We Should Rather Treate Capital As An Industrial Strategy

We cannot transform Nigeria’s economy if we continue to think of capital merely as money to be distributed rather than as a strategic instrument for building productive capacity. We must rethink where capital goes, who receives it, what it builds, how efficiently it is deployed and, most importantly, what economic value it leaves behind.

The Bank of Industry (BOI)’s 2026 Annual Public Lecture has brought this question into sharp focus. We should pay attention because Nigeria’s industrial challenge is not simply a shortage of capital. We also have a problem of capital structure, access, allocation and productivity.

We have seen too much capital chasing short-term opportunities while businesses capable of producing goods, creating employment and strengthening domestic value chains struggle to obtain patient and appropriately structured financing. We cannot continue this way and expect industrial transformation to emerge by accident.

Olasupo Olusi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the BOI, put the issue directly: “Nigeria needs capital that can support long-term industrial growth, reach underserved businesses, and attract private investment into productive sectors. This requires us to think carefully about how capital is mobilised, structured and deployed, and the development outcomes it ultimately delivers.”

We should regard those words not merely as a banking observation but as an economic imperative.

The figures from the BOI demonstrate that development finance can have substantial reach. We are told that the Bank disbursed N645 billion in 2025, supporting more than 12,000 businesses and positively impacting 1.68 million jobs.

But we should not allow the scale of disbursement to become the sole measure of success. We must ask what those businesses produced, how many survived, how many expanded, how many became exporters, how many strengthened domestic supply chains and how many attracted additional private capital. Capital must produce more capital.

If capital merely finances consumption or repeatedly rescues enterprises without improving their productive capacity, we have postponed rather than solved the problem.

This is why Dr Asad Alam, former World Bank Director and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, offers an important perspective. “There is more to capital than just capital accumulation and investment,” Alam stressed.

We should take that distinction seriously. An economy does not become productive simply because more money is invested in it. We need capital to be used more intelligently, efficiently and productively.

We must therefore place total factor of productivity at the centre of our economic conversation. We should be asking how much more output we can generate from the labour, technology, infrastructure and capital already available to us.

We must also confront the geography of capital. Businesses outside the traditional centres of economic activity cannot remain permanently underserved if we genuinely seek inclusive transformation. Small manufacturers, agricultural processors, technology companies and businesses operating in less-developed markets need financing structures that reflect their realities rather than generic lending models.

We also need stronger links between development finance and private investment. Public or development capital should not crowd out private capital. It should help make productive investments sufficiently credible and de-risked to attract it.

This is where Alam’s three pillars of incentives, institutions and inclusion become important. We need incentives that reward productive investment. We need institutions capable of allocating capital transparently and efficiently. And we need inclusion that ensures viable businesses are not excluded simply because they operate outside established financial networks.

We should also be honest about the responsibility of businesses. Access to capital cannot substitute for sound management, credible governance, viable business models and disciplined execution. We cannot demand more capital while ignoring the quality of the enterprises receiving it.