Nigeria’s plan to turn its state oil company, Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC), into a publicly traded firm is back on the table, ten years after officials first floated the idea in November 2016 and then let it stall.
The question facing investors now is whether this attempt will be any different because this time the numbers behind it are hard to ignore.
President Bola Tinubu told the leadership of Nigerian Exchange Group on Aug. 6 that the NNPC would eventually be floated on the bourse in its entirety, reviving a listing promise that has hung over Africa’s biggest crude producer after the idea was first documented in 2016 and a 2021 law ordered it.
The Federal Government first planned to list NNPC on the NGX after concluding reforms in the country’s petroleum sector, according to the draft National Oil Policy submitted to the Federal Executive Council (FEC) in November 2016.
“We will do NNPCL reforms to the extent that one day the totality of it, not just arms and legs, the totality of it, will be listed on NGX,” Tinubu said.
This development comes at a time when the bourse is among the world’s best-performing markets, boasting a 57.8 per cent return this year alone.
The mere prospect of an NNPC Initial Public Offering (IPO) has injected fresh optimism into the market. Market capitalisation stood at N158.51 trillion as of the trading week ended Aug. 7, up from N158.28 trillion a week earlier.
“President Tinubu’s affirmation during our engagement that NNPC Limited will be reformed and listed on the capital market is a landmark moment for Nigeria and a significant response to the priorities we presented for translating the strong performance of our capital market into broader economic development,” Temi Popoola, group managing director/CEO, NGX Group Plc, told BusinessDay.
Read also: Nigeria revives decade-old plan to sell stake in state-oil company
He said the listing of commercially viable government assets, alongside greater participation by leading Nigerian companies through domestic or dual listings, clarity on the capital gains tax treatment of listed securities, and greater use of capital market instruments to finance infrastructure, can significantly deepen capital formation and strengthen the role of the market in national development.
Data sourced by BusinessDay showed NNPC Limited controls an asset base valued at roughly $150 billion to $153 billion.
“A listing of this scale would deepen our market significantly, but its greater significance lies in what it represents,” Popoola said.
He explained further that an “NNPC listing provides an opportunity for Nigerians to own a stake in one of the nation’s most important commercial assets, while bringing the transparency, accountability and market discipline that public markets provide.”
BusinessDay calculations showed that if NNPC lists even a 10 percent float at a conservative $40 billion valuation (approximately N60 trillion), it would immediately surpass current mega-cap market leaders (such as Airtel Africa, Dangote Cement, and BUA Cement) by a vast margin and potentially double the total weight of the energy sector on the index.
Ola Brown, a managing partner of HealthCap Africa, an investment firm that provides early-stage financing to businesses, said listing state-owned giants like NIBSS, NNPC, and NLNG is a masterstroke for capital market development.
“It forces transparency through mandatory disclosures, expands market cap and liquidity, deters corruption via public scrutiny and democratizes wealth for retail investors,” Brown said.
NNPC’s importance to Nigeria’s economy is difficult to overstate. Every oil company operating in the country, foreign or domestic, is required by law to run its production assets as a joint venture with the state firm, which manages Nigeria’s share of the proceeds.
That structure means NNPC’s leadership, its balance sheet and its credibility with international partners ripple through the entire industry, and through the federal budget, which still leans heavily on oil revenue.
For Tinubu, Saudi Aramco is the acceptable standard for NNPC’s IPO.
“The expansion is all for us, and I could look back and look at Aramco and others and see how the oil-producing company of Saudi Arabia was, the life of a publicly quoted company,” Tinubu said, pointing to Saudi Arabia’s state producer as a model.
The comparison to Saudi Aramco, whose 2019 listing remains the largest initial public offering in history, sets a high bar. It also underscores how far NNPC has to travel.
Aramco went public after years of preparation, with audited reserves, external auditors and a governance structure built for outside scrutiny.
NNPC, by contrast, is still working through the basics like sorting out its balance sheet, clarifying what it owes and to whom, and proving it can remit money to the federal government on schedule.
A decade ago, the scandal broke into the open when Sanusi Lamido, the country’s then-central bank governor, alleged NNPC had failed to remit $20 billion to state coffers over a two-year stretch, a claim that triggered a political firestorm and years of inquiry.
The more recent record offers little reassurance. The World Bank in May 2025 said that NNPC has been passing along only about half of the savings generated by Tinubu’s decision to end petrol subsidies, a policy shift that was supposed to free up billions of dollars for the government.
“What is unique to NNPC is that, unlike a lot of the other national oil companies within our corporate universe and around the world, most of its production and its assets are non-operated,” Wood Mackenzie, a global energy research firm, said.
Woodmac’s analysts, including Ian Thom, research director for Upstream; Neivan Boroujerdi, director of corporate research; and Mansur Mohammed, head of West Africa upstream content, noted that NNPC’s production is largely dependent on assets operated by international oil companies and indigenous producers.
“The NNPC has big ambitions, but its future hinges on how much capital other players are willing to invest in Nigeria,” the analysts said.
NNPC is not the only heavyweight Nigerian energy name investors are circling. Dangote Petroleum Refinery & Petrochemicals is targeting a $5 billion initial public offering it hopes to complete by October, a listing that traders say has already primed appetite for oil-and-gas paper on the local exchange.
Should both transactions eventually materialise, NGX would be adding two of the continent’s largest energy balance sheets to a bourse that has already tripled in naira terms, from roughly N28.7 trillion in the first half of 2023 to today’s levels, since the currency float and the market’s subsequent rebound.
Key macroeconomic forces supporting the NGX bull run are: banking sector recapitalisation, foreign exchange stabilisation and capital inflows, easing inflation and yield realignment, global index provider upgrades, expanding domestic energy refining capacity, and accelerated settlement cycles (T+1).
“In H2’26, we expect the Nigerian equities market to resume its bullish trend after consecutive declines in May and June. A relatively stable macroeconomic backdrop supports this view,” according to research analysts at Lagos-based CardinalStone.
They noted that the imminent listing of Dangote Refinery on the NGX, which is valued at circa $39.1 billion, could provide a meaningful tailwind for the broad market in the second half of 2026.
“We expect the listing to generate material transaction activity and attract substantial domestic and foreign institutional interest in H2’26, with its scale alone positioning it as a defining market event for the year,” CardinalStone analysts added.
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