, and that many more ignore unlawfully with little fear of consequence, is not a wage floor — it is a suggestion. Until currency stability, wage enforcement, and cost-of-living relief move together, Nigeria’s macroeconomic recovery will keep reading as a story told about ordinary citizens rather than one that includes them.

That is the standard CSR Reporters will keep measuring this recovery against: not whether the naira looks strong on a chart, but whether that strength shows up in what a worker in Kano or Aba takes home at the end of the month.

CSR REPORTERS

Africa’s independent accountability and sustainability intelligence platform.

We commend genuine progress. We hold accountable where evidence is clear. We do not soften conclusions to keep the peace.