More than 60 million Nigerians are staking a combined $5.5 million daily or $2 billion annualy in gambling, against less than three million investing in the capital market, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Director-General Emomotimi Agama said.
Nigerians’ preference for plowing their money into gambling and cryptocurrencies rather than the capital market is denying the nation of funds that could be used to build key infrastructure, the head of the financial regulator said.
On top of that, many young people with access to digital platforms are piling into cryptocurrencies, with more than $50 billion worth of transactions conducted between July 2023 and June 2024, he said.
Low local investor participation means that the value of listed assets-to-gross domestic product is 30%, compared with South Africa’s that’s more than three times in excess of GDP, Agama said.
That’s “a major impediment to economic growth and capital formation,” and makes it difficult to plug the nation’s annual infrastructure gap of $150 billion, he added.
“An appetite for risk clearly exists, but not the trust or access to channel that energy into the productive sector.”
The SEC DG said it plans to create new products and deploy technology to attract more investment, to help reverse this trend.
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