Perhaps, that is just what is needed to get the younger Nigerian population off the couch and start investing in their country’s capital market – by designing a specific product that helps the target feel like they can belong. This vision has been mulled at the 13^th Annual Conference of the Institute of Capital Market Registrars (ICMR) that just ended in Lagos on Saturday 9 November 2024, around familiar guests.

All the speakers that took the stage four days ago were connected in their consensus that domestic investment is a sure avenue to raise the economic profile of Nigeria. Through investment in indigenous companies, jobs are created for the teeming youths, these citizens pay taxes and innovate in return, and there will be a happy nation.

This is the sort of way Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Dr Emomotimi Agama pictured the scene when he headlined the 13th annual conference of the Institute of Capital Market Registrars (ICMR) this past Saturday. At the event, he thought it was very, very important that we understand the value of the capital markets in the development of any economy. 

Oftentimes, he adds, people forget that money answers all things, so it is said. Even in companies.  And where do you get that money from? You get that money from the society. And what is the means of getting that money? 

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The answer, the Director-General analyses, is through the Capital Market. That is through investment. That is through inviting people to come and invest in your company for you to be able to use that money, to develop the company, employ more people, make production increase, and of course, increasing the stability of the economy. So clearly there is no better place that will help the economy other than the capital market.

Even the Managing Director of the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) Jude Chiemeka thought this direction was the way to go. At the 13^th ICMR annual conference, his presentation centred around restoring confidence in the Nigerian capital market, as well as the role registrars play.

For this director, the lack of a lung-suffering capital market mileage among younger Nigerians is awfully obvious, but the status quo needs to change to adopt the key ingredients which he identifies as more around products that resonate with the younger category of investors.

With inflation eating deep where wages are hardly increasing, not all young professionals found that they could part away with their meagre resources when opportunities to buy from the share offerings top-tier banks like the Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB) and Zenith Bank recently laid open and have now closed.

If they were to get tailored ideas from the troupe of financial institutions that could use their money and their large population to better position themselves for future success, they might be inspired to risk even more. For the investor who dared to impress the lot, there would be benefits.

Seeing further into the problem of gaining young people’s finances and contribution to building their country, Mr Chiemeka and his associates find that we don’t have a lot of millennials investing in our markets and the Gen Zs. So we’re committed to creating products that will be able to match their expectations and encourage them to begin to invest in the market.

The stakeholders on their part, need to work more collaboratively around financial literacy and investor education because there are so many, innovative products and services that even this registrar community and the capital market community provide that a lot of people are not aware of, says the NGX managing director.

But it isn’t like young Nigerians detest investment. Records x-raying the past decade see a thirst for quick returns. This desire for immediate value has led some people to fall victim to Ponzi schemes like MMM Global which attracted interest in November 2015.

Members back then were mostly professionals and undergraduates who were being eased slowly into a difficult stretch of inflation ever increasing. Before the scheme eventually crashed as it did in Russia in the 1990s, the participants were supposed to receive 30 percent returns on their investment in just 30 days. It happened that only a few parts of the millions who got hooked got the exciting experience of seeing their money multiplied as if it were magic.

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For a time, at least before the September 26, 2024 airdrop on the Telegram-based cryptocurrency mining web3 gaming tech, Hamster Kombat, the millennial and Gen Z population in Nigeria thought they had finally found the sure passive income opening but the token that came out of the first season did not impress.

It is certain that these groups now need to take the bold but much safer plunge into the capital market for their green financial health to maintain its colour.

Meiza Nigeria