Tag Archives: Nigeria

As Nigeria’s Cashless Transition Falters, POS Operators Thrive

Cash is expensive in Nigeria. When undercover agents for the Central Bank of Nigeria tried to buy cash on the open market, they found sellers charging markups of 20 to 40 percent of face value, the bank governor, Olayemi Cardoso, said at a March event in Abuja. Since 2012, the Central Bank has promoted a series of policies to reduce the amount of cash in circulation and shift Nigerians to electronic payments, which are lower cost, more secure, and more traceable. The Central Bank releases limited cash to commercial banks, who in turn cannot match public demand. When the banks do have cash, middlemen often take it in bulk to sell onward at a higher price.

In exchange, the Central Bank also built an ever-more-capable digital infrastructure for electronic payments, boosting Nigeria’s financial technology industry, and the volume of electronic payments in Nigeria grew around 16 times from 2018 to 2024. “Once that foundation was there, the cashless economy has done well,” says electrical engineer Funke Opeke, an eminence in the Nigerian technology scene who founded and later sold a crucial telecommunications and data services company, MainOne.

On the one hand, that is a victory. On the other hand, only those with reliable access to the Internet (about half of Nigeria’s population) can count on electronic payments. The rest still need cash.

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Breaking Free from Nigeria’s Grid

Nigeria’s electrical grid collapses so regularly that entrepreneur Lanre Bello bought not one but two backup generators for his coffee shop in Ikeja, a middle-class neighborhood adjacent to Lagos’ airports. He also has a second coffee maker because the first blackout he experienced (before he bought the generators) blew out his first coffee machine. Unfortunately, that kind of waste and the associated loss of opportunities are common across the country’s economy: The World Bank estimates Nigeria’s faulty grid costs the country 2 percent of its GDP annually. 

In addition to poor stability, the grid only reaches about 60 percent of Nigeria’s population, leaving around 86 million people in the dark, the largest population without electricity in the world.

For a long time, Nigerians could point their fingers at one culprit: the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA), a state monopoly that managed production, transmission, and distribution. Yet a decades-long process of privatization and decentralization of electricity generation and distributionmeans that now there are more parties to blame for equally poor service. While politicians and power engineers point fingers at each other, some Nigerians are tired of waiting and are taking it upon themselves to try to build their own solutions.

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