Emma Okonji
Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), yesterday, in Lagos told financial institutions and Fintech companies still host-ing their payment data outside Nigeria that the Janu-ary 1, 2027 deadline for the migration of all Nigerian data back to the country for local hosting remained unchanged.
CBN advised those concerned to immediately com-mence the process of data migration and localisation, if they had not started the process, in order to meet up with the deadline.
Director, Payments Systems Supervision Department, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Dr. Rakiya Opemi Yusuf, made the clarification in her welcome address, dur-ing the “CloudReady Nigeria Financial Services Roundtable”, organised by Africa Hyperscalers.
According to Yusuf, who was represented by Assistant Director, Payments Systems Supervision Department at CBN, Mr. Babatunde Ajiboye, “Our task is to ensure proper implementation of the directive of the CBN for local data storage and management of payment trans-action data into practical, reliable implementation.
“The CBN circular of June 15, 2026 requires payment transaction data generated within Nigeria to be stored and managed in Nigeria with full compliance set for 1st of January, 2027.”
According to Yusuf, “The compliance date hasn’t changed. It’s 1st of January, 2027. So, while you go about your implementation, you must know that it has to address the full data lifecycle from creation through processing and storage to eventual disposal. This calls for a complete data audit. The practical sequence is to audit and classify the data, agree on the local architec-ture and contracts, then mitigate, test, and inde-pendently verify completion.”
National Commissioner and CEO, Nigeria Data Protec-tion Commission (NDPC), Dr. Vincent Olatunji, in his address, spoke on data sovereignty and stressed the need for the protection of Nigeria’s data hosted out-side the country.
Olatunji, who was represented by Head, Regulations Unit at NDPC, Ibukunoluwa Owa, said, “Today, the entire African continent accounts for less than one per cent, in fact barely 0.5 per cent of global data centres co-located in the country. This dynamic is economical-ly unstable, unsustainable, and strategically vulnera-ble.
“The federal government has established a clear na-tional mandate under the National Digital Cloud Policy to transition Nigeria from being a primary consumer of global cloud infrastructure into a globally competitive hub for digital infrastructure, local skills, and cloud ex-ports.”
Executive Director, Africa Hyperscalers, Mr. Temitope Osunrinde, said Nigeria had taken critical steps over the last few years, especially over the last few weeks, towards strengthening digital sovereignty through the recent state of policies that involved the National Cloud Policy, the National Sovereign Cloud Policy, Ni-geria Data Protection Act, and Central Bank of Nigeria.
According to him, Nigeria has already established a clear direction towards sovereign cloud.
He said the concern now was what it will take to im-plement that vision successfully across the financial sector.
Osunrinde said the implementation would require clear guidelines, appropriate data, and workload clas-sification, including resilient infrastructure, trusted providers, and coordinated regulation.
Cloud service and Data Centre providers, like Nobus Cloud, Open Access Data Centres (OADC), Layer 3, among others, that spoke at the forum, assured Nige-rians of their readiness to efficiently host data in Nige-ria, when migrated back to the country.