Economy

FG willing to work with private sector to revive economy, says Buhari

By
2 Mins read
0
Share

President Muhammadu Buhari has congratulated the management of the Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX) on the successful conversion of the defunct Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) into a public company.

The President spoke, yesterday, at the NGX virtual launch of the ‘Stock Africa Is Made Of’ campaign to unveil the exchange’s new identity as well as amplify NGX Group’s positioning and commitment to the African financial markets.

Delivering his remarks before sounding of the closing gong, the President assured Nigerians that the Federal Government would continue to engage and collaborate with the private sector to improve lives and transform the country’s economy.

He affirmed that the exchange has continued to play its part in nation-building by stimulating economic growth and providing a platform for businesses to raise capital.

He said: “Let me start by congratulating Nigerian Exchange Group Plc on its recently-concluded demutualisation, which is the first in the country. I recall signing the demutualisation Bill in August 2018, paving the way for the long-awaited demutualisation of the then NSE.

“It is my pleasure to join you all at this important event organised to amplify the positive narrative about Africa and its great potentials. The occasion of the demutualisation of the NSE is yet a proud moment for all of us. Indeed, all Nigerians deserve congratulations for this feat as it is the beginning of a new era for the capital market.

“The exchange continues to play its part in nation building by stimulating economic growth and providing a platform for businesses and individuals to save and raise capital through innovation, diversified products and services, enabling regulatory environments and much more.”

Also speaking at the event, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, described the demutualisation of the exchange as a landmark event that generated intense global interest.

According to her, the exercise is critical for the development of the Nigerian capital market (NCM) because it would enable the exchange to build new strategic partnerships, achieve capital raising flexibility and improve its operational efficiency.

She said the transition is expected to deepen the investor base of the exchange as it unlocks opportunities for domestic and institutional investors to create significant economic value by bringing the capital market in line with prevalent international practice and standards resulting in enhanced governance.

NGX group, Abimbola Ogunbanjo, assured that the NGX group is better positioned to support sustainable economic development, provide a wide range of services including listing and trading of securities, licensing, data solution and regulation, real estate among others.

“Our story is one birthed from resilience, collaboration, determination and continued focus on our vision. A true Africa story! With demutualisation, NGX Group is positioned to enable strong economic growth and contribute its quota to the development of the Nigerian capital market, and the African Continent.”

On his part, the Group Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, NGX Group, Oscar Onyema said: “At Nigerian Exchange Group Plc, we have the vision to be the premier exchange hub for Nigerian businesses and for the wider African economy, building on the strong reputation and corporate governance the NSE has established over the years.

“As we march bravely into the NGX era, we look forward to impact and create partnerships that will unlock value for our stakeholders, whilst improving the state of the Nigerian economy. It is a period to reinforce on the global stage, our great African pedigree and the ‘Stock Africa Is Made of.”

   

0
Share

About author
Time Nigeria is a general interest Magazine with its headquarters in Abuja, the nation’s Capital.
Articles
Related posts
Abuja FileDevelopmentEconomyEnergyFinanceInside LagosOpinionPerspective

The Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: Why Capital Still Fails to Become Infrastructure

By
6 Mins read
  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. The Missing Middle  This is the Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: the institutional architecture that sits between capital that wants to move and infrastructure that needs building, and whose incompleteness explains far more of the global infrastructure gap than any shortfall in committed funds. It consists of project preparation facilities able to fund feasibility and structuring work before commercial viability has been proven. Transaction advisers capable of building deals that satisfy development mandates and commercial return thresholds at once, rather than treating the two as separate constituencies to be managed sequentially. Risk-sharing and guarantee instruments that convert political, regulatory and currency risk into something a commercial balance sheet can underwrite. Aggregation platforms that bundle smaller, individually sub-scale projects into portfolios large enough to justify institutional transaction costs. Standardised documentation that reduces the bespoke legal cost of every new deal. And coordination across ministries, regulators and financiers robust enough that a technically sound project does not die in bureaucratic sequencing after the money has already been found. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is missing is their assembly into a coherent system, deliberately funded and institutionally accountable, rather than scattered across donor-funded pilots that end when the grant does. The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. The Global Comparison  Mature markets solved this problem gradually and mostly invisibly, through decades of institution-building that predates the current infrastructure conversation: specialist project finance units inside banks, standardised PPP frameworks, established regulatory playbooks, deep benches of transaction lawyers and engineers who move between deals rather than between one-off assignments. Emerging and frontier markets are not being asked to meet a lower standard. They are being asked to meet the same standard without having built the same machinery, and then being told, when deals fail to close, that the problem is insufficient funding….
Abuja FileCover StoryDevelopmentEconomyEntrepreneurshipNewsTelecommunication

NCC, Maida’s Leadership Take Centre Stage as Nigeria Celebrates GSM Revolution

By
4 Mins read
  By Abdulrahman Aliagan,  As Nigeria prepares to celebrate more than two decades of the GSM revolution, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)…
Cover StoryDevelopmentEconomyEnergyEntrepreneurshipFeaturesOil and GasOpinionPerspectiveSecurity

The Missing Middle of Productive Use of Energy: Why Electricity Access Is Not the Same as Economic Power

By
6 Mins read
  By Chidi Nwafor The transformer is energised on a Tuesday morning. Engineers make a final check, close the switch, and the…
Stay on the loop!

Subscribe to our latest news.

Leave a Reply

WP2Social Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com