Sudip Bandyopadhyay

Few months back I was driving through the suburbs of Lagos, the commercial
capital of Nigeria and was remembering Mumbai of early 80s.  The chaos, the
confusion, the congestion was so similar.  When I reached Lagos Stock
Exchange at the commercial hub of the City it again reminded me of area
around BSE or the Calcutta Stock Exchange during the 80s.  Once inside the
building, the similarities were again remarkable.  The exchange is
dominated by the brokers, it is not demutalised  and dematerialiastion of
securities hasen’t fully happened.  The officials at  the exchange, their
mind set, work culture, all resembles where we were 15-20 years back.
Electronic trading has just been introduced .  Trading  is dominated by the
shares in the financial services sector &  market favourites are the
Insurance and Banking companies. Manufacturing sector has negligible
presence amongst the listed traded securities.

My visit to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, convinced me of the country’s
similarities with India. Abuja is just like New Delhi..a planned modern
city with well laid out roads, parks & buildings. The government functions
from Abuja & the city is crime free.

From the point of view of opportunities, Nigeria definitely ranks very
high.  The country is a functioning democracy and has been so for more than
a decade.As an Indian, the similarities are quite obvious as Nigeria was a
British colony  till the early 1960s &  english is the language of
communication. The law, regulation, infrastructure (or whatever is left of
it) is the legacy of the British and very similar to what India had.

Nigeria is the most populated country in Africa with seventh  largest
proven oil reserves in the world.  It has also rich deposit of many other
minerals.  The potential for agricultural, trading, industry and financial
services is huge.  The environment is business friendly and though there is
some security concerns, the same are not as grave as it seems by watching
the international news channels.