Roughly twenty African countries now run some version of a sovereign wealth fund. Collectively they oversee a slice of a global sovereign investment industry that has swollen to well over USD 14 trillion, though Africa’s share of that pool remains stubbornly under one percent — a reminder of how thin the continent’s fiscal surpluses are relative to the Gulf states or Norway.

Yet within that modest total, a handful of funds have begun to do something that matters more than raw size: they have started to compound. They have built governance structures that outlast the ministers who created them, they publish numbers that can be checked, and they are, increasingly, delivering returns that would not embarrass an endowment manager in London or Toronto.

What separates these funds from the many African sovereign vehicles that remain, in effect, government slush accounts with a fancier name? The answer turns out to have less to do with how much oil, gas or diamonds a country has, and rather more to do with four unglamorous things: independence from the treasury, discipline about withdrawals, a genuine investment mandate rather than a political one, and transparency that is enforced by habit rather than by law alone.

The scoreboard that keeps everyone honest

Any serious conversation about sovereign fund performance in 2026 now runs, sooner or later, through the Governance, Sustainability and Resilience Scoreboard published annually by the research firm Global SWF.

The seventh edition of the index, released at the end of June, assessed 25 separate governance, sustainability and resilience criteria across the world’s 200 largest state-owned investors, which between them manage some USD 34 trillion.

Only nine institutions worldwide earned a perfect score. One of them is African: Nigeria’s Sovereign Investment Authority, universally known by its acronym NSIA. It sits alongside NBIM of Norway, Singapore’s Temasek, Australia’s Future Fund and Canada’s La Caisse — genuine company for a fund capitalised with a comparatively modest USD 1 billion in seed money fifteen years ago.

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It is worth dwelling on that fact before moving to the numbers, because it reframes the entire debate. The story of Africa’s best sovereign funds is no longer a story about scale. It is a story about institutional design.

Nigeria’s NSIA: the outlier that proves the rule

NSIA has become, almost by default, the reference case for what an African sovereign fund can achieve when insulated properly from political interference. Established by an Act of the National Assembly in 2011 and structured around three ring-fenced pools — a Stabilisation Fund, a Future Generations Fund and a Nigeria Infrastructure Fund — the Authority has now posted thirteen consecutive years of earnings and asset growth, a run that has taken its net asset value from roughly USD 2 billion in seed and government contributions to USD 3.4 billion, a compound annual growth rate of close to 11%.

The 2025 numbers, presented in Abuja earlier this year, show total assets rising 10.9% year-on-year to nearly 4.91 trillion naira, driven by fresh capital contributions and core earnings of 478.8 billion naira.

Strip out the headline naira figures, which were flattered in 2024 by a weak currency and then normalised in 2025 as the naira stabilised, and the underlying story is one of patient, diversified asset allocation rather than one-off windfalls.

The Future Generations Fund returned 15.44% against a policy benchmark of US inflation plus four percentage points — an outperformance of more than 800 basis points. The Nigeria Infrastructure Fund returned 14.55% against its own inflation-linked target, and the Stabilisation Fund, which by design holds the most liquid and conservative assets, still managed 9.27% against a target pegged to US CPI alone.

Management has been candid, too, about the parts of the balance sheet that look less flattering on paper. Pre-tax return on equity fell from 73.4% in 2023 to 57.8% in 2024 once the currency effects are stripped out, and headline profit for 2025 dropped sharply once the one-off foreign exchange gains of the previous year washed out of the base.

NSIA’s leadership has framed this, reasonably, as a return to a more normal earnings pattern rather than a sign of deterioration — the kind of frank public accounting that is itself part of what earns a fund credibility with outside analysts.

Three structural choices explain why NSIA keeps outperforming both its African peers and its own modest starting capital.

First, the tripartite fund structure separates money that might be needed tomorrow from money that will not be touched for a generation, which allows each pool to be invested according to its actual time horizon rather than a single, compromised risk appetite.

Second, the Authority has been unusually aggressive about co-investment and blended finance, pairing its own capital with partners such as Japan’s development agency JICA on start-up financing, and with private investors on healthcare infrastructure, including a diagnostics and cancer-treatment network under its Medserve platform that is expanding well beyond its original three centres.

Third, and most important, NSIA has resisted becoming a piggy bank. Where other African funds have been raided during fiscal emergencies, Nigeria’s has largely been left alone to compound — a political discipline that is rarer on the continent than any investment technique.

Botswana’s cautionary counter-example

No feature on African sovereign funds would be complete without Botswana’s Pula Fund, and it earns its place here as much as a warning as a model. Established in 1993 to preserve diamond export revenues for future generations, the Pula Fund was for years held up as the African gold standard: professionally run out of the central bank, invested conservatively in global equities and bonds, and governed under the same Santiago Principles that underpin best practice worldwide.

But a fund is only as disciplined as the government that owns it, and Botswana’s fiscal position has deteriorated as the diamond industry, hit hard by falling global demand and competition from lab-grown stones, has passed its peak contribution to the economy.

Repeated withdrawals to plug budget and balance-of-payments gaps have shrunk the fund from roughly USD 1.8 billion in 2018 to a reported USD 142 million by August last year, according to Bank of Botswana data cited by regional media — a startling collapse for what was once southern Africa’s flagship savings vehicle. The economy contracted an estimated 3 percent in 2024, with the IMF projecting a further contraction into 2025, and diamonds still account for roughly 80% of exports and a third of fiscal revenue, leaving Gaborone dangerously exposed to a single commodity cycle.

Botswana’s response has been to launch an entirely new, more ambitious fund, tasked not only with investing surplus revenue but with restructuring loss-making state enterprises that have required repeated bailouts.

Officials say only investment returns, not capital, will be drawn from the new vehicle. Whether that discipline holds where the old fund’s did not is the open question — and it underlines the central lesson of this entire sector: a well-designed mandate is worth little without a legal or political firewall that keeps a finance ministry from treating the fund as a current account.

Rwanda’s Agaciro: small, deliberate, and citizen-owned

If NSIA demonstrates what independence and diversified mandates can achieve at reasonable scale, Rwanda’s Agaciro Development Fund shows what discipline can achieve almost regardless of scale. Launched in 2012 following a national dialogue chaired by President Paul Kagame, Agaciro — the Kinyarwanda word for dignity — remains unusual globally for having been seeded not by oil or mineral windfalls but by voluntary contributions from Rwandan citizens, the diaspora and the private sector, later supplemented by government transfers.

The fund has grown steadily to around USD 400 million in assets, modest by continental standards but run with a consistency that shows up in the governance data: Agaciro scored 48% on the 2026 Global SWF assessment, respectable for a fund of its size, with particular strength on governance criteria.

Roughly 70% of the portfolio sits in equities, with the balance in government securities, a relatively aggressive stance for a fund explicitly designed to reduce Rwanda’s dependence on aid and donor goodwill.

Management has signalled ambitions to grow the fund toward USD 1 billion partly through more infrastructure and co-investment activity, including in data centres and power generation to support the country’s push into digital services.

What Agaciro offers that larger, resource-backed funds cannot is a genuine political constituency. Because part of its capital came from citizens rather than the state alone, withdrawing from it carries a reputational cost that goes beyond fiscal arithmetic — a subtle but real form of accountability that has, so far, kept the fund from becoming a target for emergency raids.

Angola’s FSDEA: proof that redemption is possible

Perhaps the most dramatic turnaround on the continent belongs to Angola’s Fundo Soberano de Angola. Established in 2011 with an initial USD 5 billion endowment, FSDEA spent its early years mired in allegations of self-dealing and opaque investment practices under the fund’s first chairman, who happened to be the son of the then president — a textbook illustration of the governance failures that give African sovereign funds their poor global reputation.

Since 2017, under President João Lourenço’s anti-corruption drive, the fund has been rebuilt almost from scratch. A new board, greater disclosure and a transparency score of eight out of 10 from the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute have accompanied a genuine financial recovery: FSDEA posted record net profit in 2023, more than tripling the prior year’s result, and has more recently reported annual returns in the region of 10%.

Armando Manuel, who returned to lead the fund in late 2023 after helping launch it more than a decade earlier and later serving stints at the IMF and World Bank, has been explicit that rebuilding trust meant insisting investment decisions no longer flow through the presidency.

The fund, now with roughly $4 billion under management, has diversified into regional infrastructure, including a USD 1 billion commitment to the Lobito Corridor rail project linking Angola, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — a bet that connectivity, not just financial assets, is where long-term African sovereign capital can do the most good.

FSDEA’s case matters because it demolishes the idea that governance failure is a permanent condition. A fund that was, ten years ago, a byword for cronyism now scores among the better-governed institutions on the continent, according to Global SWF’s most recent assessment.

The lesson is less about any particular investment technique than about political will: reform happened because a president decided it should, and was sustained because the new leadership treated the Santiago Principles as a floor rather than a public-relations exercise.

Ethiopia, Egypt and the new generation of “strategic” funds

Not every fast-growing African sovereign vehicle fits the classic savings-fund mould, and the newest entrants complicate the performance conversation in useful ways. Ethiopia Investment Holdings, barely two years old, has already amassed an estimated USD 150 billion in assets under management by consolidating some thirty state-owned enterprises, including Ethiopian Airlines, under one holding structure — making it, at least on paper, the largest sovereign fund on the continent.

Its mandate is less about generating portfolio returns than about modernising the management of state assets, entering partnerships such as a solar power joint venture with the UAE’s Masdar, and preparing to launch the Ethiopian Stock Exchange.

Whether EIH’s headline asset figure translates into anything resembling Norway-style investment performance is a question that will only be answerable once its accounts mature and its state-enterprise holdings are independently valued — a caution worth noting given how differently “strategic” funds like Ethiopia’s, Gabon’s FGIS or Angola’s FSDEA are constructed compared with pure savings vehicles like Botswana’s.

Egypt’s Sovereign Fund, known as TSFE, sits somewhere in between. Established in 2018 to monetise underused state assets, the fund has been expanding rapidly, with plans to absorb hundreds more state enterprises and to launch dedicated sub-funds for tourism, healthcare, financial services and infrastructure, alongside an Africa-focused vehicle.

Its 40% GSR score reflects a fund still building out its governance architecture even as its balance sheet grows quickly, a reminder that scale and institutional maturity do not always arrive together.

TSFE’s approach — attracting private co-investors into state assets rather than accumulating a traditional savings pool — mirrors a broader shift among newer African funds toward what practitioners call “strategic” investing: less concerned with hoarding foreign exchange reserves, more concerned with catalysing private capital into infrastructure, healthcare and industry at home.

Ghana’s petroleum funds: small, rules-bound, and quietly effective

Ghana offers a smaller but instructive case of rules-based discipline. Its two petroleum funds, the Ghana Heritage Fund and Ghana Stabilisation Fund, were created in 2011 under a Petroleum Revenue Management Act that legally mandates the split of oil revenue between the two vehicles and requires regular public reporting by the Bank of Ghana.

Together, they held about USD 1.42 billion at the end of the first half of 2025, with the Heritage Fund’s closing book value alone reaching USD 1.36 billion on the back of steady investment income.

The framework has not been immune to political pressure — recent amendments to the governing law have loosened some spending restrictions in favour of infrastructure financing, prompting warnings from resource-governance watchdogs about the risk of diversion into short-term political priorities.

But the underlying architecture, with parliamentary oversight and a published, auditable track record stretching back over a decade, remains one of the more transparent among Africa’s commodity-financed funds, and offers a template smaller producing nations continue to study.

Senegal’s FONSIS and the diversification play

Senegal’s Fund for Strategic Investments, known as FONSIS, illustrates a different route to relevance: rather than accumulating a single large pool of liquid assets, it operates through five specialised subsidiaries spanning healthcare, agriculture, real assets and private equity, and has built roughly USD 1 billion in assets under management since its creation in 2012.

Its model — smaller, sector-specific investment vehicles feeding off a central sovereign platform — has influenced how several newer West African funds are being designed, including Guinea’s planned USD 1 billion fund, expected to launch by mid-2026, built around revenue from the giant Simandou iron-ore project.

The common threads

Pull these case studies apart and a pattern emerges that has little to do with geology and everything to do with institutional plumbing. The funds that perform best over time — NSIA above all, but also the reformed FSDEA and the disciplined, citizen-anchored Agaciro — share a few features.

Their investment decisions are taken by professional boards operating at arm’s length from the finance ministry, not by presidencies or cabinets. Their withdrawal rules are either legally binding or politically costly to break.

They publish enough detail, consistently enough, that independent assessors such as Global SWF and the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds can actually verify performance rather than take it on faith. And, critically, they have all, at some point, survived a moment when a government under fiscal pressure was tempted to raid them — and didn’t, or did and then rebuilt.

Botswana’s Pula Fund shows what happens when that last safeguard fails even after decades of good practice.

Angola’s FSDEA shows that failure is not necessarily terminal. Ethiopia and Egypt show that scale can now be built astonishingly fast when a government consolidates state assets under a single sovereign umbrella, though the jury is still out on whether size will translate into the kind of risk-adjusted returns that older, more conservatively run funds have delivered.

For a continent long defined in this space by extractive-industry dependence and governance scandals, that is a meaningfully different story than the one still told about it in most boardrooms outside Africa.

The best-performing funds are not the ones sitting on the biggest reserves of oil, diamonds or iron ore. They are the ones that have figured out how to say no to their own governments — and have been allowed, by design or by hard-won reform, to keep saying it.

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The spur is volatility in retail petrol prices, which have rocketed more than sixfold since Bola Tinubu abruptly terminated decades-old fuel subsidies on his inauguration day in May 2023, and the promise the move holds for the affordability of the product, and other fuels.

Retail petrol has been defenceless against external pressures that have driven it to extreme price levels in Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer, since the US-Iran war started in February, up by 22.7%.

It continues to weigh on consumer budgets so profoundly that regulators are now stepping up consultations more tenaciously to introduce reforms to ease the pressure on businesses and households.

In August, the idea of a crude oil and gas swap system – that pairs domestic producers up with refineries with a view to compressing input costs and delivery time – was discussed at a meeting between the midstream sector’s top watchdog and the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) in Abuja.

“How the swap works is that I have an obligation somewhere and I am close to an export facility. Somebody else has an obligation inland and his own (facility) is close to a domestic offtaker,” said Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, the CEO of NUPRC, which is leading the course.

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Real gross domestic product (GDP) grew 4.43% year on year in the three months through June, accelerating from 3.89% in the first quarter, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

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The investment, announced at the 25th NOG Energy Week Conference and Exhibition on 8 July, marks ExxonMobil’s return to drilling operations in Nigeria after nearly a decade, with its last drilling campaign in the country conducted in 2016. Oritsemeyiwa Eyesan, chief executive of the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), described the announcement as a significant development for the country’s upstream oil sector, noting that Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria, an ExxonMobil affiliate, had not drilled in Nigeria since that campaign.

The project falls within Oil Mining Lease 138 and involves on-block operations at the Usan field, which Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria operates under a production sharing contract alongside the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, with Chevron, TotalEnergies, and Nexen, a subsidiary of the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, as co-venture partners.

The Usan field was discovered in 2002 and developed in water depths of 2,400 feet using a floating production, storage, and offloading vessel and 42 subsea wells, comprising 23 production wells and 19 water and gas injection wells connected to a two-million-barrel-capacity FPSO. First oil was produced in February 2012, when the field had a gross production capacity of up to 180,000 barrels per day.

The investment comes as Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest crude producers and an OPEC member, seeks to reverse years of declining output through regulatory reform and renewed investment. The African country has faced persistent challenges, including oil theft, pipeline vandalism, and underinvestment, prompting the government to accelerate project approvals and encourage fresh capital inflows into the sector.

In a separate development, the NUPRC issued petroleum prospecting licenses to successful applicants from the 2022/2023 Mini Bid Round and the 2024 Nigeria Licensing Round. A total of 12 companies received 19 licenses covering deep offshore, shallow water, and continental shelf areas, with Broron Energy, Petroli Energy Marketing and Supply, Sahara Deepwater Resources, and Tulcan Energy among those receiving awards, underscoring the breadth of opportunities on offer in Nigeria’s licensing rounds.

Apart from its big-ticket investment in Nigeria, Exxon, in partnership with QatarEnergy, has entered Cyprus as well through a deal signed with the Mediterranean country’s government. Prospects of two offshore gas fields have been declared marketable, a milestone in efforts by the ‌East Mediterranean island to develop its energy reserves.

The “Declaration of Marketability” signed in Nicosia has advanced a project central to the region’s ambitions to supply more gas to Europe.

ExxonMobil has reported discoveries in two offshore blocks in fields known as Glaucus and ⁠Pegasus. As per the company and the Cypriot officials, the combined discoveries could be between eight and nine trillion cubic feet.

The “Declaration of Marketability,” according to the Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides, “represents a major step towards establishing the Eastern Mediterranean as a credible alternative energy corridor for Europe.”

“Some additional drilling on the two offshore fields would be required before moving into the front-end engineering and ‌design (FEED),” the administration added further.

“A final investment decision is anticipated around 2029 and production in 2033,” remarked ExxonMobil Vice President and head of global expansion John Ardill.

QatarEnergy signed a preliminary deal with ExxonMobil and Egypt’s government in May 2026 to study ⁠the development and commercialization of gas discoveries in Cyprus using Egypt’s existing gas and LNG infrastructure.

“The reserves from Pegasus and Glaucus would probably be ⁠delivered with a pipeline tie-back to Egypt,” Ardill concluded.

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The purchases come amid more oil shipments transiting the Strait of Hormuz, following the US-Iran ceasefire earlier in June 2026. However, the weak demand in Asia has freed up more Middle Eastern crude supply for other regions.

“Dangote imported one cargo of Umm Lulu crude and another ‌of either Das ⁠or Murban ⁠crude in June. The refinery receives about five to seven crude cargoes a month from Nigeria’s state-owned NNPC, benefiting from lower shipping costs, but has previously said it requires about 13 to 15 cargoes per month,” reported Reuters.

As per the Kpler data, the Dangote refinery, which has turned into a major exporter of middle distillates ‌to Europe due to fuel shortages linked ⁠to disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, also sourced up to 65,000 bpd of Libyan crude in May.

The two UAE cargoes, confirmed by S&P Global Commodity Insights on June 29, will arrive at Dangote’s Lekki facility in the coming weeks. Since the beginning of its commercial operations in early 2024, the facility has drawn its crude almost exclusively from Nigeria, the United States, and other Atlantic Basin suppliers. In 2025, approximately 70% of its imports originated from Nigeria under the naira-for-crude arrangement the African country’s federal government struck with the Dangote Group. The remaining 30% was split primarily between US grades.

In 2026, the refinery diversified its import options further, receiving cargoes from Angola, Ghana, Libya, and Guyana alongside domestic Nigerian supply. The UAE purchase marks the first time any Middle Eastern crude has been added to that growing roster.

The import by Dangote also serves as a double delight for the UAE’s crude grades, as the development, along with the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, has brought the commodities back into the global supply picture at competitive prices. Benchmark UAE Murban crude was trading at approximately USD 66.40 per barrel on June 26, nearly USD 6 below pre-Iran war levels, making Middle Eastern grades an increasingly attractive option for a merchant refinery trying to widen the range of crude it can profitably process.

CEO David Bird, who joined Dangote in 2025 after two years running Oman’s Duqm refinery, wants to more than triple the number of crude grades the facility can process from approximately the current capacity of 40 to more than 120 in the coming years. The UAE’s key export grades, including Murban, Das Blend, Umm Lulu, and Upper Zakum, are broadly compatible with the refinery’s distillation unit configuration and would add significant flexibility to a facility currently running at full nameplate capacity of 650,000 barrels per day.

“The naira-for-crude agreement between NNPC and the refinery has guaranteed 13 to 15 cargoes of Nigerian crude monthly, helping to reduce the refinery’s foreign exchange exposure on the bulk of its feedstock. But that arrangement has faced persistent operational headwinds. Inadequate crude availability at export terminals and recurring technical issues at key loading points have compelled the refinery to seek additional crude sources outside Nigeria on a regular basis, a situation that Bird acknowledged had accelerated the timeline for building out the international procurement infrastructure. The UAE cargoes are the most visible expression yet of that imperative,” reported Billionaires Africa.

The Dangote refinery has already confirmed plans to double its processing capacity to approximately 1.4 million barrels per day by 2028, a level that would allow the business to process approximately 80% of Nigeria’s entire daily crude oil production in a single day. However, the drawback with the approach is that, going by things, domestic Nigerian crude supply will become structurally insufficient to feed the expanded facility and international sourcing at scale will become a permanent operational requirement rather than a supplementary buffer.

“The Middle East has historically been one of the primary sources of refined petroleum products imported into West and Central Africa. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and India together accounted for the majority of the region’s refined fuel imports before the Dangote Refinery began reshaping those trade flows. The refinery is now not only displacing Middle Eastern refined product imports across African markets but also beginning to buy raw crude from those same Middle Eastern producers to process in Nigeria. The direction of the trade is reversing,” Billionaires Africa concluded.

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The conference, as per the experts, has provided a clear roadmap for insurers seeking growth in a market long constrained by weak penetration, noting that the implementation of the Nigerian Insurance Industry Reform Act (NIIRA) 2025 has created a regulatory environment that can support rapid expansion.

“The call came as the Commissioner for Insurance, Olusegun Omosehin, declared at the conference that Africa’s low insurance penetration should be viewed as a multi-billion-dollar growth opportunity rather than a market weakness, citing the continent’s existing premium pool of about USD 68 billion,” reported Nigerian daily The Guardian.

At the conference, insurance executives argued that the biggest challenge facing the industry operators was no longer product availability but distribution, warning that conventional agency networks would continue to leave millions of potential customers outside the insurance ecosystem.

According to industry estimates (discussed at the conference), Africa’s digital economy now includes more than 500 million mobile wallet users, offering insurers a ready-made platform to distribute retail products without worrying about the heavy costs associated with physical branch expansion.

The experts also urged Nigerian insurers to accelerate partnerships with telecom companies, fintech firms and digital payment providers to deliver insurance products through mobile applications, unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) channels and embedded financial services.

The Director-General of the Nigerian Insurers Association, Bola Odukale, told The Guardian that the Cairo conference reinforced the need for operators to rethink traditional distribution models and embrace technology-enabled channels that are capable of reaching millions of Nigerians currently facing exclusions, both from the African country’s financial framework and its insurance services.

According to Odukale, the insurance industry can no longer depend solely on conventional agency networks if it hopes to achieve meaningful penetration growth.

“The opportunities are enormous. What the Cairo conference has shown is that insurance penetration can improve significantly when operators leverage existing digital infrastructure and focus on solving customers’ real-life risks through accessible products,” she said.

While stating that innovation must be matched with capacity development and professional competence, President/Chairman of the Council of the Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria, Yetunde Ilori, said, “The increasing deployment of policies across digital platforms requires continuous training to ensure ethical standards, customer protection and sustainable growth.”

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As per Dr Tijani, the meeting focused on strengthening collaboration on NUCAP, a major national initiative aimed at providing telecommunications access to more than 20 million Nigerians living in unserved and underserved communities. Through the project, the West African country will deploy 3,700 modern telecommunications towers across its territory, particularly targeting rural and riverine areas lacking reliable network coverage.

Describing NUCAP as a “wholly green network” initiative, Dr Tijani said that the programme has been designed to deliver sustainable and modern digital infrastructure to previously unconnected Nigerian communities.

“Improved connectivity would not only bridge the digital divide but also create opportunities for economic inclusion, education, innovation, and access to digital services for millions of Nigerians,” the minister remarked.

Highlighting the significance of China Industrial Bank’s involvement, Dr Tijani noted that the investment also represents the bank’s first major commitment in Nigeria.

“The partnership demonstrates increasing international confidence in Nigeria’s vision for digital transformation and inclusive economic growth through technology-driven infrastructure development,” he said.

The senior official further expressed optimism about the CIB’s support for the Nigerian government’s immediate target of delivering at least 1,000 telecommunications tower sites before the 2026 end, while stating that achieving this milestone would bring connectivity and new economic opportunities closer to millions of the West African country’s citizens who remain excluded from digital access.

Talking about the NUCAP, it will see the deployment of 3700 telecom towers that, apart from delivering voice and data services, will also provide public WiFi, digital learning tools and associated energy solutions in areas with poor infrastructure. As per the reports, the absence of basic mobile network coverage has limited people’s access to education, healthcare and, most importantly, financial inclusion.

The successful conclusion of NUCAP will usher in steady internet connections, transforming local communities and economies by enabling e-commerce, mobile banking, online education and better delivery of government services.

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In a policy briefing on the recapitalisation exercise, the commission disclosed that equity market capitalisation rose from 99.38 trillion naira at the close of 2025 to 129.21 trillion naira by March 31, 2026. The Nigerian Exchange All Share Index (NGX ASI) also surged from 155,613 points at the 2025-end to a historic high of 201,287.78 points by the end of Q1 2026, representing a 29.35% gain within three months.

February 2026 alone delivered a market capitalisation gain of 17.6 trillion naira, the highest single-month increase ever recorded in the history of the African country’s stock market.

SEC said the market also demonstrated structural resilience, despite the extraordinary volume of fresh equity supply that was introduced through public offers and rights issues by banks.

“The Nigerian equity market demonstrated reasonable price discovery throughout the recapitalisation period,” it added.

While the NGX Banking Index declined in mid-2024, as investors priced in dilution risks from anticipated large rights issues, the sector later made a strong comeback as capital was successfully raised and market participants reassessed stronger balance sheets, before expanding the lending capacity of recapitalised institutions.

“The market’s ability to manage valuation complexities in real time reflected growing analytical sophistication among institutional investors, stronger broker research, wider analyst coverage, and improved real-time data systems,” the SEC stated.

Beyond the stock market rally, the banking recapitalisation created broader structural benefits across the African country’s capital market ecosystem.

According to the SEC, about 500,000 new investors participated in various bank public offers between 2024 and 2026, with many being first-time equity investors.

“A significant number of these investors were expected to remain active in the secondary market and future public offerings, thereby deepening market liquidity and broadening the investor base. The exercise rebuilt institutional capacity across investment banks, stock broking firms, registrars, custodians and issuing houses, which handled unprecedented transaction volumes during the recapitalisation process,” the commission remarked.

According to the SEC, Nigeria’s capital market mobilised 4.65 trillion naira over the 24-month recapitalisation period, proving the capabilities of Nigeria’s market infrastructure, investor community and regulatory framework, when it comes to supporting large-scale national transformation.

Director-General of SEC, Dr Emomotimi Agama, said the recapitalisation exercise should be seen not as an isolated success, but as the foundation for a stronger financial market capable of financing Nigeria’s long-term development.

“The recapitalisation has demonstrated that the Nigerian capital market is resilient. It is the Commission’s unwavering determination to ensure that resilience becomes transformation. The story of the 4.65 trillion naira raised should be remembered not as a peak achievement, but as the beginning of a more consequential era in which the capital market plays a central role in financing the nation’s future,” he concluded.

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Speaking at the 2026 Monetary Policy Forum in Abuja, Olayemi Cardoso further revealed that the reforms under the policy have given rise to positive economic outcomes. He commented, “Gross external reserves increased from USD 38.34 billion in February 2025 to USD 50.12 billion in February 2026, representing a 30.73% year‑on‑year increase, the highest level recorded in 13 years. Similarly, Net External Reserves have surged from USD 3.99 billion at the end of 2023 to USD 34.80 billion at the end of 2025, representing a 772.2% increase and higher than total gross reserves in 2023.”

“This improvement was reinforced by enhanced reserve‑management practices, integration of London Bullion Market Association (LBMA)‑certified gold into the national reserves, restructuring of the external asset management framework, and the initiation of a second global custodian to improve risk diversification. When our administration assumed office in September 2023, the macroeconomic environment was marked by pronounced distortions and significant imbalances, with the economy facing heightened vulnerability and elevated stability risks,” the senior official added.

Noting that headline inflation rose to 29.9% in January 2024, reflecting sustained food price pressures, exchange‑rate pass‑through, and structural supply constraints, Cardoso continued, “Excessive monetary financing had compromised policy integrity; Ways and Means advances had climbed to 26.95 trillion naira by May 2023, far beyond statutory thresholds, weakening the monetary‑fiscal interface and eroding credibility. The foreign exchange market was severely impaired, with over USD 7.0 billion in verified FX backlogs, constraining private‑sector operations and damaging external confidence.”

“Parallel market premium widened sharply to over 60%, and the exchange-rate architecture became increasingly fragmented. External reserves were under severe pressure, with net foreign reserves dropping to as low as USD 3.99 billion at the end of 2023, while Nigeria’s balance of payments position oscillated between deficits and instability. These conditions collectively undermined the transmission of monetary policy, weakened investor sentiment, and strained the credibility of the Central Bank at home and abroad,” he remarked.

The senior official also added that with a clear understanding of the challenges, the CBN has moved on a proactive basis to implement far‑reaching, bold but necessary reforms aimed at restoring credibility, normalising policy conduct, rebuilding confidence, and stabilising the macroeconomic environment.

“The first critical step was restoring monetary–fiscal discipline. Ways and Means financing was reined-in decisively, declining from 26.95 trillion naira to 3.51 trillion naira in December 2024 and further to 2.84 trillion naira by January 2026, marking one of the sharpest fiscal consolidations in recent history,” Cardoso added, informing the media that his institution’s policy actions restored compliance with the law and strengthened central bank independence. The moves also signalled the bank’s commitment to orthodoxy and transparency to markets, with a clear message that the era of fiscal dominance had ended.

“We complemented these actions with a firm but data-driven tightening cycle. Throughout 2024, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) maintained a restrictive stance to rein in inflation expectations by raising the policy rate cumulatively by 875 basis points from 18.75% in January 2024 to 27.50% in November 2024. While the Monetary Policy Rate (MPR) was kept at elevated levels for most of the year, improved inflation dynamics enabled the first policy rate cut in five years. A modest easing was carefully calibrated, with the policy rate reduced from 27.5 per cent to 27.0 per cent in September 2025, followed by a further cut to 26.5 per cent in February 2026,” he concluded.

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“The introduction of the H160 into Nigeria represents a meaningful step forward for our offshore operations in West Africa. This aircraft brings a combination of advanced technology, operational flexibility, and improved fuel efficiency that strengthens our ability to deliver safe, reliable, and cost-effective transportation for our customers. Its performance profile, particularly its range, payload capability in a 12-passenger configuration, and ability to operate from smaller helidecks, positions Bristow with a distinct advantage in this market. We believe the H160 will play an important role in supporting the evolving needs of the energy sector across the region,” Stu Stavely, Chief Operating Officer, Offshore Energy Services, Bristow Group, said.

“Milestone is pleased to support Bristow with the lease of five new H160s, making us the first lessor to introduce this aircraft type into Bristow’s fleet. Our continued investment in next-generation medium and super medium helicopters ensures our customers have access to the most efficient and capable aircraft on the market, supporting mission-critical operations around the world. We appreciate the strong collaboration with Bristow and Airbus and look forward to further strengthening our partnership in the years ahead,” remarked Pat Sheedy, Chief Executive Officer of Milestone.

“The arrival of these first two H160s in Nigeria is a proud moment for Airbus Helicopters as we see our latest medium-twin aircraft prepare to take flight for Bristow’s offshore missions. This delivery underscores our commitment to supporting the energy sector with a helicopter that sets new standards in safety, comfort, and competitiveness with its 18% reduction in fuel burn. We look forward to seeing the H160 in operation and continuing our long-standing partnership with both Bristow and Milestone,” noted Bruno Even, CEO of Airbus Helicopters.

With three additional H160s planned for delivery to fulfil the five-aircraft agreement, Bristow is well-positioned to operate one of the most modern and capable fleets in Africa to support mission-critical services for the energy industry. One of the world’s most technologically advanced helicopters, the H160 was designed and built to offer the highest levels of operational safety while providing exceptional comfort for rotorcraft in its class.

The H160 can perform a wide variety of missions such as law enforcement, offshore transportation, search and rescue, private and business aviation, and emergency medical services, and has been put into service in Brazil, Canada, China, France, India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe.

Image Credits: Airbus

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