Femi Otedola, chairman of First HoldCo Plc and one of Nigeria's wealthiest businessmen, told President Bola Tinubu at a private dinner in Paris on Monday that the administration's economic reforms had placed Nigeria on a path of sustainable growth, according to Premium Times and Nairametrics.
The setting matters. Tinubu was in Europe on what has been described as a 28-day working vacation — an extended overseas stay that has itself drawn domestic criticism. That a sitting Nigerian president conducting official business from European hotels received a leading financier's public validation at a private dinner rather than in Lagos or Abuja is a detail worth noting for anyone trying to read the political economy of the moment.
Otedola's First HoldCo Plc — the holding company for First Bank of Nigeria, one of the country's oldest and largest lenders by assets — gives his voice material weight. First Bank holds hundreds of billions of naira in deposits and its health is tightly coupled to the direction of interest rates, forex policy, and the broader credit environment. When its chairman signals confidence in macroeconomic direction, it is not empty rhetoric: his institution's balance sheet either benefits or suffers from the reforms in question.
The reforms Otedola was endorsing centre on two landmark policy shifts Tinubu announced at his May 2023 inauguration: the removal of the petrol subsidy, which had cost the federal government an officially acknowledged ₦4.4 trillion in 2022 alone, and the unification of Nigeria's multiple official exchange rate windows, which collapsed the spread between the official and parallel naira rates. Both moves were painful in the short term — inflation surged to a three-decade high above 33% earlier in 2024 before the Central Bank of Nigeria's aggressive rate tightening cycle began to drag it lower.
By mid-2025, headline inflation had retreated to roughly 23%, still historically elevated but directionally improved. The CBN's policy rate, which was raised to 27.5% during the tightening cycle, had begun a cautious descent as price pressures eased. Nigeria's gross external reserves recovered from a trough near $32 billion to hover above $37 billion for stretches of 2025. These are the numbers underpinning the optimism — though they are being felt very unevenly across the population, with food inflation remaining stubbornly high and purchasing power for wage earners still compressed.
For a bank like First Bank, rate normalisation is a double-edged event. High rates fattened net interest margins across the sector in 2024, with several Nigerian lenders posting record pre-tax profits. A pivot downward squeezes those margins but, if managed well, also lowers the cost of funds and widens the pool of creditworthy borrowers. Otedola's endorsement of the reform trajectory is, in part, a bet that the cycle will land softly enough for financial services to keep growing.
What is absent from the reported remarks is any specificity: no reference to GDP growth targets, no comment on the 4.6% year-on-year expansion Nigeria recorded in Q1 2025, no mention of unemployment or the naira's still-fragile position near ₦1,600 to the dollar on the parallel market. Broad praise delivered at a private dinner is a political act as much as an economic assessment, and investors and operators should weight it accordingly.
The episode also reinforces a structural feature of Nigerian business: the proximity between its largest private-sector figures and state power is tight, and endorsements of this kind are rarely cost-free for either party. For Otedola, aligning publicly with the administration protects First HoldCo's regulatory relationships at a moment when the CBN is still reshaping capital requirements and licensing conditions for banks. For Tinubu, a billionaire's blessing in Paris provides international-facing credibility during an extended overseas stay.
Why it matters: Otedola's endorsement carries real institutional weight given First HoldCo's size, but operators and investors should look past the headline to the underlying data — a 23% inflation rate, reserves above $37 billion, and a CBN rate cycle beginning to turn — to decide whether Nigeria's reform story has genuinely turned a corner or is simply in a more manageable phase of an ongoing adjustment.