🍞 Two funding realities

Hello!!

Adetomiwa here, and I come bearing good news for the travel community. Nigerians, and all other Africans, can now travel visa-free to Togo and stay for up to 30 days.

Context: Nigeria is allowed to enter 44 countries visa-free, and of those, 18 are African countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and now Togo.

Nairametrics noted that as Western countries begin to tighten their immigration policies, African countries have started to take the pan-African idea a little more seriously. Great news, but let’s kick it up a notch by making travelling around Africa less expensive.

Last week, we walked you through Femi Otedola's N43.4 billion insider buy at First HoldCo. This week, another billionaire is sinking teeth into another company.

Tony Elumelu is officially on Seplat’s board

Today at 11 AM, shareholders of Seplat Energy will gather for the company's 13th Annual General Meeting, where one of the key items on the agenda is locking in Tony Elumelu’s Non-Executive Director-ship.

This is really just the formality that closes a loop that started with Heirs Energies — a subsidiary of Elumelu's pan-African Heirs Holdings — acquiring a 20.07% stake in Seplat from French firm Maurel & Prom. The deal was worth about $496 million, paid for a block of 120.4 million shares at 305 pence each, roughly an 11% premium to where Seplat was trading on the London Stock Exchange at the time.

Co-financed by Afreximbank and the Africa Finance Corporation, the deal made Heirs Energies the single largest shareholder in Nigeria's leading independent indigenous oil and gas company, holding 20.46%. Before selling to Elumelu in January 2026, Maurel & Prom had held this stake since Seplat’s establishment in 2009.

Then there’s Sterling's quest for more

Over at Sterling Financial Holding Company, shareholders are being called to a June 9 Annual General Meeting where the headline item is a proposal to raise $400 million in fresh capital through a combination of debt and equity instruments. This isn't the first time Sterling has put this idea to shareholders. They passed a similar resolution at their July 2025 General Meeting. The new resolution is meant to run alongside the previous one, not replace it.

What shareholders are being asked to approve is not a specific plan, but rather a mandate to raise the money in whatever way makes the most sense when the time comes.

The structure they're proposing is flexible enough to be almost anything: bonds (convertible or not), preference shares, ordinary shares, global depositary receipts, public offer, private placement, rights issue (basically every tool in the capital-raising toolbox, mix and match as the board sees fit, subject to regulatory approvals). If equity is involved, the board also gets authority to increase share capital and amend the Memorandum and Articles of Association accordingly.

Your portfolio angle: Elumelu acquires a dominant stake in a dual-listed indigenous energy company and formalises board presence. Sterling comes back to shareholders, again, for a flexible $400 million mandate in an environment where CBN recapitalisation pressure is separating the banks that are building from the ones that are treading water. In both cases, the real story isn't the announcement but what might come after. For Seplat, watch capital expenditure direction and acquisition appetite over the next two reporting cycles (although the outlook is positive). For Sterling, watch the eventual pricing and structure of the raise when they actually pull the trigger.

⚖️ Back to reality: While big money deals dominate the headlines, the Alliance for Economic Research and Ethics dropped a rather sobering reminder of what's happening at the other end of the economy. Nigeria's Development Finance Institutions collectively hold just a little above ₦8 trillion in total assets. However, the estimated financing requirement for MSMEs (the 39 million micro, small and medium enterprises that account for 96% of all businesses, 48% of GDP, and 84% of private sector employment) is over ₦130 trillion. While projects like the World Bank's $500 million FINCLUDE programme (designed to support about 250,000 enterprises) are a great start, there is still a long way to go. With the CBN's Monetary Policy Rate at 26.5% and headline inflation at 15.69% as of April, the real cost of capital remains punishing for anyone without a boardroom seat and an Afreximbank relationship.

👀 New eyes on MSMEs: IFC and Access Bank signed a $500 million local currency financing framework, with Access Holdings chairman Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede and IFC MD Makhtar Diop putting pen to paper at the ceremony. Financing will be distributed across Nigeria, Angola, Botswana, the DRC, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and the CEMAC and UEMOA blocs, targeting MSMEs, agribusiness, housing, and infrastructure. The idea is that local-currency financing will allow businesses to borrow in the same currency they earn in, which will remove the FX risk that has historically made dollar-denominated debt a landmine for African operators whenever the exchange rate moves against them.
African governments and financial institutions have been pushing hard for local currency structures precisely because dollar shortages, exchange rate volatility, and rising external borrowing costs have made the old model increasingly painful. For Access Bank, this deepens an existing IFC relationship and gives the bank a development finance anchor to deploy capital at scale across a footprint it has spent years building. For MSMEs in the ₦130 trillion financing abyss, a $500 million local currency facility is not the solution, but it’s a start.

‼️ Food inflation is back up: After eight months of headline inflation being above food inflation, April flipped it. Food inflation at 16.06% just edged past the headline rate of 15.69%, meaning the thing Nigerians spend the most money on is getting more expensive again. The most expensive foods? yams, beef, garri, tomatoes, beans, pepper, and crayfish. Also, eleven states are still above 20% food inflation year-on-year, with Enugu leading at 32.7%. The harder problem is structural. Food is more expensive in rural communities due to insecurity disrupting food-producing communities, and no interest rate decision or financing opportunity fixes a supply-side problem. Can it be worse? Yes. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network says 16 to 17 million Nigerians could need urgent food assistance by November 2026, putting Nigeria in the same bracket as Sudan and Yemen.

Nigeria's industrial goods sector is having a moment. The top five industrial goods companies on the NGX collectively pulled in N1.9 trillion in revenue in Q1 2026 (a 22% jump from the same period last year). More tellingly, combined post-tax profit rose 72.7% to N604.8 billion. Revenue grew, but profits grew faster, which means margins are expanding, not just top lines. Here's where everyone landed:

Dangote Cement: N1.19 trillion in revenue, up 20.45%. Profit after tax hit N321 billion, and retained earnings at N1.8 trillion. Stock up 93% year-to-date after a N45 per share final dividend.

BUA Cement: N354.9 billion in revenue, up 22%. Post-tax profit more than doubled to N176.3 billion. Stock up 143% year-to-date after a N28 final dividend.

Lafarge Africa: N334.9 billion in revenue, up 34.84%. Post-tax profit doubled to N97.9 billion. Stock up 149% over the past year.

Beta Glass: N37.5 billion in revenue, down 8.81% year-on-year. Still delivered N7.8 billion in post-tax profit. Stock up 54% year-to-date.

Chemical & Allied Products: N11.59 billion in revenue, up 14.9%. Post-tax profit of N1.5 billion. Stock up 238% year-to-date after a N4 dividend declaration in March.

The cement trio (Dangote, BUA, and Lafarge) tell a similar story: revenue up, costs relatively contained, profits surging. Lafarge's gross profit nearly doubled on a 35% revenue increase, and BUA's post-tax profit more than doubled on 22% revenue growth. The sector is benefiting from sustained construction demand and pricing power that has held up even as input costs rose. Chemical & Allied Products is the chart-topper on share price performance at 238% year-to-date, though at N11.59 billion in revenue, it's playing a different game entirely from the cement gurus above it. Beta Glass is the outlier: revenue actually fell year-on-year, but the company still generated nearly N8 billion in post-tax profit and sits on N101 billion in retained earnings, so it's hardly distressed.

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