US fintech company PayPal tried to slide back into Nigeria’s DMs, and the country collectively said – not on my watch!

There are corporate blunders, and then there’s PayPal's re-entry to Nigeria. A  misfire so graceless, it managed to tank its own reputation and set one of Nigeria’s beloved fintech companies on fire at the same time.

PayPal didn’t just return to Nigeria; it ghosted a generation, seized their funds, and doubled back years later without explanation. After a decade away, the company waltzed back into the market last month, armed with a Nigerian partner and no self‑awareness.

That partner was Paga, the sixteen‑year‑old fintech that has been on a generational run after nearly two decades of building critical payments infrastructure, expanding into the US, and recording $12 billion in transactions, all in 2025.

In 2004, PayPal, then a darling of the early internet, quietly placed Nigeria on a restricted list. Nigerians could send money – sure, feel free to spend your Naira abroad – but receiving funds? No. The stated reason was fraud. The unstated subtext, which any Nigerian who had a PayPal account in the early 2000s could tell you in significant detail, was something more like: we do not fully trust you.

Nigerians, being Nigerians, got creative. They built workarounds. They built companies. Then those companies became billion-dollar infrastructure. Paystack, Flutterwave, and Paga— enterprises constructed specifically because a gap had been left in the global payments market, and Nigerians decided to fill it themselves.

In the years PayPal spent ignoring Africa's most populous country, Nigerian fintech processed N1.07 quadrillion in domestic payments volume in 2024 alone. That's not a typo.

Then came 2014, and a partnership with First Bank that was, in spirit, the equivalent of a person who stood you up for dinner, apologising ten years later by giving you a coupon for 10% off at the restaurant you were supposed to have dinner at. Outbound payments only. You could give your money away. You still couldn't receive any.

Then came 2021, when PayPal partnered with Flutterwave, Africa's largest payments infrastructure company. Businesses only. Individuals, again, were left outside.

And then, on January 27, 2026, came the announcement.

Tayo Oviosu, founder and CEO of Paga, posted on social media. He had waited 13 years for this moment. He had first reached out to PayPal about a partnership in August 2013, when Nigeria's fintech ecosystem was still young enough that people were still debating whether the whole thing would work. He described the partnership, which would finally allow Nigerians to receive PayPal payments and withdraw in Naira.

The internet, predictably, exploded.

But not in the way Paga might have hoped. The backlash was immediate, and it was not aimed, at least not primarily, at PayPal. It was aimed at Paga. "PayPal hurt me so bad. I will never have anything to ever do with them or any company associated with them. So yeah — Paga, I'm done with you guys too."

That was one user on X. Others called for a boycott. Freelancers shared stories of frozen accounts, unexplained holds, and funds that disappeared into PayPal's compliance machinery and never returned. And there stood Paga, a company that had spent fifteen years building trust in one of Africa's most competitive markets, suddenly fielding questions about someone else's sins.

To understand what PayPal did wrong here, it helps to see what the company was doing on the other side of the world with its partnership announcements.

In July 2025, PayPal unveiled PayPal World — a grand, sweeping, unprecedented platform partnership connecting the world's most significant digital wallets. The press release, published on PayPal's official newsroom and distributed via PRNewswire, was the kind of document that communications teams spend weeks polishing. CEO Alex Chriss was quoted. The CEOs of NPCI International Payments (India's UPI network), Tenpay Global (China's Tencent), and Mercado Pago (Latin America) were all quoted. Together, these platforms represented nearly two billion users — and PayPal made sure everyone understood this. The announcement landed on CNBC, TechCrunch, Bloomberg, etc. Analysts wrote notes. The stock ticked up.

NPCI's CEO called it a "significant step." Mercado Pago's CEO called it "tremendous." Tenpay Global's CEO said his company was "glad." These are not particularly illuminating quotes, but they exist, which is more than can be said for what PayPal did when it returned to Nigeria or its MPESA partnership in Kenya.

Because when PayPal returned to Africa's largest economy, a market of over 200 million people and a digital payments sector processing nearly a trillion dollars annually, there was no press release on the PayPal newsroom. There was no coordinated announcement. There was no Alex Chriss, who was then still the CEO, offering a quote on transformation, inclusion, or the global digital economy. There was, instead, a LinkedIn post by Otto Williams, PayPal's Senior Vice President and Regional Head for the Middle East and Africa.

In all those markets, PayPal made a fuss about the partnerships. In Nigeria, a country with a fintech sector that has outperformed almost every comparable market on earth, a regional SVP's LinkedIn post.

PayPal did not announce this partnership. Paga did. Then absorbed the resulting exposure and stood in the crossfire of two decades of accumulated Nigerian resentment towards a company that had nothing to do with Paga's history.

There is a version of this story in which PayPal's return to Nigeria is genuinely exciting. Digital payments within Nigeria reached $754 billion in 2024 — up from $423 billion the year before.

And Tayo Oviosu has great credentials for this partnership. He’s spent sixteen years building a company across multiple markets, with the specific stated goal of connecting Africans to the global economy.

Paga processed N17 trillion (aka $12 billion) across 169 million transactions in 2025. It has 23 million users. It has the merchant network, the API infrastructure, the regulatory relationships, and the compliance framework that PayPal needed but could not have built from scratch in Nigeria in any reasonable timeframe. Tayo saw an opportunity and took it, and that is what founders are supposed to do.

If it hadn't been Paga, it would have been a different company. The economics of Nigeria's digital economy make it inevitable that global players will eventually return — and when they do, it is, in fact, a signal of a thriving market. Companies re-enter places that are worth entering. The problem is not that PayPal came back.

The problem is how.

PayPal knew, when it began planning this relaunch, exactly what it was walking into. The backlash in December 2025, when initial rumours of an Africa expansion began circulating, was swift and unambiguous.

People were furious.

A company with a functioning communications apparatus would have seen that and built a plan. A public acknowledgement that they had left Nigeria behind, that people had suffered real professional and financial harm as a result, that frozen funds are not a customer service matter but a moral one, and that the company intended to do better.

Instead, PayPal did nothing. It let Paga take the stage alone. And then, and this is the part that is hard to fathom, it still did nothing in the weeks that followed, while Paga absorbed boycott threats and managed an angry public conversation that was fundamentally about a company called PayPal.

The burden of laundering PayPal's image was placed on a fifteen-year-old company that had earned its reputation the old-fashioned way.

It is worth noting, here, that PayPal was not, at this moment, operating from a position of comfortable corporate strength. PayPal's stock entered 2026 down roughly 80% from its 2021 peak. Branded checkout, the company's most profitable product, the thing it is supposed to do better than anyone, grew 1% in the most recent quarter.

On February 3, 2026, the company fired Alex Chriss, who had been CEO for less than two and a half years, and replaced him with Enrique Lores, the former CEO of HP. The board's explanation was unusually blunt for corporate America: "the pace of change and execution was not in line with the Board's expectations." The stock fell 17% the same day.

Here is what will probably happen next, because this is how these things go.

The boycott will not hold. It never holds, not because the anger wasn't real, but because the economics of the situation are realer.

An international client does not care what happened to Nigerian freelancers in 2006. They pay in whatever they know, which is often PayPal.

The person who swore off Paga in the heat of January will eventually have a client who pays via PayPal, and he will think about it for a moment, then link his account and get on with his life. This is not hypocrisy. It’s just how money works.

Other fintech companies will quietly begin integrating PayPal. They will not announce it. They will add it as an option: another checkout button, another settlement rail, and say nothing in particular, and let users discover it.

And Paga will be fine. Paga was fine before this, and it will be fine after. A company does not process N17 trillion in transactions in a single year by being fragile. But it lost something in January that it should not have had to lose, not because of its own failings, but because it trusted a global partner to show up with the same seriousness it brought to every other market in the world.

Simply partnering with a beloved fifteen-year institution was not enough to launder years of broken trust. PayPal learned this when it saw the reaction.

The question is whether the lesson actually lands. Whether the new PayPal CEO, or the one after him, or whoever is running PayPal by the time it tries something like this again, will remember that the countries you underestimate have very long memories.