Brutal Hidden Data Show How Uber ‘Self-Harmed’ & Lost Its Way In Nigeria

A Nigerian Uber driver completed about 130 rides over seven months. A South African Uber driver completed 1,142 in the same window.

That 8.8x gap is where the story of Uber’s Nigeria exit actually begins, according to some troubling new data, which shows Uber lost money on a large share of its Nigerian rides for reasons that had nothing to do with competition from Bolt or inDrive. Rather, it was paying drivers more than riders paid it, on short trips, in a market with roughly one-ninth the per-driver volume of South Africa.

That is the central finding of a new report from Obi, a California-based ride-hailing data aggregator that analysed 20,298 trips across 308 drivers between January and July 2026, the final months of Uber’s 12-year run in Africa’s most populous country. The report, titled “The Real Reasons Why Uber Left Nigeria,” offers the most detailed public accounting yet of how a company that helped create Nigeria’s app-based transport market ended up exiting it.

The numbers show a business that was structurally underwater on short rides. On trips under roughly 20 kilometres, Uber paid drivers more than it charged riders, by as much as 23% on some distance bands. At 5 to 9 kilometres, driver pay exceeded the customer fare by 23 percent. At 9 to 13 kilometres, the gap was 19%. Only past 20 kilometres did the fare finally overtake driver pay.

In other words, Uber was subsidising short trips to keep drivers accepting them. That subsidy might have been survivable in a high-volume market. Nigeria’s was not. Over the seven-month window Obi tracked, Nigerian Uber drivers averaged 130 total rides, or about 3.9 rides per active day. In South Africa, Uber drivers averaged 1,142 rides over the same kind of window, roughly 9.9 rides per active day. That is an 8.8x gap in per-driver activity between the two markets.

Low volume plus a per-ride subsidy is a lethal combination. And Uber had almost no room left to fix it through commissions. Nigerian drivers on both Uber and inDrive were already keeping roughly 80 to 90% of the fare throughout the period Obi measured.

Uber’s own cut was thin before the short-trip subsidy was layered on top. Raising commissions would have provoked the kind of driver backlash the company had already seen in Nigeria in 2017, 2023, and again in March 2026, when drivers across Uber, Bolt and inDrive staged a three-day strike over low fares and high commissions.

Pricing was not the answer either. Uber’s per-kilometre fare climbed 71% between January and July, from NGN 574.00 to NGN 983.00. That is a steep increase by any measure, and it still did not close the gap on short trips. Essentially, the platform raised prices by 71% and still needed to subsidise a large share of its rides, which proved to be a structural hole it couldn’t price its way out of.

The macroeconomic backdrop made everything worse. President Bola Tinubu’s removal of the fuel subsidy and changes to the naira exchange rate sent petrol, imported spare parts and vehicle maintenance costs soaring. Fuel prices in Lagos rose from about NGN 800.00 per litre in late February to between NGN 1.3 K and NGN 1.33 K by mid-April, a 60% jump in six weeks. Drivers absorbed that cost without corresponding fare adjustments on most platforms.

Obi surveyed 93 Nigerian Uber drivers the day after the exit was announced. Their responses back up the trip-level data. Asked why Uber left, 57% pointed to currency and inflation pressure, 51% to regulatory or government issues, and 44% to fares and commissions being too low to sustain. Just 25% cited losing to local competition.

Most drivers had already hedged. 80% were multi-apping before the exit was even announced, with 45% pairing Uber with Bolt, which has over six-times more users in Nigeria than Uber, and 19% with inDrive. Only 20% drove exclusively for Uber. Nearly half, 49%, now expect to lose 50% or more of their monthly income. 11% percent expect to lose more than 75%.

“I bought fuel at NGN 1.4 K per litre,” said Peter Obasi, a ride-hailing operator in Lagos, in an interview with The Guardian Nigeria, as fares displayed on the inDrive platform no longer cover his operating costs.

The driver survey also captured something the trip data alone could not. Despite everything, 71% rated their overall experience driving for Uber as very good and another 26% as good. If Uber returned to Nigeria, 90% said they would drive for it again without hesitation. Just 1% said no.

Uber’s exit is not just a Nigeria story. The company has also left Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania, and Uganda in the past year. It is redirecting capital toward autonomous vehicles, pledging more than USD 10 B to deploy robotaxis and aiming to operate driverless services in at least 15 cities by the end of 2026. Nigeria’s per-trip economics, where gross bookings per trip lagged far behind Uber’s global average, could not compete with that calculus.

Bolt and inDrive are now absorbing the drivers Uber left behind. Bolt, which entered Nigeria in 2016, had already captured an estimated two-thirds of the ride-hailing market by some measures. InDrive, with its negotiable fares and lower commissions, saw a three-fold spike in driver applications within 48 hours of Uber’s exit announcement. Shuttlers, a local startup known for its bus sharing platform, has also moved to fill the void with its new car sharing service.

The ride-hailing market in Nigeria is valued at around USD 450 M and projected to reach USD 879 M by 2031, with over 200,000 drivers, and growing. But the structural pressures that pushed Uber out have not disappeared.