By Tonnie-Egun
When a multinational writes a cheque for Nigeria, it is betting on the answer to one question: can I get my money out? Until recently, the honest answer was no, not easily.
For instance, let us take Indomie as a case study. The noodles consumed in millions of Nigerian homes are made by Dufil Prima Foods, the Nigerian manufacturer through which Indonesia’s food giant Indofood has built one of the country’s biggest food businesses. As the world watched the naira’s turbulence in 2024 and 2025, Indofood quietly deepened its Nigerian operations, seeing the market not as a place to leave but a place to build. That decision didn’t come out of nowhere. It dovetailed with the biggest shake-up of the foreign-exchange market by the Tinubu administration: one honest price for the dollar, and the freedom for anyone to trade at it.
The contrast speaks volumes. Before the Naira unification, Nigeria operated with two prices for the same dollar: an official rate that was artificially low and a parallel rate where everyone else bought theirs. In June 2023, the difference was about N461 against over N760. The spread was no curiosity. It was a machine of blight. A favoured importer bought dollars at the official window and sold them on the street, making hundreds of naira per dollar in the process without producing anything.
Even worse, the rationing that fed that machine drove serious companies away. During this period, GlaxoSmithKline, Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark all left Nigeria citing the same killers: inability to source dollars and shrinking capacity to repatriate profits. But if a multinational can’t get its naira back into dollars, it stops investing, no matter how big the market is.
Unification solved both problems at once. In June 2023, the administration merged the multiple windows into one and allowed the naira to be traded on a willing buyer, willing seller basis. The round-tripping racket was deprived of its source of cheap dollars and the parallel-market premium collapsed. The Central Bank also took action in 2024 to clear the backlog of unmet dollar demand that had been strangling foreign firms, equally important.
This is the silent story of the Indomie decision. A company that watched Nigeria in 2023, where obtaining dollars was a matter of who you knew, by 2024 and 2025 saw a market with a single discoverable rate and a central bank working through its backlog. The change was not a slogan. It was the difference between exiting and evolving.
The same signal was sent to the capital markets. Nigeria’s return to the Eurobond space in late 2024 was oversubscribed, external reserves were rebuilt to the $50 billion level, and the sovereign credit outlook improved. These are not abstract statistics; these are foreign money voting, in real time, on whether Nigeria has changed.
The honest condition still applies. The naira, though transparent, is not strong yet. But it is by far more stable. Families are no doubt feeling the cost of living every day. But the direction toward a system where the market, not a phone call, determines who gets dollars and where international and local investors judge Nigeria on its merits, rather than its connections, is right.
In the 2027 election, the decision shall be whether to keep that Naira unified door open or allow the two-price system to creep back. It is just one cheque in a cascade of Indofood deals, but it tells the story in a sentence: as Nigeria stopped rationing dollars and started to price them honestly, the companies that had been leavening quietly started to come back.
