A burgeoning literature on ethno-regional favouritism in Sub-Saharan Africa has largely found that Presidents favour their co-ethnic kin in the provision of public goods. However, this literature is arguably flawed for two reasons. First, it assumes the equitable provision of public goods within the President’s ethnic group, which neglects both the potential of intra-ethnic inequality in public goods provision as well as the existence of non-material or ‘psychic’ benefits. Second, the literature is empirically narrow inasmuch as the vast majority of studies either focus on individual countries, a very narrow range of outcomes, and/or use a single data source. As such we conduct the largest examination to date of ethno-regional favouritism in Sub-Saharan Africa using a wide variety of survey and infrastructure data across more than two dozen countries and a large number of outcomes. Strikingly, we fail to find any evidence of a positive effect of co-ethnicity, and in fact find a negative effect across multiple objective outcomes. Moreover, we find evidence that is consistent with the existence of the subjective ‘psychic’ benefits of co-ethnicity, such that individuals in co-ethnic areas have higher opinions of the government, view themselves as subjectively better off and rate government performance on service delivery higher, even after controlling for the services in question. Finally, we show that individual-level co-ethnicity is associated with increasing intra-ethnic inequality, such that co-ethnicity is associated with increasing poverty and wealth simultaneously. We supplement our results with qualitative case study evidence from South Africa and Nigeria.