The federal government may soon begin disbursing salaries, pensions, and social welfare benefits through the eNaira, Nigeria’s central bank digital currency, under a sweeping new roadmap released by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
The proposal forms part of the CBN’s Nigeria Payments System Vision 2028, a strategic roadmap designed to transform the eNaira from an experimental initiative into a mainstream payment channel for both public and private sector transactions.
The document identifies government-to-person payments, salary disbursements, offline transactions, and support for small businesses as priority use cases for the repositioned digital currency.
The move marks a significant pivot for a project that has struggled since its debut. Launched in October 2021 as Africa’s first central bank digital currency designed for everyday use, the eNaira was expected to ease payments, cut remittance costs, expand financial inclusion, and boost economic growth ambitions that have largely gone unmet nearly five years on.
The CBN itself acknowledges these shortcomings in the new document, noting the eNaira currently has millions of wallets but has processed only about ₦22 billion (roughly $16 million) in transactions since launch.
The central bank attributed the slow uptake to weak stakeholder engagement, poor integration efforts, limited implementation resources, and inadequate awareness campaigns.
Rather than scrapping the project, however, the CBN is now reframing the eNaira as “infrastructure rather than product,” embedding it within a broader ecosystem spanning open banking, digital identity systems, instant payments, and cross-border settlement rails. Officials say this could give the currency a long-awaited second wind.
On the technical front, the CBN highlighted the “programmable money” potential of the digital currency, saying it could carry features such as time limits, purpose-specific usage, split payments, and sub-wallet capabilities that could be especially relevant for targeted welfare disbursements and conditional cash transfers.
The bank added that the digital currency could also strengthen financial market infrastructure by supporting settlement systems, banks, and tokenized financial assets, including bonds and securities, while making transactions faster and cheaper.
The Payments System Vision 2028, released under CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso, sets a target of 95% formal financial inclusion by 2028, up from roughly 74% today.
The CBN also plans to deepen the eNaira’s role in cross-border transactions, piloting interoperability with other central bank digital currencies under ECOWAS and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, while introducing a classification and compliance framework for stablecoin issuers, including a requirement for the CBN to run its own observer nodes on any blockchain network hosting approved stablecoins in Nigeria.
CBN Governor Olayemi Cardoso, writing in the document’s foreword, said the vision was designed to reinforce Nigeria’s position as a leading digital payments market through improved efficiency, resilience, and financial inclusion, with a focus on modernizing payment infrastructure, strengthening regulatory oversight, accelerating digital financial services, and deepening collaboration among financial ecosystem stakeholders.
Deputy Governor for Economic Policy, Dr. Muhammad Abdullahi, added that the vision would support the broader application of digital currencies and other innovative payment technologies within a robust regulatory framework.
Whether the eNaira can shed its image as a cautionary tale among global CBDC experiments now hinges on execution and on whether millions of Nigerian civil servants and pensioners find a government-issued digital wallet more convenient than the bank apps and fintech platforms they already use.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
This isn’t just another eNaira relaunch; it’s a fundamental shift from selling the eNaira as a consumer product to embedding it as backend infrastructure for government payments, with civil service salaries and pensions as the test case.
Success now depends less on technology and more on whether the CBN can fix the trust, awareness, and integration failures that doomed adoption the first time around.
