Nigeria's Central Bank released its Payments System Vision 2028 on June 1 in Abuja, and buried within the 132-page document is a significant strategic reversal: the eNaira, Africa's first central bank digital currency and one of only three live retail CBDCs globally alongside the Bahamas' Sand Dollar and Jamaica's JAM-DEX, will no longer be positioned as a consumer product.

Instead, the CBN wants to embed it in government disbursements, cross-border settlements, and diaspora remittance corridors. The shift acknowledges, without using the word "failure," that the original retail experiment failed.

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The eNaira launched in October 2021 with considerable fanfare. Then-President Muhammadu Buhari inaugurated it as a flagship financial inclusion tool. Within 48 hours, the Speed Wallet app was pulled from the Google Play Store after receiving a 2.0 out of 5 rating from 2,150 reviews citing a tedious registration process and persistent glitches.

The app returned briefly, then disappeared again. A USSD shortcode meant for feature phones also stopped working. The underlying structural problem was more stubborn: the eNaira required a Bank Verification Number or National Identity Number to activate, the same identity documents needed to open a conventional bank account. The unbanked population it was designed to serve could not access it.

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The numbers that followed bear this out. Of roughly 13 million wallets created by 2025, an estimated 98.5% went unused in any given week, according to the IMF working paper "Nigeria's eNaira, One Year After." The IMF concluded that the eNaira "has not yet moved beyond the initial wave of limited adoption." Average weekly transactions across the entire system ran at approximately 14,000. Total eNaira in circulation as of February 2025 stood at around 18.31 billion naira, equal to roughly $11.4 million and representing about 0.37% of Nigeria's total currency in circulation. Cumulative transaction value through the same period totalled an estimated 22 billion naira, or around $16 million. By comparison, Nigeria's electronic payments ecosystem processed 1.07 quadrillion naira in 2024 alone, a national record.

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The PSV 2028 document, which mentions the eNaira more than 200 times across its pages and dedicates a full section to the currency spanning pages 82 through 94, includes a candid self-assessment from the CBN. The regulator cites "limited stakeholder engagement and buy-in in design and implementation, limited adoption and integration drive, limited resources and capacities for retail CBDC implementation" as factors behind the currency's poor performance. The new strategy pivots toward three institutional use cases: government-to-person payments (G2P), cross-border transactions, and diaspora remittances. The document sets a target of routing 100% of G2P payments through the CBDC, covering welfare transfers, agricultural subsidies, and similar disbursements. CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso announced additional targets at the same launch event: 95% financial inclusion of Nigerian adults by 2028, up from around 64% today and representing approximately 15 million additional people, and fraud losses reduced to below 0.001% of total transaction value by 2028. Cardoso framed the broader vision at the launch: "Every Nigerian, from Abuja to Brass, will be able to send and receive money faster than they can blink."

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The remittance angle carries real economic weight. Nigeria received $21.8 billion in diaspora remittances in 2025, one of the largest inbound flows on the continent. The average cost of sending money to Sub-Saharan Africa stood at 8.46% of the transfer value in the third quarter of 2025, according to World Bank data. If CBDC settlement rails can bring that cost down materially, the benefit to recipients would be concrete. The CBN has flagged this as a primary target, though no specific cost reduction benchmark or timeline for delivery appears in publicly available materials.

TechCabal's analysis of the document notes that PSV 2028 contains no budget, no implementation sequence, and no public scorecard, an accountability gap that mirrors weaknesses in the previous PSV 2025 framework, which ran from 2021 to 2025. That cycle saw Nigeria's broader instant payment rails succeed while the eNaira struggled; without clear benchmarks, PSV 2028 cannot be held to account for which outcome repeats.

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The eNaira now competes in a market where alternatives have already taken root. The cNGN, a naira-pegged stablecoin regulated by Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission, has gained voluntary commercial adoption without the frictions that slowed the CBDC. USDT and USDC together accounted for roughly 43% of Sub-Saharan Africa's crypto transaction volume in 2025, according to AllBusiness Africa. Private fintech wallets including OPay, PalmPay, and Paga captured the low-income digital payments segment the eNaira was built to serve. On the infrastructure side, a new National Payment Stack built on the ISO 20022 messaging standard went live in late 2025. Its first live transaction ran between PalmPay and Wema Bank in November 2025, replacing a NIBSS Instant Payments engine that had been operational since 2011, had processed nearly 11 billion transactions in 2024 (up from 5 billion in 2022), and was recognised by AfricaNenda as Africa's first "Mature" instant payment system.

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Across the continent, Nigeria's pivot will be watched closely. Ghana's eCedi retail launch, expected by the end of 2025, did not materialise. A new central bank governor, Dr. Johnson Asiama, installed in February 2025 has introduced further uncertainty about that project. South Africa opted against a retail CBDC entirely, choosing to focus on wholesale settlement between financial institutions. Nigeria's effort is, at this point, one of the most substantive live experiments in redirecting a failed retail CBDC toward a more targeted institutional use case.

Whether PSV 2028 delivers measurable results or becomes another well-designed document with limited accountability depends on execution whose early signs are not yet visible.