NGX just showed the President its scorecard. Now someone should ask the bigger question

A $1 trillion economy needs more than a stock exchange that’s having a good year.

Last week in Abuja, NGX Group’s Board and Management sat down with President Tinubu at the Presidential Villa and walked him through an impressive set of numbers: market capitalisation up from roughly ₦30 trillion in 2023 to ₦160 trillion today, the All-Share Index up from 52,000 points to over 244,000, and a fresh commitment to bring NNPC to market. The President was pleased, and he should be. But I want to sit with a harder question than the one that the scorecard answers.

Nigeria keeps talking about becoming a $1 trillion economy — industrialisation, infrastructure, housing, manufacturing, and companies built to compete globally. What almost never comes up in the same breath is who’s actually going to pay for it. Not the government alone. Not the banks alone. Not foreign capital alone. It has to run, in large part, through a deep, sophisticated, ambitious Nigerian capital market. Which means the Abuja meeting wasn’t just a good-news briefing — it was an opening bid on a much bigger conversation.

Give NGX its due

None of what follows is an argument that NGX is underperforming. The opposite, actually. What was presented to the President was earned: equity turnover more than doubled in 2025, the All-Share Index gained over 50%, and NGX Group posted ₦22.98 billion in revenue. Settlement is tighter, and retail participation is turning into a real trend, not a talking point in strategy decks.

That’s momentum, and momentum should force…