Harmattan: Nigeria Market Weekly
Edition 9 — Wednesday, 29 April 2026
A note on Edition 8. Harmattan framed former Finance Minister Wale Edun’s departure as a dismissal, following the initial Secretary to the Government of the Federation communication and dominant press reporting at press time. The Presidency subsequently clarified on 22 April that Mr Edun formally resigned citing health reasons. We correct the record here and wish him a full recovery.
The Nigerian Exchange did what it has done all year. It went up. The All-Share Index closed Tuesday at 228,579.80 points, another fresh all-time high, with market capitalisation at ₦147.17 trillion and a year-to-date return of 46.89 percent. Read the headline number and the story is simple. Read the data underneath and the story is more interesting.
This week the easy-money era for Nigeria’s tier-one banks quietly ended. First-quarter results began landing for the 2026 financial year, and the early prints tell a sobering story for the same lenders that delivered record FY2025 dividends only weeks ago. The naira slid to a seventeen-day low against the dollar even as the index rallied. Wale Edun’s resignation triggered a cabinet shuffle, and Taiwo Oyedele entered his first full week as Nigeria’s Coordinating Minister of the Economy with the country watching closely. This is a market in transition, not just in motion.
Market Wrap
Across the Wednesday-to-Tuesday coverage window, the All-Share Index gained roughly 4.7 percent, lifting market capitalisation by about ₦7.4 trillion. By Tuesday’s close, the ASI stood at 228,579.80, market capitalisation at ₦147.17 trillion (approximately $106.6 billion at the NFEM closing rate), and year-to-date returns at 46.89 percent. The standard NGX week to Friday 24 April produced a 3.94 percent advance and weekly turnover of ₦213.96 billion (approximately $155 million), capping a seventeen-session bullish streak before Monday’s pullback. Top weekly gainers were UACN at 42 percent, Union Dicon Salt at 32.73 percent, and Nascon Allied Industries at 32.63 percent. The standout weekly loser was Infinity Trust Mortgage Bank, which shed 50.79 percent. Dollar figures are computed at the NFEM closing rate on the final day of the coverage week, ₦1,380.71 per dollar on Tuesday 28 April. Currency movement is therefore embedded in the reported return.
The headline mathematics conceal a quiet tension. The naira closed Tuesday at a seventeen-day low against the dollar after weakening sharply during the session as NFEM turnover collapsed to zero deals on Tuesday from $276.7 million on Monday. Gross external reserves fell another $731 million in the first three weeks of April to $48.45 billion. The rally is real. But its dollar value is being compressed by currency drift. Market capitalisation stood at roughly $106.6 billion on Tuesday, almost unchanged in dollar terms from the prior Friday, even as it climbed meaningfully in naira.
₦147.17 trillion. Nigerian equities have never been worth more in local currency. And yet that record sits beside a naira at its weakest point in nearly three weeks. Both stories are true. Investors need to read both.
The Big Story
The first-quarter 2026 earnings season opened this week, and what landed should reset how readers think about Nigerian bank valuations. UBA reported gross earnings of ₦801.5 billion, up only 5 percent year-on-year, while pre-tax profit moderated 21.4 percent and after-tax profit fell 22.8 percent to ₦146.6 billion. Group Managing Director Oliver Alawuba framed it as a “transition year,” language that markets recognise as deceleration. GTCO confirmed the pattern. Interest income rose to ₦458.5 billion from ₦386.0 billion a year earlier, but profit fell roughly 15 percent on higher funding costs, sharply higher tax expense, and the absence of the foreign-exchange revaluation gains that drove 2024 and early 2025 results.
The diagnosis is straightforward. The era of windfall profits from naira devaluations and aggressive monetary tightening is closing. Banks that booked enormous translation gains as the naira moved from ₦645 to over ₦1,500 against the dollar across 2023 and 2024 cannot repeat that trick when the currency has stabilised in the ₦1,360 to ₦1,400 corridor. With the CBN holding the Monetary Policy Rate at 27.5 percent and rate cuts now penciled in for the third quarter, interest-margin support is also approaching its peak. Recapitalised balance sheets, cleaner loan books, and resilient core earnings are real positives. But the valuation rerating that lifted the NGX Banking Index by triple digits over two years was built on a one-time mechanical lift that is no longer in play.
For the diaspora investor and the institutional allocator, the implication is not that Nigerian banks are no longer attractive. It is that Nigerian banks must now be valued on what they actually are: well-capitalised, dividend-paying, deposit-rich franchises operating in a recovering economy, rather than on sustained earnings velocity. Speaking at the NESG Private Sector Outlook in Lagos last Thursday in his first major address as Coordinating Minister, Taiwo Oyedele argued that Nigeria’s reform programme has moved from stabilisation to execution. “Reforms on their own do not create growth. We need investment at scale,” he said. Bank earnings normalisation is the moment that thesis meets the tape. Allocators who rode the rally on momentum now need a more defensible answer to the question of why these stocks are worth what they cost.
Nigeria’s Money
The most consequential financial-inclusion data point of the year was published this week, almost without notice. The value of point-of-sale transactions in Nigeria reached ₦18.78 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, a 79 percent jump from ₦10.49 trillion in Q1 2025. To put that number in perspective, in three months Nigerians moved more money through PoS terminals than the entire NGX equity turnover for many recent quarters combined. This is the parallel financial system that institutional investors and policymakers consistently underestimate.
The PoS economy is not an alternative to the formal market. It is increasingly the rail on which much of Nigeria actually transacts, especially in cash-dependent neighbourhoods, market clusters, and the long tail of micro-enterprises that the banking sector cannot profitably serve at branch level. NIBSS data shows over 5.5 million terminals deployed nationally and 7.8 million registered, with operators such as OPay, PalmPay and Moniepoint emerging as effective shadow banks for tens of millions of Nigerians. For Harmattan readers thinking about long-horizon Nigerian exposure, the question is no longer whether the formal capital market can capture this flow. It is whether ContisX, the new SEC-licensed exchange targeting a September launch, with its explicit “investment inclusion” design and partnerships such as the Egoras Cube Phone announced this week, can engineer the bridge.
Africa Watch
The Dangote pan-African IPO accelerated this week, with reports that Aliko Dangote is now considering a listing on the Ethiopian Securities Exchange in addition to the NGX, JSE, GSE, NSE and BRVM. The structure remains the most innovative on the continent. Investors subscribe in naira, but receive dividends in US dollars drawn from the refinery’s projected $6.4 billion in annual export revenues. The prospectus filing with Nigeria’s SEC is expected in the coming days. If approved at the proposed terms, with a $40 to $50 billion valuation and a 5 to 10 percent float, this will be the largest equity offering in African market history. The dollar-dividend mechanism, if cleared, will set a regulatory precedent for how African industrial assets are priced for cross-border investors.
What to Watch
Two events define the coming week. First, Zenith Bank’s Q1 2026 unaudited results are due by the regulatory filing deadline of 30 April. Zenith crossed the ₦5 trillion market capitalisation threshold on 20 April, the first Nigerian bank to do so, and its print will signal whether the bank-earnings normalisation thesis is broad-based or concentrated in selected names. Second, watch for the Dangote Refinery prospectus filing with the SEC. The document will confirm float size, the cross-exchange allocation methodology, and most importantly whether the regulator approves the dollar-dividend mechanism. That decision has continental implications.
The week’s headline number was a record. The week’s real story was an inflection. Nigeria’s market is rich enough now that you can no longer read it from the index alone.
Nothing published in Harmattan constitutes financial advice. Always consult a qualified financial adviser before making investment decisions.
— Bestman Eleanya Founder, Harmattan hello@harmattanintel.com | harmattanintel.substack.com