By Tunji David
There is something deeply uncomfortable about the way Nigeria is building its digital economy. We have built the users, the merchants, the agents, the transactions, the demand and the opportunity.
PalmPay says it now serves 40 million users and one million businesses, while OPay has built an enormous customer base around Nigerian economic activity.
Yet as these companies grow into billion-dollar businesses, the question we should be asking is simple: who ultimately owns the wealth being created? This is not an argument against PalmPay, OPay or foreign investors. Foreign capital has played an important role in building Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem.
The problem is what happens when the market is Nigerian but the capital formation, valuation and eventual ownership increasingly happen elsewhere. If a Nigerian company lists primarily overseas, much of the benefit of that listing follows the money.
Trading activity, valuation opportunities, institutional investment and brokerage fees migrate to markets such as New York, London or Shanghai, while Nigerian investors remain largely customers of companies they helped make valuable. That is why the proposed listing of OPay in the United States should force a bigger conversation. Reports indicate that OPay is considering a U.S. listing at a valuation of about $4 billion. There are rational reasons for this.
American capital markets are deeper, technology companies often attract stronger valuations, liquidity is greater and there is a much larger pool of investors experienced in valuing high-growth technology companies. But Nigeria should not simply accept that reality. It should ask what it can do differently.
The emerging Dangote Refinery model offers an interesting alternative. The $20 billion, 650,000-barrel-per-day refinery is preparing what could become Africa’s biggest-ever IPO, targeting about $5 billion. Crucially, the primary listing is being structured for the Nigerian Exchange.
Dangote has said Nigerians will have the opportunity to own shares in the refinery, with advisers reportedly exploring a structure that would allow Nigerians to subscribe in naira while receiving dollar-linked dividends. The significance goes beyond Dangote.
If the listing succeeds, it could dramatically deepen the Nigerian capital market, potentially push NGX’s total market capitalisation beyond ₦200 trillion and give pension funds, institutions and ordinary Nigerians an opportunity to own part of an asset built around Nigerian crude, Nigerian labour and Nigerian demand. After Nigeria, Dangote plans a secondary listing in South Africa. That sequencing matters. List at home first. Expand abroad afterwards. The Nigerian Exchange Group has itself been pushing for stronger cross-border listings and reforms designed to make Nigeria more attractive to technology companies. The objective should not be to force every Nigerian company to reject foreign markets.
It should be to make the Nigerian market strong enough that companies have a compelling reason to anchor their ownership here. This is particularly important for fintech. Banking, telecommunications and consumer goods have historically dominated the NGX.
A PalmPay or OPay listing would introduce a major new category of technology equities to the Nigerian market. It could attract retail investors, institutional funds and a new generation of Nigerians interested in owning technology businesses. More importantly, local listing can strengthen transparency, corporate governance, disclosure and accountability.
As the Central Bank of Nigeria continues to demand stronger governance and operational standards from fintech companies, public-market discipline can become another layer of institutional accountability. The bigger issue, however, is ownership. Nigeria has already demonstrated that it can create enormous markets. What it has struggled to create is equally enormous pools of Nigerian capital capable of owning those markets. A Nigerian trader can use PalmPay every day.
A merchant can process millions of naira through OPay. An agent can spend twelve hours a day serving customers on a fintech platform. Every transaction makes the network more valuable. Yet those Nigerians may own nothing of the company whose valuation they are helping to create. That is the real financial drain. It is not necessarily money physically leaving Nigeria. Employees are paid here. Agents earn commissions here. Vendors operate here. Taxes and regulatory fees are paid here. The deeper leakage is the possibility that Nigerians remain customers while the capital appreciation created by their economic activity accrues primarily to shareholders elsewhere.
This is why Nigeria must distinguish between welcoming foreign capital and surrendering ownership of the future. If a foreign investor puts $100 million into a Nigerian fintech and that company eventually becomes worth $5 billion, Nigeria should not complain that the investor made money. The investor took the risk and deserves the return.
But Nigeria should build mechanisms through which Nigerians can participate in the next stage of value creation through subsequent funding rounds, employee share ownership, pension investments, retail investment, secondary offerings and, ultimately, local or dual listings.
Experts and NGX stakeholders should therefore push government to explore policies that encourage, or where appropriate require, Nigerian-headquartered fintechs to list or raise a meaningful portion of capital in Nigeria before pursuing a foreign IPO. At minimum, dual listing with NGX as the primary venue should become a serious policy objective for systemically important Nigerian technology companies.
The argument is not that every company must be trapped inside Nigeria. It is that if Nigeria’s first trillion-dollar company emerges from a market built by Nigerian consumers, Nigerian entrepreneurs, Nigerian agents and Nigerian data, its success should also help build Nigerian capital markets. If it lists only abroad, it becomes a proof point for founders and a payday for foreign investors. If it lists at home, even partially, it can become infrastructure for the next hundred Nigerian startups. That is the lesson from Dangote.
Nigeria does not need to shut out foreign capital. It needs to learn how to compound foreign capital domestically. We need companies that can raise international money, scale globally and still create meaningful pathways for Nigerians to become owners. PalmPay and OPay have proved that Nigerian problems can produce globally valuable businesses. The next test is whether Nigeria can prove that Nigerian markets can also produce Nigerian shareholders. We have spent too long being the customer. It is time to become the shareholder.
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