Start with pension allocation. Nigeria’s pension assets reached ₦26.66 trillion as of October 2025, with roughly 60%, or about ₦16 trillion, invested in government securities. If the real return on government paper has been negative for most of the past 15 years, then millions of retirement savers were not just earning low returns. They were losing purchasing power while their nominal balances increased.
This is not unique to Nigeria. The OECD’s 2024 pension report, using 2023 data, found that pension systems in Nigeria, Angola, and Egypt, where more than half of assets are allocated to bills and bonds, delivered negative real returns. Recent increases in Nigeria’s pension fund equity allocation limits are directionally positive. But they are modest relative to the scale of the problem.
Under the old CPI methodology, a 91-day T-bill yielding 18% against inflation at 34.8% was clearly negative in real terms. Under the rebased CPI, a yield of 15% against inflation of 15.15% appears roughly neutral. Has the underlying reality improved, or has the measurement changed?
The answer is both.
Inflation has genuinely moderated. Monthly CPI increases fell below 1% for several consecutive months in the second half of 2025. But the rebase also lowered measured inflation by roughly 10 percentage points. Without a continuous series, it is difficult to separate these effects.
What is clear is that the sign has shifted.
From August 2025 through January 2026, real returns turned positive for six consecutive months. January 2026 was the strongest month, with a +4.39% real return, driven by a 2.88% month-on-month decline in CPI alongside a 1.38% nominal T-bill return. The real return index rose from 984 to 1,027, above its base level of 1,000 for the first time.
After 15 years of negative returns, cash is no longer guaranteed to destroy purchasing power. Whether that shift proves durable remains an open question.
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