Earlier this year, Nigeria completed the most significant reordering of its banking system in two decades. The Central Bank’s recapitalisation exercise, which opened in April 2024 and closed at the end of March, required commercial banks holding international authorisation to carry ₦500 billion in capital, national banks ₦200 billion and regional banks ₦50 billion. By late February the apex bank had verified more than ₦4 trillion in fresh capital, the greater part of it raised locally.
The last time this happened, in 2004 and 2005, the sector went from eighty-nine banks to twenty-five, and the shareholder registers set then are the ones much of the industry still runs on today. Two years. Trillions of naira. New names on the register of almost every bank in Nigeria. I have not been able to establish how many of those names belong to women. Not because the number is necessarily small.
Because nobody appears to be counting. What we know about women in Nigerian banking is genuinely good news, and I want to say so plainly before anything else. Roughly a third of our commercial and merchant banks are now led by women. Adaora Umeoji at Zenith. Miriam Olusanya at Guaranty Trust Bank. Nneka Onyeali-Ikpe at Fidelity. Yemisi Edun at FCMB. In 2019 there was one. These are not ceremonial appointments.
These are the executives who steered multi-trillion naira balance sheets through the very recapitalisation I have just described, and who carry the consequences when it goes wrong. The boardroom picture has moved too. The 2025 gender diversity scorecard on the thirty largest companies listed on the Nigerian Exchange found women holding ninety-eight of three hundred and fifteen board seats, a little over thirty-one per cent.
For the first time in that scorecard’s six years, not one company in the group has an