The Central Bank of Nigeria has scooped the 2026 “Central Bank of the Year” award, with judges praising a rapid-fire reform drive that pulled the naira—and the wider economy—back from the brink.
The Central Banking Awards Committee, in a statement on Sunday, said the CBN’s return to orthodox policy, cleanup of the foreign-exchange market, and rebuilding of institutional independence “restored both investor confidence and macro-stability.”
Nigeria entered 2023 with inflation at 22.4 per cent, foreign reserves under strain and a $7 billion queue of unpaid FX obligations. The gap between the official and black-market naira rates had blown past 60 per cent. By 2014 the country had slipped from Africa’s largest economy to fourth, trailing South Africa, Egypt and Algeria.
A former senior CBN official told the committee the nation “appeared headed the way of Venezuela and Zimbabwe.”
Governor Olayemi Cardoso, appointed in October 2023, scrapped the multi-window FX regime, unified rates under a single market and rolled out an electronic matching platform. Within months the parallel-premium collapsed to below two per cent and the backlog cleared, the committee noted.
Cardoso said the naira “now trades within a narrow, stable range,” crediting a willing-buyer, willing-seller model for price discovery.
The judges singled out the bank’s wider pivot: halting quasi-fiscal spending, tightening monetary policy and reasserting operational independence. The result, they said, was “a decisive U-turn that put Nigeria back on investors’ radar.”
The trophy will be presented at the awards ceremony in London next month.
