By Cheta Nwanze
The announcement that PayPal would finally allow Nigerians to receive international payments through a partnership with Paga has met, not with celebration, but with a furious and revealing debate. For many, this is not a lifeline but a provocation, a belated attempt to profit from a market forced to mature without it. This reaction is not about technology. It is a stark examination of two things: whether Nigerians possess a collective memory; and whether we have the spine to act on it.
The context is crucial. For nearly two decades, PayPal operated a policy of exclusion against Nigeria. Citing fraud concerns, it allowed payments to leave the country but blocked the vital function of receiving money. This was not an oversight. It was an active stigmatisation that branded an entire generation of digital entrepreneurs. Freelancers, remote workers, and online merchants were pushed into the shadows, grappling with frozen funds and missed opportunities while the global digital economy passed them by. They shut us out when they were the standard, and now wish to enter a market we built for ourselves.
And build it we did. In the absence of the global giant, Nigerian innovation filled the void with fierce determination. A world-class fintech ecosystem emerged. Companies like Paga, the very partner in this deal, alongside Flutterwave and Paystack, built robust, trusted infrastructure from the ground up. They solved local problems and earned trust, capturing a digital payments market worth hundreds of trillions of naira. PayPal is not entering a vacuum. It is gatecrashing a sophisticated party it refused to attend for 20 years, hosted by the very people it once snubbed.
This history fuels the current call for a boycott. The argument is one of principle and painful experience. The grievance is rooted in that long period of disrespect, a perception that this move is driven not by respect but by a fear of missing out on a lucrative market. There is a profound distrust of PayPal’s operational power, a fear that it remains an efficient account freezing machine that can withhold funds for months with little recourse. When you lack a government that will credibly fight for your digital rights, such fears are rational. Furthermore, a compelling case can be made for economic patriotism. Why funnel commissions to a latecomer who has actively given us the middle finger in the past, when homegrown alternatives offer faster, cheaper, and more trustworthy service?
Looking at it this way, the calls for a boycott are an act of collective self-respect.
Against this stands a pragmatic counterargument. Some see only utility and access, a new tool for receiving payments from PayPal’s vast network. They argue that emotion should not blind us to a useful business opportunity. This perspective is where the analogy of the good nurse becomes painfully relevant. It refers to the worker who, while colleagues protested unpaid salaries, continued working. She was celebrated and individually rewarded for her diligence. But her action, while personally beneficial, undermined the collective stand needed to solve the systemic injustice of unpaid wages.
Choosing to engage with PayPal purely for personal convenience, while ignoring the historical insult and collective stance, is the digital equivalent of that good nurse. It is individualism masquerading as intelligence. It mistakes neutrality for sophistication, when it is often a fragmentation of the very unity required to demand accountable power. This mindset is why systems, foreign and domestic, keep disrespecting us. When it is time to stand together, someone always wants to be the exception, the savvy operator, not realising that this fragmentation is what allows exploitation to persist.
This debate is a mirror held up to our national condition. We are a society that glorifies the individual hustle, the survival instinct that built our fintech success. Yet that same hyper-individualism constantly defeats the sustained collective action needed to demand accountability, whether from our government or from corporate powers. We are quick to embrace transactional benefits and slow to uphold transformative principles. The Paga founder pitched this collaboration to PayPal in 2013. It took thirteen years of demonstrable local success to make it happen. That is the strength of building your own table. The boycott argument is an attempt to use that hard-earned strength to set the terms of engagement.
In the end, the issue transcends PayPal. It is a rehearsal for a broader discipline that Nigerians must learn. Sovereignty is not given. It is built through memory, unity, and the conscious direction of our economic energy. We can engage with the world, but we must do so with our eyes open, on a foundation of our own making, and with the unwavering will to withdraw our participation when that engagement becomes disrespectful. Until we master that collective spine, we will remain in the fool’s paradise, forever checking our pockets while others write the rules of our economic destiny.
Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence
