Is your money actually growing? What 15 years of data says about Nigerian cash returns

Treasury bills have quietly become the Nigerian allocator’s safe haven of choice.

And if you put N1 million into T-bills back in 2009, your statement today would show something like N4.7 million.

That number feels good when you look at it.

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It should not. But there’s something your bank statement won’t tell you: adjusted for what things actually cost now, that N4.7 million buys roughly what N380,000 bought in 2009.

Ironically, you multiplied the digits on the page, but the wealth behind them actually shrank. Fifteen years of that was just compounding quietly in the background while the balance ticked upward, and you assumed everything was fine.

We built an index to prove it. The VNG-CRR (that is our shorthand for the Venoble Nigeria Cash Real Return Index) tracks what actually happens when you hold Nigerian cash instruments after accounting for inflation.

Two inputs go in each month: the CBN 91-day Treasury bill stop rate from the most recent auction, and the NBS consumer price index.

One equation comes out. We have 204 consecutive months of data now, running from February 2009 to January 2026. The annualised real return over that entire period is negative 5.48%.

Over those 15 years, T-bills earned about 9.5% annually in nominal terms. That is the number you see on the statement, and also the deceptive number that makes you think the money is working.

But inflation ran much harder. The gap between what your bank says you have and what that money can actually do (rent, school fees, fuel, a 50kg bag of rice) widened every single year. What good is your savings growing on paper if they shrank in the supermarket. I keep coming back to the bag of rice because it is the one thing everybody understands.

Nobody cares about basis points and real yield calculations when you put it like this: the money you saved faithfully for fifteen years buys fewer bags of rice today than the day you started. That is the whole story, condensed.

Now, the reason we can say this with any precision at all is because we did something that, as far as we can tell, nobody else in Nigeria had done before. We chain-linked the CPI series across the NBS rebase.

Let me explain what that means for the non-economists reading this. In February 2025, the National Bureau of Statistics updated how it measures inflation. New basket of goods, new weights reflecting how Nigerians actually spend money now, and a new base year.

Headline inflation dropped from 34.8% to 24.5% overnight. The cost of a bag of rice did not change overnight. And a litre of petrol certainly did not suddenly get cheaper.

The way NBS counts these things changed. What this means practically is that the old inflation data stops at December 2024, and the new data starts at January 2025. The two series do not connect. They are built on completely different baskets and methodologies.

NBS published no official bridge between them. So we built one. Using standard IMF chain-linking methodology (the same approach the Fund uses when member countries rebase their price indices), we identified one overlap month, calculated a single scaling factor, and stitched together a continuous 204-month CPI series from 2009 to 2026.

Without that bridge, you literally cannot compare what inflation did to your money in 2015 versus what it is doing to your money in 2026. The numbers are on different scales. Who loses the most from this? Anyone sitting primarily in cash and government paper. Which, to be blunt, is most Nigerians with any savings at all.

But the real story here is pensions. Nigeria’s pension assets hit N27.45 trillion by the end of 2025. Roughly 60 percent of that sits in FGN securities: Treasury bills and bonds. These are the same instruments that delivered negative real returns for 15 straight years. We are talking about ten million contributor accounts. Every single one of them showed steady growth on the quarterly statement PenCom sends out. Every single one of them lost purchasing power the entire time.

PenCom raised the equity allocation limits in February 2026, and credit where it is due, they moved. RSA Fund I went from 30% to 35%, Fund II from 25% to 33%. That is a step. But it does not undo a decade of compounded real losses.

Your pension statement might say N8 million today. The question you should be asking is whether N8 million in 2035 will cover what you actually need it to cover. For most of the past 15 years, the trajectory says no.

There is some good news, though, and I want to be honest about it rather than just leaving you with the doom. Since August 2025, real returns on cash have turned positive. Properly positive, not the barely-above-zero kind that evaporates the next month.

January 2026 was actually the best single month we have on record: positive 4.39% in real terms. Month-on-month consumer prices fell while T-bill yields held steady. That almost never happens in Nigeria. Is this the beginning of something? Possibly.

Headline inflation came in at 15.1% in January 2026. The CBN’s 91-day stop rate at the most recent auction (that was March 4) printed at 15.95%. Positive margin. Real money being earned for the first time since most people reading this started paying attention to their investments.

I would love to tell you the corner has been turned for good, but I cannot, and anybody who tells you they can is selling something. The CBN cut the monetary policy rate by 50 basis points to 26.5% in February 2026. That filters through to T-bill yields with a lag. If auction rates keep falling while prices hold, the window closes.

We have seen this movie before. And then there is the measurement problem. NBS changed its CPI methodology three times in twelve months. Three times. The most recent change, in December 2025, switched from single-month to 12- month average reference periods.

Analysts at a few shops we talked to estimated that without that methodological switch, headline inflation would have printed closer to 31% rather than the 24.5% that was officially reported. The underlying price movement in the economy was largely stable. The yardstick changed. Again… So yes: real returns are positive today.

Whether they stay positive depends on decisions being made at the CBN and methodological choices being made at NBS, and I am not going to pretend I can predict either of those with confidence. Nobody can.

What you can do is check. Check whether your returns, on whatever you hold, are beating inflation in real terms. Not naira terms. Real terms. This applies to your savings account, your money market fund, your T-bill ladder, and your pension.

If the number on your statement is growing slower than prices, your wealth is shrinking. Full stop. The balance going up does not necessarily mean you are getting richer. It might mean you are getting poorer, just more slowly than someone who kept the cash under a mattress.

_E.J. Ibhawoh is the Founder and CEO of Venoble Limited, an investment intelligence and capital management firm for African markets.  _