Patience Oniha, director general of the Debt Management Office, said that it is engaging with JP Morgan to get back on the JPMorgan GBI index.
“We believe we are eligible to get back on the JPMorgan GBI index with all the reforms in the FX market,” she said at a Nigeria investor presentation today at Willard InterContinental in Washington DC.
The event was jointly organized by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), JP Morgan, Chapel Hill Denham, Citibank, Standard Chartered and the Ministry of Finance at the IMF 2025 spring meeting at the Willard Intercontinental.
The JPMorgan Government Bond Index-Emerging Markets (GBI-EM) indices are comprehensive emerging market debt benchmarks that track local currency bonds issued by the Emerging Market governments. Some of the countries include Brazil, Thailand, Turkey, Peru, and South Africa.
In 2015, the Nigerian government bond was yanked off the index after a series of administrative measures by the CBN that impeded the ability of foreign investors to replicate Nigeria’s weight in the GBI-EM suite of indices. This includes the cancellation of the weekly CBN Dollar auction, amongst others, and the lack of a fully functional two-way FX market.
There couldn’t be a better time than now to invest in Nigeria- Cardoso
At the event, Yemi Cardoso, the CBN governor, also highlighted to investors that the naira is stabilising and that the difficult reforms have begun to bear fruit.
“ We believe that by adopting orthodox monetary policy, macros have been stabilised, which has led Fitch to recently upgrade the country,” he said.
Fitch, the credit rating agency, has recently upgraded Nigeria’s long-term foreign-currency issuer default rating to ‘B’ from ‘B-’, with a stable outlook.
Cardoso said that the competitive naira is a game changer, “a great paradigm shift in how foreign direct investors look at Nigeria, who have been consistently looking at how the naira moves. There couldn’t be a better time than now to invest in Nigeria,” he said.
“No doubt we’re in a period of heightened uncertainty. We have for the past 18 months have been in a period of crisis, and we’ve rolled up our sleeves to do the difficult things. We’re on the road to ensure our institutions are resilient to tackle the shocks that will confront us,” Cardoso said.
