When ₦20 Became Worthless: A Child’s Lesson on Inflation

This morning in Ikeja, my four-year-old son showed me a twenty-naira note and said, “It’s mine.” I asked if he planned to buy goodies at school. He looked at me and calmly replied, “It cannot buy anything.” That one sentence stopped me in my tracks. I remembered the 1990s when twenty naira could buy pap and akara or feed a family breakfast. Even school fees for a testimonial cost just fifteen naira then. It’s amazing—and heartbreaking—how a note once so valuable has almost lost its power within a single generation. What can ₦20 buy in your area today?

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