0:00 How long does your salary last? Count from payday. How many days until it's finally gone? In Abuja, a health worker named Grace Adama gives us an idea. She works for a health NGO in Abuja and earns 135,000 naira a month. That is nearly twice the national minimum wage. In August 2026, she told Reuters, if I am paid today, my salary stays with me just for one week. One week, and then the rest of the month is [music] borrowing, cutting back, and waiting. Now, look at what his salary like has is up against. In October 2025, a liter of petrol cost around 955 naira. The air
0:46 liter NNPC stations in Abuja were charging 1,405 naira. Food cost almost 20% more than it did a year earlier. And if Grace earned the minimum wage, that is 70,000 naira, she'd be living on about $52 a month. Now, go across town. In the same city, same period, inside the State House, the president is describing a very different economy. It is July 2026. President Bola Tinubu is receiving guests. He tells them the economic recovery is here. Proudly, we are running a very stable economy
1:33 right now. He had been saying it for months. On his third anniversary in office, in May, he told the country, [music] Nigeria has stabilized and is moving forward again. And he has the numbers to back that up. You see, between April and June, the economy grew 4.43% faster than the year before. Inflation, which stood at 24.48% in [music] January 2025, was to 14.63 % by September 2026. The country's dollar savings grew from about 35 billion when it took office to more than 55 billion. [music] The naira which crashed after it was floated has steadied at around 1,350 naira to the dollar in September. The
2:18 Central Bank was confident [music] enough to cut interest rates from 26.5 % to 23 % Independent fact checkers tested his claims [music] on growth and inflation and they held up. In October, the World Bank said growth, government finances and Nigeria's dollar position had all improved. Even an old critic came around in the first week of November at a conference in Oxford, Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II, a former Central Bank governor who has clashed with more than one Nigerian government said this administration deserves credit for quote bringing us back from the brink. So that is the government's case. The reforms hurt but
3:03 the hurt paid off. The recovery is here. Every one of those numbers is real. We checked them and Grace's salary still runs out in a week but both these things are true only because they are measuring different things. The scoreboard measures the government's accounts, the Central Bank's vote and the country's biggest companies. None of those tires is Grace. This is a recovery at the top, one that doesn't take into account what Grace and people like her are going through. And so when you check, you can find this recovery in bank profits, telecom profits, government revenue and dollar reserves but you won't find it in Grace's kitchen. The World Bank's own report shows the
3:50 gap. It says growth in 2026 stabilized the poverty rate for the first time since 2019. The same report put that rate at more than 60 % of Nigerians now living the national poverty line. Stable and stock. So where did the recovery go? Well, the best way to find out is to follow a salary like Grace's through a month, one bill at a time. Every bill leads somewhere. We start with the phone. For a working person in Abuja in 2026, data isn't optional. It is how you find work and keep in touch with family. Every top-up lands somewhere. In the first half of 2026, MTN Nigeria made 1.09 trillion naira in profit before
4:37 tax, up 75% on the year before. Most of that growth came from data. The banks had a good six months too. Five listed banks led by First Bank, Zenith, and GT Bank reported a combined 2.29 [music] trillion naira in profit before tax. That is where much of the 4.43% growth lives. Services, the part of the economy that includes telecoms, banking, and trade makes up more than half of Nigeria's output. These companies are big and very profitable. Most Nigerians will never work for them. In the last official count, 85.6% of working Nigerians were and these traders, farmers, drivers, and
5:23 tailors. Only about one in seven had an employer at all. Grace with a salary is one of the lucky ones. The woman selling pepper outside the bank branch gets no share of that bank's record half year. And the factories, the places that hire people by the thousands are letting them go. The Manufacturers Association counted 18,935 job loss in the first half of 2025. So how many jobs has this recovery created? The government can't say. Nigeria's Statistics Bureau hasn't published an unemployment rate since November 2024. That is two years without a number. So, growth is real, but it is sitting with the big NAs. Now, you will
6:10 say but inflation is falling. So, shouldn't Grace's money at least stretch a little further? It should, but it doesn't. And the reason is in what inflation actually measures. Inflation measures how fast prices rise. When it drops from 24% to 15%, prices keep going up, just more slowly this time. What went up in 2024 and 2025 stays up. And look closely at September's good news. Food prices fell that is 1.55% in that one month. That is the harvest that is rice, grains, onions, tomatoes coming in from farms. Everything else kept climbing. Core prices, the ones that cover rent,
6:56 school fees, and transport rose 1.11% in September. Keep that up for a year and you're back at about 14% Well, to be fair, some staples did get cheaper. A 50 kilo bag of Nigerian rice fell from about 60,000 naira in January to 53,000 naira by September. But food over the year was still up nearly 200% and for the poorest families, food takes up to 70% of everything they spend. And then there is getting to work. And for that, the story starts more than 5,000 kilometers away from Nigeria. On the 28th of February 2026, the United States and Israel strike Iran. And within days, tankers stop
7:43 moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil jumps from about $72 a barrel to 120. For Nigeria's government, that is a good news. Nigeria sells crude. By mid-year, the country had earned $12 billion more from the rest of the world than it spent. But for Grace, it's just another increased bill. Nigerians buy petrol and the same spike pushed that liter to 1,405 naira. Every bus fare carries a piece of it. Money in for the government, money out for everyone else. And when she gets home, the power bill is waiting. Customers on band A, that is the top tier, paid 209.5 naira for every unit of electricity in return for a promise of
8:28 about 20 hours of power a day. In 2026, the regulator had to order refunds for band A customers who got less than 18 hours because gas shortages and vandalism left the power plants short. So Nigerians pay twice, once to the greed and again for the fuel in the generator, which leaves one question. The war, the reforms, the floated naira, all of it brought the government more money than it has had in years. So where did all that money go? [music] Follow the government's money and it takes three tons before it gets anywhere near grace or people like grace. First,
9:15 the windfall. The World Bank says the money flowing into the pot shared by every level of government rose 69% in real terms between 2023 and 2025. It credits the exchange rate reforms, the end of the petrol subsidy, and better tax collection. So turn one, the states, their revenues nearly doubled, and the share they spent on capital projects, above all roads, jumped from 46% to 61%. But education's share of state budgets went down to 12.1% in 2025. And then turn two, the lenders. And this is where the story turns. In the first six months of 2026, the federal government collected 6.2 trillion naira in revenue. But in the
10:03 same six months, it paid 7.7 trillion naira in interest on its debts. [music] So for every 100 naira it took in revenues, it paid about 124 naira to the people it owes. The finance ministry says that is an improvement on the year before. And it is actually an improvement. But since more money is going out than coming in, there needs to be another way of funding the government. And so the borrowing goes on. On the 26th of October 2026, the president asked the senate to approve another 7.7 billion dollars in foreign loans. Then we have turn three, the reserves. Remember that 55 billion dollars? Well, the World Bank says it grew in large
10:50 parts because foreign investors brought money in chasing higher returns. Yeah, in case you haven't noticed, Nigeria has very lucrative interest rates for government bonds. Nigerian government bonds average roughly 16.9% to 17.1% for 10-year instruments, compared to the low single digit or moderate yields found in developed economies and lower double digit or single digit yields in many other emerging markets. United States, for example, is less than 4.5%. Kenya is about 12 to 13%. [music] Money like that can leave as fast as it arrived. Sanusi gave the same warning in Oxford in the same speech where he praised the government. So what part of
11:35 this government money reaches households directly? Well, that would be the government's cash transfer program that pays 75,000 naira per poor household in installments. By August 2026, it had reached 10.4 million of the 15 million households it aimed at. This is according to the government. That is roughly one month of minimum wage spread over several months for a whole family. And the minimum wage hasn't moved since July 2024. The government promised a review in June 2026. The Nigerian Labour Congress wants 500,000 naira, but that doesn't look like it's happening. So follow the money and you find it in the state roads, in the lender's interest, and in the investors' returns.
12:20 By the time it reaches the household, it is an installment, mostly peanuts. So, we need a different scoreboard. GDP tells you how much the economy produced. Reserves tell you how many dollars the central bank holds. Neither one tells you whether a family ate today. Try this test instead. [music] An economy has recovered when the people living in it can plan past the end of the month. It is a salary that stretches further than it did the year before. A family that can fill the tank and still buy the week's food and a graduate who finds work that pays enough to rent a room. When Reuters met Grace Adamu in August 2026, that was not her story.
13:06 Her salary lasted a week and there are many like Grace who have no idea where they will source next year's rent from. The World Bank expects poverty to start to gradually decline. For the 139 million Nigerians it counted as poor in 2025, that recovery is still a forecast and nothing in reality points to that happening. In January 2027, Nigerians will vote again. Every campaign will bring you numbers, but the ones we're checking are the ones in your pocket. So again, how long does your salary last? Tell us the number of days, what you do in your town, and if you remember what 10,000 Naira bought in your [music] market in January 2026, tell us what it buys now.
