Nigerian Shake-Up Not Yet Complete

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Nigeria dominates our table of the Top 30 West African banks more completely than the far larger South African banking sector is able to dominate its equivalent survey.

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Incredibly, the first 19 places in the regional table are filled by Nigerian institutions, with the rest of West Africa apparently left to pick up the crumbs. Yet these results are a sign both of Nigeria's strength and its weakness. It may possess the largest banking sector in the region and the largest financial institutions, but such a large number of banks, in what is still a fairly limited economy, is certainly a sign of weakness.

Thankfully, the Nigerian government has already implemented a deep-seated banking reform programme and there has been a major programme of mergers and acquisitions over the past year or so.

Once the bank results for the current financial year have been filed, our table should have a very different composition in 2007. There will almost certainly be fewer Nigerian banks than at present, but the gap between …