Category: Business Day

For as long as anyone has done business in Nigeria, the phone call was an asset you owned. A number to reach a customer, confirm an order, chase a payment, close a deal. It was the most direct line a company had to the people it served. That asset has quietly turned into a liability, and most businesses have not adjusted their thinking to match.

The reason is simple and brutal. More than one in every two calls Nigerians now receive from an unknown number is flagged as spam or fraud, the highest rate in Africa. So people have learned the only rational defence: ignore the unknown number. Let it ring out, assume the worst.

That single, sensible habit, multiplied across a whole country, means the channel businesses have relied on for decades no longer reliably works. When customers stop trusting unknown callers, they stop trusting your call too. The call still connects. It just no longer gets picked.

This is not a small-business problem or a big-business problem. It is both.

For the small business, it is the deal that dies in silence. You call a customer back about the order they enquired about yesterday. They do not recognise the number, assume it is a scam, and let it ring out. You never get a second chance, because they never knew it was you. For a one-person shop or a growing SME, whose entire pipeline depends on being reachable, every ignored call is revenue that simply evaporates, with no invoice to record the loss.

For the logistics and delivery business, it is the failed drop. The rider calls from the road to confirm the address, the customer sees an unknown number and ignores it, and the package bounces back to the depot. Now you are paying twice to deliver once, and the customer blames you for a failure that started with a call they were too wary to answer. Multiply that across thousands of deliveries and the cost stops being an inconvenience and becomes a line on the balance sheet.

For the telecom operator, it is stranger still. The networks carry the very traffic that has poisoned the well, and they also depend on reaching their own subscribers, for renewals, service messages and support. When their outbound calls land in the same suspicious silence as everyone else’s, the operator is undermined by the exact channel it runs.

And for the bank, it is the deepest cut of all, because the bank did this to itself for the best possible reason. For years, banks told customers a simple, correct thing: we will never call you to ask for your details. That message worked. Customers internalised it. But it also trained an entire market to distrust a call that claims to be from the bank.

Which means the bank’s own legitimate outbound calls, the genuine fraud alert, the real card-services team, the actual relationship manager, now arrive pre-suspected. The institution most dependent on being trusted on the phone is the one that can least use the phone at all.

Step back and the pattern is unmistakable. A bank, a telco, a delivery firm, a corner shop: wildly different businesses, all quietly losing the same asset for the same reason.

The phone call, once the most trusted line between a company and its customer, has become a channel none of them can rely on because none of them can prove, in the moment it matters, that the call is genuinely theirs.

That is the real problem underneath all of it. Not that businesses are being impersonated, though they are. Not that customers are being scammed, though they are. The structural cost is that legitimate businesses have lost the ability to prove they are legitimate on the one channel where it counts, at the one moment a customer decides whether to trust the ring.

Which points to the only durable fix: identity has to travel with the call.

This is where services such as Truecaller for Business change the equation. Its Verified Business Caller ID allows a business to establish a verified identity on calls, including its name, logo and business category, rather than leaving the customer to guess who is behind an unfamiliar number. Truecaller also offers Business Call Reason, allowing businesses to give customers context for why they are calling before the call is answered.

That distinction matters. The answer is not asking customers to become better detectives. It is giving them better information. For a customer waiting for a delivery, a call that arrives with a verified business identity and clear context is fundamentally different from an anonymous number. For someone receiving a call from their bank, the difference between ‘unknown number? and a verified business identity is not cosmetic; it gives the customer an additional signal with which to make an informed decision.

And for businesses, the significance goes beyond a logo appearing on a screen. Truecaller’s business tools are designed around the idea that identity, trust and context should become part of the communication itself. Its Secure Call capability can authenticate calls from verified businesses and display a ‘Secure Call? indication, while its APIs can integrate these capabilities into existing calling infrastructure.

That is the shift businesses need to make: from simply owning a phone number to owning a verifiable identity behind that number.

A verified identity does not make every call welcome, and it should not. Customers should still be free to ignore unwanted communication. But it changes the starting point. The customer no longer has to ask, ‘Who is this number?? before deciding whether the call deserves attention.

For a business, that verifiable identity is becoming as fundamental as a signboard once was. A shop without a name over the door does not get walked into. A company that cannot establish who is calling does not get answered.

In a market where unknown calls are increasingly associated with fraud, being reachable is no longer about having your customers’ numbers. It is about your customers being willing to pick up when you call. And that willingness now has to be earned, communicated and proven on every ring.

The businesses that solve this early will keep the trust their competitors are losing. The ones that continue treating the phone as the reliable asset it used to be will keep wondering why fewer and fewer people pick up.

Nigerian startups and small businesses have a fresh opportunity to secure up to $65,000 through the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Startup Award 2026.

The initiative is designed to support promising businesses with funding, visibility and opportunities to scale across West Africa. Here’s what you need to know about the award, eligibility requirements and how to apply.

The ECOWAS 2026 Startup Awards applications come with a total cash prize of $65,000 up for grabs among the top three startups.

The second edition of the ECOWAS Startup Awards is designed to identify, celebrate and support high-impact startups contributing to digital transformation, regional integration and sustainable value-chain development across West Africa.

The programme is being convened by the ECOWAS Commission’s Directorate of Private Sector and Industry, hosted in Abuja and jointly implemented by the Pan African Alliance of Small and Medium Industries (PAOSMI) and the Investment Promotion Agencies of West African States (IPAWAS).

The initiative follows the inaugural edition held in Niamey, Niger, on November 18 and 19, 2021.

The 2026 edition is expected to bring together 60 startups from ECOWAS member states and will feature masterclasses, startup clinics, pitch competitions, exhibitions, investor deal rooms, policy dialogues and post-award acceleration.

Prizes to be won

The top three winners will share the cash prize of $65,000, with the winner going home with the sum of $30,000, first runner-up to get $20,000, and second runner-up receives $15,000.

Besides, there will be cash rewards, and regional exposure across the ECOWAS bloc, investor introductions, networking opportunities with founders and policymakers, mentorship and a six-month acceleration programme, for selected startups

Eligible sectors

Here are the six sectors eligible for the awards, the EdTech, Fintech, Health Tech, Agri Tech, Clean Tech, and TravelTech.

EdTech startups will focus on education technology and skills development, FinTech, on businesses developing technology-driven financial products and services, and HealthTech startups using technology to improve healthcare delivery and related services.

While AgriTech businesses work in agricultural technology and food systems, CleanTech on clean technology, climate solutions and green innovation, and TravelTech on tourism, hospitality and travel technology.

Requirements

Applicants must meet six eligibility requirements to participate in the competition.

They must be a citizen of an ECOWAS member state, operate a startup that is registered and based within an ECOWAS country.

Besides, applicants must have been operating for at least two years, has a working product or service, and demonstrate market traction or scalability, and must submit all required documentation.

Applicants are expected to prepare the following documents and materials before beginning the application:

A completed application form covering Sections A-J.

A national passport or ECOWAS-approved identity document for the lead founder, in PDF or image format and not exceeding 10MB.

A recent colour passport photograph of not more than 5MB.

Business registration certificate issued in an ECOWAS member state, where applicable.

In addition, have two years of financial statements, management accounts or projections. A business plan of no more than 10 pages, single-spaced and written in Times New Roman, size 12. A pitch deck of no more than 10 slides.

A one-minute pitch video in MP4, MOV or WebM format, with a maximum file size of 100MB.

Eligible startup founders across ECOWAS member states can apply through the official ECOWAS Startup Awards application portal.

Applicants are advised to have all required documents ready before starting the process.

The Federal Government has called on wealthy Nigerians, philanthropists, business leaders and corporate organisations to invest in the establishment of fire stations across the country, saying firefighting and emergency response should be regarded as a collective responsibility.

Adeyemi Olumode, Controller-General of the Federal Fire Service (FFS), made the call on Friday in Abuja at a One-Day National Stakeholders’ Summit on Fire Safety, held under the theme, ‘Building a Resilient Fire Service for the 21st Century.’

Olumode said the country needed a greater number of strategically located fire stations to bring emergency response closer to communities, reduce response time and minimise the loss of lives and property during fire outbreaks.

According to him, government alone cannot provide all the infrastructure required to effectively respond to fire emergencies across Nigeria, making private-sector and community investment critical to strengthening the national fire safety architecture.

He cited the Offa Descendant Association Fire Station, Oyo Town Fire Station, Idanre Fire Station, Bonny Island Fire Station and Kugbo Fire Station as examples of successful interventions by individuals, communities and organisations.

The Controller-General said such initiatives should not be viewed merely as acts of philanthropy, but as direct investments in the protection of lives, businesses, communities and property.

‘We need a multiplicity of strategically located fire stations to bring emergency response closer to our people and reduce response time,’ he said.

Olumode also disclosed that the summit coincided with the first anniversary of his assumption of office as Controller-General of the Federal Fire Service on August 14, 2025.

He said the anniversary provided an opportunity for the Service to take stock of its activities and achievements over the past year, stressing that the date of the summit was not deliberately chosen to mark his anniversary.

Among the achievements recorded during the period, he listed the rehabilitation of 40 firefighting appliances, the provision of two modern firefighting appliances and the supply of more than 2,000 pieces of personal protective equipment for firefighters.

He added that more than 700 cadet officers had undergone basic firefighting training and had subsequently been deployed to various commands across the country.

The FFS boss said the Service had also expanded its specialised operational capabilities through counter-terrorism training conducted in collaboration with the Office of the National Security Adviser and the Armed Forces.

He further disclosed that the National Fire Academy was undergoing upgrades, expressing confidence that the institution would become the best firefighter training academy in Africa when reopened.

The summit also featured the induction of 37 Public Relations Officers (PROs) drawn from the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory into the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR).

Olumode described the exercise as historic, noting that it was the first time officers responsible for public communication across the Service’s state commands had been brought together under a coordinated and structured professional training and certification programme.

He said the initiative was designed to improve the way the Federal Fire Service communicates with the public, particularly during emergencies when timely and accurate information could save lives.

‘This is much more than issuing certificates. We are professionalising the way the Federal Fire Service communicates with Nigerians,’ he said.

The Controller-General said the newly inducted PROs would be expected to develop expertise in strategic and crisis communication, media relations, stakeholder engagement, public education and reputation management.

They would also have to understand the growing challenges posed by misinformation and inaccurate reports during emergencies.

Olumode stressed that fire incidents should not be regarded solely as operational emergencies, arguing that effective communication was equally important to emergency management.

He said public trust remained fundamental to the ability of the Fire Service to protect lives and property, particularly when members of the public needed to respond quickly to instructions from emergency personnel.

The Controller-General commended the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) for its collaboration with the Federal Fire Service on fire safety in tertiary institutions.

He also praised the Tony Elumelu Foundation for partnering with the Service on fire safety preparedness training for 7,740 Nigerians, with a target of extending the programme to 10 people in every local government area.

According to him, expanding fire safety awareness and preparedness beyond government institutions to communities, businesses and households was essential to reducing the impact of fire incidents.

Olumode also appreciated the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations and Rightangle PR for supporting the Service’s efforts to strengthen its professional communication capacity.

He extended his appreciation to government institutions, private-sector organisations and members of the media for their continued support of the Fire Service.

The Controller-General also urged Nigerians to play an active role in facilitating emergency response whenever fire incidents occur.

He appealed to motorists and other road users to give fire appliances a clear path, warning that traffic congestion and obstruction could significantly delay firefighters from reaching affected locations.

He also urged members of the public to avoid unnecessary crowds at fire scenes and to refrain from spreading unverified information that could complicate emergency operations.

Olumode called for greater public cooperation with emergency responders, stressing that reducing fire-related deaths and destruction required the combined efforts of government agencies, businesses, communities and individuals.

He said the Federal Fire Service would continue to strengthen its operational capacity, professionalise its personnel and deepen partnerships with stakeholders as part of efforts to build a more responsive and resilient fire safety system for the country.

ipNX Nigeria has joined key stakeholders in Nigeria’s telecommunications sector to call for stronger collaboration, improved infrastructure standards and greater protection of fibre networks as the country seeks to accelerate broadband connectivity.

The call was made at the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) Critical Conversation Forum on Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH), held at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Lagos.

The forum, themed ‘Fibre to the Home in Nigeria: Addressing Challenges, Strengthening Standards and Ensuring Sustainable Deployment,’ brought together telecommunications operators, regulators, government agencies, infrastructure providers, industry associations and media representatives to examine barriers to fibre deployment and explore ways to support Nigeria’s broadband ambitions.

Delivering the keynote address virtually, Aminu Maida, the executive vice chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), described FTTH as a critical component of Nigeria’s digital future.

According to Maida, rising data demand makes reliable fibre infrastructure important to businesses, the digital economy and citizens.

‘FTTH is uniquely positioned to meet Nigerians’ next phase of data demand. The quality of our broadband will increasingly shape the competitiveness of our businesses, the growth of our digital industry and the opportunities available to our citizens,’ he said.

He also called for greater protection of telecommunications infrastructure, warning that damage to fibre networks could have significant economic consequences.

‘We must uphold deployment standards. Nigeria needs fibre that is properly installed, properly documented, and properly protected,’ Maida said.

Tony Emoekpere, ATCON President, said FTTH would play a critical role in helping Nigeria achieve broader broadband penetration, while urging communities and the public to treat telecommunications infrastructure as critical national assets.

He compared the protection of communications infrastructure with the public response to damage to electricity infrastructure, arguing that similar attention should be given to fibre networks.

‘When we see people damaging fibre cables, we should raise an alarm,’ he said.

The forum also examined infrastructure management at the state level, with Adebayo Akande, the director-general of the Oyo State Infrastructure Management and Control Agency (OYSIMCA), highlighting efforts to address fibre theft and vandalism.

Akande advocated the use of shared pole infrastructure by operators along common routes, saying the approach could reduce unnecessary duplication, minimise damage and optimise infrastructure investment.

Eghosa Urhoghide, managing director of the Edo State Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA), called for stronger coordination between telecom operators, regulators, government institutions, road maintenance agencies and host communities.

Representing ipNX on a panel focused on ‘Policy, Governance and Regulatory Alignment,’ Segun Okuneye, deputy director, Strategic Business Initiatives, said sustainable fibre deployment would require more than capital investment and technological capacity.

He identified policy consistency, regulatory alignment, infrastructure protection and cooperation among stakeholders as critical to expanding fibre connectivity across Nigeria.

‘Achieving universal fibre connectivity requires more than deploying infrastructure; it requires sustained collaboration between operators, regulators, government agencies and host communities,’ Okuneye said.

He added that consistent enforcement of deployment standards and protection of critical infrastructure would help create a more predictable environment for investment while expanding access to high-speed broadband.

The discussions also highlighted persistent challenges facing fibre deployment in Nigeria, including vandalism, right-of-way difficulties, inconsistent deployment practices, duplication of infrastructure and limited public awareness of the importance of telecommunications networks.

Stakeholders agreed that addressing these challenges would require coordinated action across government, regulators, operators and communities.

The forum concluded with calls for stronger industry standards, increased infrastructure sharing, improved policy implementation and greater public awareness of the need to protect fibre networks.

For ipNX, the engagement reinforces its position on collaborative efforts to strengthen Nigeria’s broadband infrastructure and support the country’s transition towards a more connected digital economy.

Nigeria’s inflation story has changed dramatically over the past year. The country is no longer battling runaway price growth; it is confronting a more difficult challenge: convincing households that economic stability matters when the cost of living remains painfully high.

Average inflation fell to 15.51 percent in the first half of 2026, down from 23.47 percent a year earlier and well below the 32.77 percent recorded during the inflation shock of 2024. By any macroeconomic measure, that is substantial progress. For millions of Nigerians buying food, paying rent or commuting to work, the relief remains largely invisible.

The disconnect lies in a distinction that economic headlines rarely explain. Inflation measures how fast prices are rising, not how high prices already are. A lower inflation rate slows the pace of increase; it does not reverse the surge that has already reshaped household budgets.

This is why the optimism surrounding disinflation has collided with widespread public scepticism. Nigerians are not rejecting the data; they are responding to a different reality. The price of rice, transport fares, electricity bills and school fees remains far above pre-2024 levels, even if those prices are no longer rising as rapidly.

The arithmetic is simple. A basket of goods that rises from ?100 to ?130 during a period of 30 percent inflation does not return to ?100 when inflation falls to 15 percent. It rises again to almost ?150. The inflation rate has been cut in half, but the household is still paying nearly 50 percent more than before the original shock.

That is the gap between macroeconomic improvement and lived experience.

The improvement itself is genuine. After inflation climbed steadily from 16.73 percent in the first half of 2022 to 22.20 percent in 2023, it peaked at 32.77 percent in 2024 as petrol subsidy removal, exchange-rate reforms and higher production costs fed into consumer prices. Since then, inflation has moderated consistently, while monthly figures have become far less volatile than they were during the crisis period.

For policymakers, this marks the end of one phase of economic adjustment. The emergency of 2024 was to prevent prices from accelerating uncontrollably. The challenge now is fundamentally different: translating macroeconomic stability into stronger purchasing power.

That will require tackling the structural costs that continue to shape prices. Food inflation remains vulnerable to insecurity, poor logistics and weak agricultural productivity. Energy costs continue to burden both households and businesses. Expensive transport, unreliable infrastructure and high financing costs raise the price of producing and distributing almost everything Nigerians consume.

Monetary policy alone cannot resolve these pressures. The next phase of reform must therefore shift from stabilising prices to lowering the cost of production. Investments in transport infrastructure, reliable electricity, agricultural productivity and supply-chain efficiency will do more to improve living standards than celebrating another decline in headline inflation.

Income growth is equally important. Even a stable inflation environment offers little comfort if wages and employment fail to keep pace with the higher cost of living. Households recover purchasing power only when earnings consistently grow faster than prices.

This is also where government communication matters. Official statements that celebrate falling inflation without acknowledging the permanence of the higher price base risk widening the credibility gap between economic statistics and public experience. Nigerians are more likely to trust reform when its benefits are explained honestly rather than presented as immediate relief.

Businesses, meanwhile, stand to gain from greater price stability. More predictable costs improve planning, investment decisions and cash-flow management, while sustained disinflation could eventually create room for lower borrowing costs. But companies are still operating from a much higher cost base than before the 2024 shock, limiting how quickly those benefits can reach consumers.

The real measure of recovery must therefore go beyond a falling inflation rate. The priority now should be to strengthen incomes, reduce the cost of production, improve productivity and create an environment in which businesses can invest and expand. If these gains are sustained, lower inflation can gradually translate into stronger purchasing power, more competitive businesses and better living standards for Nigerians.

Dangote Sugar Refinery Plc has closed one of the largest capital raises in Nigerian corporate history, securing N485.9 billion after shareholders fully took up its Rights Issue, the company said in a disclosure to the Nigerian Exchange dated August 13, 2026.

The Lagos-based sugar refiner said the offer achieved a 100 percent allotment rate, capping a subscription period marked by demand that outstripped the number of shares available.

Dangote Sugar had offered 8.10 billion ordinary shares of 50 kobo each at N60 apiece to shareholders on its register as of April 20, 2026, a price that carried a 5.51 percent discount to the stock’s value on the qualification date.

The company received 14,595 valid applications covering 8.31 billion shares worth N498.57 billion, putting the subscription level at 102.6 percent, above the size of the offer. The excess, however, did not translate into extra shares for all applicants. A major shareholder pared back its request for additional stock, trimming the final allotment to match the approved offer size.

‘A total of 14,595 valid applications for 8,309,447,021 ordinary shares valued at N498,566,821,260 were received; therefore, the rights issue was 102 percent subscribed; however, following the scale-down by a shareholder, only 100 percent was allotted,’ the company said in the filing.

The scale-down cut the core shareholder’s request for additional shares by 211.53 million units, worth N12.69 billion, leaving it with 78.85 percent of the extra shares it had sought. In the end, Dangote Sugar allotted 8.10 billion shares valued at N485.88 billion – precisely matching the size of the original offer.

Breakdown of demand

The allotment data pointed to wide participation across the shareholder base. Of the total, 13,426 shareholders took up their rights in full, accounting for 6.99 billion shares worth N419.18 billion. A further 1,047 applications for partial acceptances covered 99.08 million shares valued at N5.94 billion.

Investors who chose not to exercise their rights renounced them for trading on the exchange, with 122 transactions covering 77.18 million shares worth N4.63 billion changing hands on the NGX. Separately, 8,241 shareholders applied for shares beyond their entitlement, with 935.41 million shares worth N56.12 billion ultimately allotted from renounced rights.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved the basis of allotment, according to the filing. Veritas Registrars Limited, the offer’s registrar, is expected to credit successful allottees’ Central Securities Clearing System accounts by August 14, 2026, with investors lacking CSCS accounts to receive shares via their Registrar Identification Number.

Refunds for excess subscription amounts arising from the oversubscription are due to be processed by the same date.

Dangote Sugar first flagged the fundraising plan in April, when it said it could raise up to N500 billion through the rights offering and would look to place any unsubscribed shares with other investors.

The company said at the time that the exercise ranked among the largest rights issues in Nigeria’s corporate history and that its share capital would be increased to accommodate the new shares.

The capital raise is part of a broader push by the company to strengthen its balance sheet and fund expansion plans, as Nigerian corporates increasingly turn to the equity market to shore up finances amid a high interest-rate environment.

Nigeria’s power sector has been reformed on paper more times than perhaps any infrastructure sector on the continent. Unbundling in 2005. Privatisation in 2013. A succession of Multi-Year Tariff Orders. The Power Sector Recovery Programme. The Electricity Act 2023, with its promise of a multi-tier, federated market. Most recently, the CapEx Provision Account directive, the Band A compensation regime, net billing for embedded renewables, and now a wave of state electricity markets – sixteen states, at last count – going live under their own regulatory commissions. And yet the lived experience of the Nigerian household, factory, and hospital has barely moved. That persistence, across two decades and several genuinely different policy regimes, is itself the most important data point in the sector. It tells a political economist that the binding constraint on Nigeria’s power sector was never primarily engineering, and is not primarily capital. It is institutional: a set of incentive structures, credibility deficits, and unresolved distributional conflicts that any technically sound reform must reckon with before it can work.

This article makes that case and sets out five reforms – not electrical, but institutional – that the political economy of the sector demands.

1. Treat the liquidity crisis as a credibility problem, not an accounting one

The standard account of NESI’s liquidity shortfall blames Distribution Company (DisCo) underperformance: poor collections, high losses, weak metering. That account is not wrong, but it is incomplete in a way that matters for reform design. A privatised DisCo, GenCo, or gas supplier is a rational actor operating inside a market whose rules the government has repeatedly shown itself willing to override – through tariff freezes announced without cost-reflective justification, subsidy obligations left unfunded for years at a stretch, and settlement shortfalls passed down the value chain as an implicit tax on whoever is least able to walk away. Under those conditions, underinvestment, under-collection, and gaming of the market rules are not moral failures; they are the equilibrium response to a government that cannot credibly commit to honouring its own tariff and subsidy obligations.

The CapEx Provision Account order (NERC/2026/062) was, in this sense, a genuine institutional innovation: it converts a vague expectation that DisCos reinvest into an enforceable, ring-fenced obligation with real consequences for non-compliance. But a single enforceable rule aimed at DisCos, sitting inside a market where government-side obligations remain discretionary, only partially resolves the credibility problem. The reform that would actually change behaviour across the value chain is a symmetrical one: a legally binding, judicially enforceable mechanism – ideally anchored in the Electricity Act’s provisions rather than in circular ministerial directives – that obligates the Federal Government to fund tariff shortfalls and subsidy commitments on a fixed schedule, with automatic penalties for late payment. Commitment devices work in both directions or they do not work at all.

2. Make metering a property-rights reform, not a rollout target

Nigeria’s metering gap is usually discussed as a logistics and financing problem – not enough meters procured, not enough capital for the Meter Asset Providers scheme, not enough local manufacturing capacity. All true. But from a political economy standpoint, an unmetered connection is best understood as an unassigned property right. Where consumption cannot be measured, both the DisCo and the customer have an incentive to contest, under-report, or informally negotiate the bill – and that contest, replicated across millions of connections, is what produces estimated billing disputes, revenue leakage, and the collapse of trust that makes cost-reflective tariffs politically toxic.

Local meter manufacturing matters here not only for foreign-exchange savings but because it changes the political economy of the rollout: a domestically produced, domestically serviced meter is harder to politicise as an extractive import and easier to defend on the floor of a state assembly. Reform should therefore pair accelerated metering finance with an explicit local-content floor for meter manufacturing, and – critically – should treat metering completion as a precondition for, not a consequence of, further tariff adjustments in any band. Asking consumers to accept cost-reflective pricing before they can verify their own consumption is asking them to accept a contract they cannot audit.

3. Give NERC and NISO independence that survives a change of minister

Regulatory independence in Nigeria’s power sector has always been independence by convention rather than by design – real when a commissioner is assertive, illusory when political pressure is applied through appointments, budget approval, or informal instruction. NERC’s dissolution of the KAEDC board under Order NERC/2026/086 is a useful test case: it demonstrated that the Commission can act decisively against a non-performing DisCo when it chooses to. The open question is whether that decisiveness is a durable institutional capacity or a one-off exercise of will by the current leadership. The same question applies with even more force to the Nigerian Independent System Operator’s (NISO) relationship with the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Company (NBET): an unbundled market cannot function if the entity responsible for dispatch and settlement remains financially and administratively dependent on a counterparty whose interests it is meant to arbitrate.

The reform that would make independence durable is structural, not personal: ring-fenced, statutorily protected funding for NERC and NISO that does not pass through annual budgetary negotiation with the executive; fixed-term, for-cause-only removal protections for commissioners, genuinely enforced; and a public, reasoned-order requirement for every major directive, so that regulatory decisions are reviewable by courts and by the public on their merits rather than defensible only by reference to who currently holds office.

4. Manage decentralisation as a coordination problem, not a devolution event

The Electricity Act 2023’s permission for states to establish their own electricity markets is, in principle, a sound subsidiarity reform: it lets states closer to distribution-level problems regulate distribution-level outcomes. But sixteen states going live with independent regulatory commissions inside a single national grid, without a settled framework for cross-border wheeling, harmonised technical standards, and dispute resolution between federal and state regulators, creates exactly the coordination failure that federal systems are prone to – a race to the bottom on tariffs to court political favour in one state, undermining cost-reflectivity in the interconnected market as a whole. The Senate Committee on Power and NERC leadership have both signalled they see this risk, which is encouraging, but signalling is not the same as a binding protocol.

What is needed is a harmonisation instrument – agreed now, before more states transition – that fixes minimum technical and market-conduct standards below which no state regulator may go, establishes a mandatory interstate settlement and dispute mechanism with NERC as arbiter of last resort, and requires new state markets to publish their tariff methodology against the same cost-reflectivity benchmark used nationally. Decentralisation without harmonisation does not produce fifty-six competing solutions; it produces one national market quietly re-fragmented by regulatory arbitrage.

5. Commission the political economy studies the technical audits cannot replace

NERC’s new Guidelines on Technical Audit of the Transmission System, and its 6.5 percent loss-reduction target for TCN, are necessary engineering discipline. But a technical audit will tell you where losses occur, not why a DisCo has persistently failed for a decade despite three changes of core investor, or why vandalism of transmission infrastructure recurs in the same corridors regardless of security spending, or why industrial consumers continue to self-generate at three to four times the grid tariff rather than reintegrate even where supply has notionally improved. Those are questions about incentive structures, local political settlements, and trust – the proper domain of political economy analysis, not load-flow modelling.

A DisCo like KAEDC, now under a dissolved board, is a case in point: replacing management without understanding the ownership, financing, and local political incentives that produced a decade of underperformance risks reproducing the same failure under a new name in three years. Regulators and the National Assembly’s power committees should routinely commission independent political economy studies alongside technical and financial audits whenever a utility is placed under intervention, and should treat their findings as a precondition for approving any new core investor or restructuring plan.

The common thread

Each of these five reforms addresses the same underlying problem from a different angle: Nigeria’s power sector will not stabilise through better engineering or more capital alone, because its dysfunction is substantially the product of actors – government, DisCos, GenCos, state regulators, even consumers – behaving rationally within a set of institutions that do not currently reward cooperation, transparency, or long-horizon investment. The reforms that will matter most over the next several years are the ones that change what it is rational to do inside the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry: symmetrical, enforceable commitment devices; metering as a property-rights foundation; regulatory independence that survives a change of administration; a harmonisation protocol for decentralisation; and a habit of asking why, institutionally, before asking how, technically. Nigeria has no shortage of technically literate reform documents. What it has lacked is reform that takes its own political economy seriously enough to design around it.

There is a peculiar irony at the heart of African development finance. Every year, governments and development partners scour the globe for capital to build roads, finance small businesses and grow local industries. Meanwhile, sitting quietly in pension funds across the continent is a pool of capital estimated at somewhere between $1.8 trillion and $2 trillion. Almost none of it is working for the continent’s real economy. This was the issue for discussions during session 6 of the 7th Annual Africa Pension Supervisors Association (APSA) Conference, held in Accra, Ghana, on 30th-31st July 2026. Most African pension assets remain parked in sovereign bonds and bank deposits. Even where regulation permits pension funds to allocate up to 10% or more to private capital, actual allocations in many markets sit around 1%. The capital is there. It simply is not moving. African pension regulators, trustees and fund managers can no longer afford to ignore the issue.

A capital retention problem, not a capital shortage problem

For years, the standard narrative has been that Africa suffers from a capital shortage, that businesses, infrastructure and climate projects go unfunded because investors elsewhere are unwilling to take the risk. This narrative is incomplete because Africa’s challenge is not the absence of capital; it is the absence of structures that allow the continent’s own capital to find its way into the real economy. Though investment eventually trickles back to the continent, the broader benefits of that capital, the jobs created by fund managers, the fees reinvested locally, the regulatory oversight, and the legal recourse when something goes wrong all stay offshore. Pension regulators lose visibility into how members’ savings are governed. Africa exports not just capital but the entire ecosystem that capital builds around itself.

Domiciliation: the structural fix hiding in plain sight

Domiciliation, anchoring the investment vehicles that receive pension capital within African jurisdictions themselves, under African regulatory supervision, with African fund managers, African legal recourse and African economic multipliers, is the solution that is staring us in the face. The deeper argument for domiciliation goes beyond fund structuring. When pension capital flows into private equity, venture capital, private credit and infrastructure vehicles domiciled at home, it sets off a virtuous cycle: businesses grow, formal employment rises, wages generate more pension contributions, and that larger pool of domestic capital reinvests into the same asset classes. Over time, countries with deep domestic institutional investors shift from importing capital to generating it. That shift is, in the truest sense, how economic sovereignty gets built.

Where the structural work has been done, the results speak for themselves. In Uganda, the pension regulator is actively scaling allocations into locally domiciled and regional vehicles, working alongside institutions such as National Social Security Fund (NSSF), Uganda Retirement Benefits Regulatory (URBRA) and the Ugandan Capital Markets Authority to build oversight clarity from the ground up. In Ghana, the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA) has pioneered a domestic capital mobilisation framework that permits pension funds to allocate up to 25% of assets under management to private funds, an active demonstration that supervisors can enable investment and protect member savings simultaneously. In Zambia, a locally domiciled, Swedfund-anchored debt platform is channeling savings into domestic infrastructure while offering above-sovereign returns. None of these are pilots. They are proof that the model works, and a blueprint the rest of the continent can adapt.

What regulators can do, starting now

Domiciliation reduces risk by bringing oversight home, denominating investments in local or hedged currency, and putting dispute resolution under familiar legal frameworks. What it requires from regulators is deliberate architecture: clarity on which fund structures and asset classes qualify for pension investment; governance standards covering licensing, valuation and disclosure; controlled pilots with guardrails before broad rollout; and investment in trustee education so fiduciaries can evaluate alternatives with confidence. This is where APSA has a role to play that no single national regulator can play alone. By enabling regional coordination, common standards, peer learning, and cross-border recognition of well-governed vehicles, APSA can shorten the distance between ‘policy framework’ and ‘actual allocation’ for the markets still finding their footing. Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria each represent a distinct opportunity: Ethiopia’s rapidly growing pension pool needs the right frameworks built early; Kenya’s mature regulatory infrastructure positions it to lead East Africa’s channelling of institutional capital into regional vehicles; and Nigeria’s vast, still largely untapped pension pool, paired with one of the continent’s youngest populations and largest infrastructure deficits, represents perhaps the single largest opportunity on the continent to convert domestic savings into domestic growth.

Building economic sovereignty, a call to action

The capital exists. The tools exist. The need for jobs, for infrastructure, for climate-resilient enterprise, is undisputed. What has been missing is the regulatory will to connect the three. The decision-makers from about 20 African countries, capable of closing that gap, were in the room at this year’s APSA Conference. The timing and the evidence both suggest the moment to act is now.

Nigeria’s central bank is turning to a market it locked individuals out of seven years ago as a fresh line of defense against an anticipated wave of election-related spending.

The Central Bank of Nigeria has reversed a 2019 restriction that confined its Open Market Operations bills, which are among the highest-yielding, lowest-risk instruments in the naira market, to banks and select institutional players.

Under the revised framework, individuals, corporates and non-bank financial institutions can now participate in both primary and secondary OMO markets, bidding and settling transactions through Deposit Money Banks.

The reversal is one part of a broader liquidity overhaul. The CBN has also eased restrictions on banks’ access to its Standing Lending Facility, or Discount Window, removing curbs tied to participation in foreign exchange transactions and primary auctions of government securities.

One restriction remains in place: institutions that tap the Discount Window still cannot bid in OMO auctions on the same day.

Ayodele Akinwunmi, chief economist at United Capital Plc, said the latest measures represent an aggressive liquidity management strategy by the CBN ahead of election-related fiscal spending.

He said the CBN’s aggressive liquidity mop-up strategy is timely, particularly ahead of the expected increase in election-related campaign spending and the substantial expansion in broad money supply (M3) observed in the market.

According to him, the approach is preferable to an outright increase in the Monetary Policy Rate (MPR), as it allows the CBN to address excess liquidity more directly while avoiding an unnecessarily broad tightening of monetary conditions.

Akinwunmi said while the liquidity mop-up may initially exert some upward pressure on interbank money-market rates, subsequent moderation in rates is expected to be gradual rather than drastic.

‘This should enable the CBN to maintain effective control of system liquidity and anchor inflation expectations without imposing excessive pressure on economic activity and credit conditions,’ he said.

He added that the latest OMO policy would create an additional outlet for investors in the financial market.

The data illustrates just how much the banking system’s liquidity position has already shifted. Banks’ use of the Standing Lending Facility collapsed to N3.52 trillion in July 2026, down from N65.53 trillion in July 2025 and N75.18 trillion in July 2024, and even below the N11.16 trillion recorded in July 2023. It remains only slightly under the N5.77 trillion posted in July 2022.

The mirror image of that decline shows up in the Standing Deposit Facility, where banks park excess liquidity with the CBN rather than borrow from it. SDF utilization surged to N595.37 trillion in July 2026 from N2.32 trillion in July 2022 – a roughly 257-fold increase – and jumped 646 percent from N79.85 trillion in July 2025 alone. On a single-day basis, deposits rose 49.39 percent to a three-month high of N6.14 trillion on Thursday, up from N4.11 trillion the day before, a level last matched on May 29, 2026, when SDF hit N6.10 trillion.

The reversal in positioning is stark. In July 2024, banks drew N75.18 trillion through the SLF against just N10.35 trillion parked in the SDF. Two years later, the relationship has flipped entirely: N3.52 trillion borrowed versus N595.37 trillion deposited.

The CBN cautioned that the SDF figure reflects utilization over the period rather than a single point-in-time balance, but said the scale of the increase underscores how much more banks are now using the facility to place liquidity with the apex bank rather than draw from it.

A Return to Orthodoxy

Okey Umeano, acting director of the Financial Markets Department, said the changes followed a review of ‘existing market practices and developments in the foreign exchange, money, and fixed-income markets,’ alongside a broader assessment of the frameworks governing the Standing Lending Facility, Tenored Repo Operations and OMO participation.

Ayokunle Olubunmi, head of Financial Institutions Ratings at Agusto and Co., framed the moves as part of a longer arc back toward conventional central banking. ‘This is part of the return to orthodox monetary system,’ he said. ‘Recall that these restrictions were not there before the last FX crisis.’

Alongside the OMO and Discount Window changes, the CBN lifted its suspension of Tenored Repo Operations, restoring the bank’s ability to conduct repos across tenors of four to 90 days, a move it said would support liquidity management, improve money-market functioning and strengthen monetary policy transmission. For banks, tenored repos add a channel for managing liquidity beyond the overnight market and could ease reliance on shorter-term funding.

What Wider Access Could Cost

Analysts at Quest Merchant Bank Limited said the reforms should deepen activity across the money and fixed-income markets and signal growing confidence in FX stability, reserve adequacy and broader market conditions.

The analysts however said broader investor participation could accelerate yield compression over time, potentially trimming treasury income for banks and moderating the carry appeal of naira assets.

The reforms, therefore, mark a broader shift in the CBN’s liquidity-management framework, coming at a time when banks are making far greater use of the deposit facility and considerably less use of the lending window.

About a year ago, I wrote from Brasília about the privilege of accompanying the Board of Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX Group) to meet His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR. 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 the 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 ?30 trillion. today, Mr President, that figure is ?160 trillion. By the end of this year, with the listings that we are seeing in our market, we expect that figure to rise to ?230 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 skeptic 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, the 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 a sentiment. It revealed preference at scale. That is what an admitted variable looks like: measured, priced, trusted. The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, 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 Securities and Exchange Commission 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 (Dr) 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, and 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 toward 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.