Within the Room, Again: The Variable Nigeria Finally Admitted

Clifford Akpolo

About a year ago, I wrote from Brasília about the privilege of accompanying the Board of Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX Group) to meet President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. I argued then that much of the commentary on Nigeria’s economy suffered from omitted variable bias: that the story being told left out variables that changed its meaning. Last Thursday, at the Aso Villa, as the Board and management of Nigerian Exchange Group made another strategic visit to the president, I sat in the room again and watched a different omission being corrected, not in the critics’ model this time, but in the nation’s own.

For decades, Nigeria’s national economic conversation has been conducted in a narrow vocabulary: oil production, foreign reserves, inflation and the exchange rate. Budgets rose and fell with the price of crude; policy debate orbited the naira. The capital market, the mechanism through which successful economies finance enterprises, build infrastructure and distribute ownership and prosperity, was, at best, a footnote. In model terms, it was the omitted variable: present in the economy, absent from the specification.

What I witnessed on Thursday was that variable being formally admitted. The capital market is no longer a spectator subject in Nigeria. It was discussed at the highest table in the land in the same breath as fiscal and monetary policy: as an instrument of national strategy.

The evidence that earned it that seat is not rhetorical. “The picture today is that when you took office in 2023, the total value of stocks listed in Nigeria was just shy of N30 trillion. Today, Mr President, that figure is N160 trillion. By the end of this year, with the listings that we are seeing in our market, we expect that figure to rise to N230 trillion,” Group MD/CEO, NGX Group, Mr. Temi Popoola, told the president.

The All-Share Index tells the same story, rising from 52,000 points to 244,000. A sceptic will say asset prices are not the economy. I agree: a single indicator proves nothing. But markets are forward-looking aggregators of information; they price not simply what is, but what millions of independent decisions expect to come.

When domestic institutions, pension funds, retail investors and foreign portfolio managers converge on the same directional bet over three years, it deserves attention. That conviction has been expressed through market infrastructure built collectively by the Exchange, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Central Securities Clearing System (CSCS) and market operators, strengthened by June’s transition to T+1 settlement and validated through a Central Bank-led banking recapitalisation funded roughly 75 per cent from domestic resources.

This is no longer sentiment. It is revealed preference, at scale. That is what an admitted variable looks like: measured, priced, trusted. The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. Olayemi Cardoso, made the point from the regulator’s side of the table, recalling the doubt that greeted the recapitalisation announcement: “There was a lot of scepticism. People didn’t think it was possible. And now it was done very successfully; close to 75 per cent of the total was domestic resources. In the past, it was the other way around.” He was generous enough to add that NGX was up to the task and that the SEC played a major role in a seamless exercise, reinforcing the broader point: admitted variables are the work of an ecosystem, not an institution.

This is where the significance of NGX Group’s role becomes clearer. Economic reform creates the conditions for confidence, but confidence alone does not build factories, recapitalise banks or finance infrastructure. Someone has to convert that confidence into investable opportunities and mobilise savings into productive capital. That is the work of the capital market. Over the past three years, NGX and its ecosystem have increasingly occupied that space, helping translate the credibility created by reform into actual capital formation. NGX and Popoola’s role has been to keep that bridge between policy and markets visible, bringing concrete market mechanisms and opportunities to the highest level of economic decision-making.

What struck me most in the room, however, was not the data. It was how naturally the conversation flowed through it. “I can see the excitement in the room. All I can do is to celebrate you all today,” the president began, before offering the line that distilled the shift: “Nigeria can build a nation of prosperity by itself. If the stock market is doing well, then we are doing well.”

He then turned from celebration to consequence: what does this confidence make possible for the manufacturer seeking expansion capital, for the entrepreneur with a bold idea and for the millions of workers whose pensions participate in this growth? That is the right question.

Market performance is an intermediate variable; the dependent variable is the welfare of ordinary Nigerians. The clearest proof that the variable is now in the model came in a single announcement. Popoola had tabled four priorities for NGX Group: the privatisation and listing of commercially viable government assets; the domestic or dual listing of leading Nigerian companies; clarity on the capital gains tax treatment of listed securities; and greater use of capital-market instruments to finance infrastructure. Before the meeting ended, the president went on to disclose that NNPC Limited would be reformed and listed on the capital market.

That is consequential. When a state chooses to finance, discipline and distribute ownership of one of its most important commercial assets through the market, the market has ceased to be a footnote. A listed NNPC means audited accounts, market discipline and, most importantly, the opportunity for Nigerians themselves, directly and through their pension funds, to own a share of the national patrimony. It converts aspiration into presidential commitment.

The conversation ran wider than the delegation. The Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Mr Taiwo Oyedele, described the capital market as “one of the fastest ways to create wealth for millions of Nigerians,” challenging NGX and the SEC to target a trillion-dollar market. His sharpest observation concerned the next generation: “Many of our young people invest their money in virtual assets and gambling, whereas you can make more money from the capital market.”

NGX Group Chairman, Alhaji Umaru Kwairanga, matched the ambition with a timeline, telling the president that a one-trillion-dollar economy is achievable before 2030. He also recalled a recent panel where he attributed the market’s turnaround to leadership and consistency of reform: two inputs no market can generate for itself.

Let me be careful about what I am claiming, because precision matters. Nigeria’s cost-of-living challenge is real, and no index level pays a family’s bills. Every reform leaves residuals, and honest analysis names them. But the fairest answer to the transmission question, how any of this reaches the man on the street, came from the CBN Governor himself.

“Without stability, you don’t get the investments you are talking about. And without the investments, you don’t get growth.” Stability, investment, growth, welfare: that is the transmission mechanism. The boom-and-bust cycles of the past, marked by apparent stability followed by devaluation and then another cycle, were symptoms of a system whose plumbing, in Cardoso’s phrase, had never been done. The plumbing is the point.

Markets cannot create macroeconomic stability by themselves. Nor can monetary and fiscal policy, however well designed, deliver broad-based prosperity without mechanisms through which capital reaches productive enterprise. The capital market is part of that machinery: the bridge between savings and investment, between institutional capital and enterprise, between national assets and national ownership. That is why Thursday mattered beyond the day’s announcements.

The deepest significance of the meeting may be permanence. The truest compliment to any reform is that it is built to outlast its authors, a standard the president has set for himself in speaking of foundations for long-term, sustainable growth. The capital market’s new place in the national conversation is exactly that kind of achievement: institutional, not episodic.

Markets reward credible policy, disciplined institutions and consistent regulation. A market admitted to the heart of national strategy can serve every government that comes after. That is precisely what makes its admission an act of nation-building rather than a moment in a news cycle.

But being admitted is only the beginning. The task ahead is to make it irreversible: listing the assets, simplifying access, protecting investors, drawing young Nigerians from speculation towards ownership, deepening domestic participation, attracting long-term international capital, and building the bridge between policy and markets that we, as capital-market professionals, exist to build.

Nigeria’s future is still being written from within the room. The difference, one year on, is that the capital market is no longer waiting outside it.

* Akpolo, an economist and brand communication professional, is Head of Group Communications and Partnerships, NGX Group