A policy think tank, the Independent Media and Policy Initiative (IMPI), has stated that Nigeria spent about $388 billion defending the naira between 2000 and 2023, describing the expenditure as wasteful and arguing that it failed to halt the persistent depreciation of the local currency.

The group said the huge outlay, incurred under successive administrations before President Bola Tinubu assumed office in 2023, did not prevent the naira from weakening against the United States dollar despite years of interventions in the foreign exchange market.

In a policy statement signed by its Chairman, Dr. Omoniyi Akinsiju, IMPI said the Tinubu administration’s decision to unify Nigeria’s multiple foreign exchange windows had eliminated the need for the country to spend an average of $16.8 billion annually defending the naira.

According to the group, “Nigeria’s foreign exchange ecosystem is now celebrated worldwide for its predictability and stability, directly due to the policy of harmonising foreign exchange windows. Before the Tinubu administration made that decision, Nigeria had made the defence of the local currency, the naira, a state policy. Yet the naira continued to depreciate against the dollar, no matter how much was spent defending it.”

IMPI said records showed that the Olusegun Obasanjo administration spent about $60 billion defending the naira over eight years, while the Umaru Musa Yar’Adua administration spent $58 billion in three years. It added that the Goodluck Jonathan administration recorded the highest spending at $145 billion over five years, while the Muhammadu Buhari administration expended $125 billion in eight years.

The group argued that despite the cumulative expenditure, the naira depreciated sharply, falling from about N22 to the dollar in May 1999 to N460 in May 2023 at the official market, while the parallel market rate weakened from N80 to N780 over the same period.

Describing the expenditure as wasteful, IMPI said, “This wasted $388 billion, as it were, should have been accounted for in the nation’s external reserves and deployed directly to build the economy rather than being filtered away. Despite the dollar’s deployment to defend the naira, the exchange rate remained volatile throughout this period.”

The think tank maintained that the current administration had adopted a more effective foreign exchange management strategy, noting that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) intervened with only about $7.8 billion between 2024 and 2025.

“The CBN intervention in the FX market totalled just about $7.8 billion between 2024 and 2025. Impressively, the naira gained 7.14 per cent in 12 months with the intervention in 2025, reversing a chronic, uninterrupted decline since 2012,” the statement said.

IMPI further credited the unification of the foreign exchange market and the implementation of the Nigeria First local content policy with boosting domestic manufacturing and reducing import dependence.

“The unification of the foreign exchange market and the enforcement of the ‘Nigeria First’ local content policy made foreign goods more expensive while boosting domestic manufacturing with more local inputs, thereby making Nigerian-produced goods cheaper. This has shifted Nigeria from an import-dependent economy to an export-surplus economy,” it stated.

The policy group also linked Nigeria’s fiscal challenges before 2023 to what it described as years of populist economic policies implemented by previous administrations.

According to IMPI, “Our investigation… showed that the crisis was rooted in the retrogressive, populist-based economic model adopted and implemented by the three federal administrations from 1999 to 2015.”

It said that although the administrations of Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan generated a combined $994.4 billion in oil and gas revenues, they left behind combined domestic and external debts of about $65.49 billion and foreign reserves of $29.61 billion.

“We consider it rather disappointing that the huge federally generated revenue and the sovereign negative balance sheet bequeathed to the successor federal administration in 2015 were aggregated with the squandering of $1.059 trillion in earned revenue by the three successive federal governments between 1999 and 2015,” the statement added.