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 the next question: what is all this progress supposed to make possible? Nigeria’s nominal GDP sat around $291 billion in 2025, per the World Bank, with the IMF projecting roughly $377 billion for 2026. “$200 billion economy” is already a stale frame. If Nigeria is genuinely heading toward $1 trillion, what does its capital market need to look like to carry that weight? We’re still treating the exchange as a marketplace. Here’s where the framing needs to shift. An exchange isn’t simply a venue where shares trade hands. It has financial infrastructure, in the same category as the roads that move goods or the grid that powers a factory floor. A capital market moves money from people who have it toward businesses and projects that need it, and the depth of that market sets the ceiling on how fast a country can develop. New factories, housing stock, African tech companies reaching global scale without relocating, infrastructure that doesn’t keep stacking onto government debt — all of it needs financing. Capital formation isn’t a side conversation to industrial policy; it’s the mechanism industrial policy runs through. NGX sits directly inside that mechanism, which is precisely why last week’s meeting deserves more scrutiny than a courtesy call gets. To its credit, NGX framed its presentation less as a victory lap on index points and more as a pitch for a national capital formation programme. Right instinct, worth pushing further. Increasing listings, turnover, retail participation, and settlement speed — all worthwhile. But the more interesting question isn’t how NGX gets bigger. It’s how much bigger the Nigerian economy gets because NGX exists. That reframes what should be measured: how much capital was raised for productive businesses, not just traded among existing shareholders; how many companies scaled because public capital became available; how much pension capital moved into productive assets instead of sitting idle; how many Nigerian companies reached global scale without ever leaving Nigeria to get there. Harder numbers to produce. Also the ones that actually matter for a $1 trillion ambition. Two models worth studying The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq became powerful by growing into global pools of capital, not just marketplaces — companies listed there for liquidity, institutional coverage, and compounding credibility, not just American investors. Closer to home, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange built a comparable ecosystem — pension funds, asset managers, investment banks, debt markets, research — that gives South Africa’s capital market influence well beyond its domestic economy’s size. Nigeria already has most of the raw material: entrepreneurs, banks, pension assets, private equity, venture capital, an engaged diaspora, and companies with continental ambitions. What’s missing is the financial architecture connecting all of it at scale — exactly why Lagos should be asking, deliberately and now, whether it can become Africa’s financial centre. The exit problem nobody wants to name This part is personal, given how much time I spend around private capital and entrepreneurship. Nigeria has gotten considerably better at financing startups — angels, VCs, and private equity all step in as companies mature. Then what? When a company grows into a $500 million or $1 billion business, where does it go to raise public capital? Too often the answer is somewhere outside Nigeria, and when that happens, the country does not just lose a listing. It loses the investors, the research coverage, the liquidity, and the chance for ordinary Nigerians and their pension funds to own a piece of something built at home. The pathway ought to run: Founder → Angel → VC → Growth Capital → Private Equity → NGX → Global Capital. Getting that pipeline to actually work would be transformational, not incremental. A government problem too, and a continental one NGX cannot fix this alone. A government cannot announce a $1 trillion ambition and leave capital formation to chance. Governments, regulators, pension managers, banks, private capital, and NGX need to operate as one connected system rather than as institutions, each protecting their own mandate — close to the language NGX itself used inside the Villa last week. The same problem exists at a continental scale. We talk about AfCFTA and African integration, but rarely ask the obvious follow-up: where is the African capital market? Dozens of exchanges, multiple currencies, multiple regulators, all fragmented, while African companies keep looking outside the continent for the deepest pools of capital. Trade, industrialisation, and entrepreneurship all need financing, and eventually investors need real exits. Nigeria, given its size, has a legitimate shot at leading that build-out. The actual challenge for NGX leadership Don’t build the next incremental version of the Nigerian Exchange. Build the institution Nigeria will need at $1 trillion, then build past that. Make Lagos the place African companies raise capital, a credible exit for venture-backed African companies, and a gateway into Africa for global investors rather than a frontier-market curiosity. Make it realistic for a company in Nairobi, Kigali, Accra, or Johannesburg to seriously weigh Lagos for its next major raise or listing — a materially bigger ambition than trading volume, and much closer to the economic role NGX is actually positioned to play. This is bigger than NGX specifically. It’s about how the country designs institutions around its own ambition. We celebrate entrepreneurs when they build billion-dollar companies, then hand them financial infrastructure that struggles to finance the next ten billion. Nigeria doesn’t need another institution merely adequate for where it stands today. It needs institutions built for where it’s trying to go. So the question for NGX leadership is simple: if Nigeria is serious about a $1 trillion economy, what does NGX need to become to help finance it? Not next year. Not in the next strategic plan. Now. Because when Nigeria eventually crosses that line, the story shouldn’t be that the economy grew enormous while the capital market wasn’t ready for it. NGX helped build it. Wale Salami is a Nigerian-born American angel investor, venture capitalist and entrepreneur, and founder of the Midlothian Angel Network. A U.S. Army veteran and former AWS executive, he is pursuing a DBA at the University of Texas at Dallas, researching human-AI symbiosis in investment decisions. His interests span African capital markets, entrepreneurship, leadership and institutional development. Join BusinessDay whatsapp Channel, to stay up to date Open In Whatsapp