Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta has long been plagued by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a rebel group whose attacks against oil infrastructure and personnel have slashed Nigerian oil output by a fifth (the country is the world’s eighth-largest oil exporter). Now, Reuters reports that “insecurity in northern Niger, where Tuareg rebels are fighting government forces, is stifling investment in the vast desert nation’s mining industry.” Niger is one of the world’s top uranium producers and has handed out 127 mining exploration permits over the last three years in order to attract more investment. Interest in uranium for nuclear power generation has increased in recent years due to high oil prices and concerns about global warming. In fact, U.S. President Barack Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, has repeatedly stated that nuclear power must play a …

MTN Nigeria, the country’s largest cellco by subscribers and part of South Africa’s MTN (which has 70 million customers in 21 countries), will invest at least US$1.5 billion on its network this year in order to boost its carrying capacity and to improve the quality of service on its network, according to its Corporate Service, Wale Goodluck.  MTN Nigeria has invested in building up transmission networks over the past four years in order to make up for the country’s lack of telecoms infrastructure, said Goodluck, who went on to note that the firm’s wireless subscriber base has grown rapidly over the past three years.  In fact, according to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms database, the company had 20.17 million customers in September 2008, up from 14.95 million a year earlier.

Per various reports, Nigeria’s …

Renaissance Capital, which won the “Investment Bank of the Year” award at the 2008 African Banker Awards in Washington D.C., is “broadly negative about the Nigerian equity market’s performance over 2009 — particularly in the first half.”  How bad have things gotten for the oil-dependent, West-African nation?  Per Bloomberg: Nigeria’s naira has lost more than a fifth of its value since the end of November when the government decided to allow the currency to depreciate rather than drain its foreign- exchange reserves as the price of oil, the country’s main export, plummeted. The Nigeria Stock Exchange’s All Share Index closed at 24,000.09 on Jan. 23, a decrease of 64% from its record 66,371.20 reached on March 5, 2008. The “most likely” scenario (60%) for 2009 sees the key index continuing its rapid descent in the first-half of the year, followed by ...

Financial Times filed a rather dour report recently on the sorry state of the Ivory Coast’s cocoa industry, which accounts for roughly 40% of global supply.  Prices in London rose by nearly 70% last year to reach 23-year highs last month, trading at £1,820 a ton (though that also reflects sterling’s fall).  Prices in New York, denominated in dollars, rose by more than 30%.
Today, the industry’s prospects appear decidedly sickly.  Political turmoil that followed the outbreak of a civil war in 2002 has hindered the investment needed to replace ageing trees. Cocoa-growing, formerly a source of pride, has lost its prestige.  The cloud hanging over Ivory Coast’s cocoa industry has fuelled a gravity defying rally in cocoa prices even as the global slowdown has caused prices for other commodities to slump.

With some care, experts say activity in Ivory …

Nigeria’s consumer price inflation rose to 15.1% year-on-year in December from 14.8% the previous month. Growth in food prices, which form much of the index basket, declined slightly to 18.0% year-on-year from 18.1% in November. Inflation rose on a month-by-month basis, with the composite consumer price index (CPI) up 0.8% to 192.6 points in December. The rise in the index was caused mainly by an increase in the price of some staple food items. Per the Daily Trust: With the 8.2 percent increase in the inflation rate in just about 13 months, experts believe this is not particularly healthy for the economy because the living standard of the people [will] further decline. What is more worrisome in this inflationary economy is that prices of goods have not only gone up but there is equally scarcity of money in circulation, thus, putting ...

Nigeria's foreign currency reserves rose this week to 59.7 billion dollars said the Central Bank of Nigeria. The rise breaks a trend over the last months still dropping crude oil prices in the international market. Oil prices have more than halved since hitting record levels of above 147 dollars in July on concerns about the faltering global economy. Since the beginning of 2006, militant attacks have cut Nigeria's oil output from 2,6 million barrels to around 1,9 million barrels.

The Euromoney Nigeria conference that we attended yesterday was fascinating in its upbeat nature despite the carnage in the stock market. Turns out the property market is still on rising sharply. Also, although there is some USD 20bn in margin loans, even if all that were written off, the banks would still be over capitalised. Infrastructure and private equity are clearly the place to be.