TheCable

The house of representatives on Wednesday passed a bill allowing the Nigerian Stock Exchange become a publicly listed company.

The process, which is called demutualisation, allows the bourse sell shares to investors and be listed on the exchange for trading.

This makes the NSE join the league of Johannesburg Stock Exchange and Nairobi Stock Exchange, which are already publicly listed companies.

The bill will now be sent to the president for it to be signed into the law.

Speaking at the market’s outlook event earlier in the year, Oscar Onyeama, NSE chief executive officer, had said that he expected that the bill will be passed in 2018.

Onyeama had also announced plans for the exchange to launch exchange-traded derivatives securities in 2018.

NSE got approval from its members, mostly stockbrokers and some institutional investors, to become a publicly listed company in 2017.

The exchange, which started trading on June 5, 1961, has 200 companies listed on it. In 2017, the market rose by 72 percent and was ranked the third best-performing market in the world in 2017.

In the early trading days of 2018, market capitalisation on the market passed the N16 trillion mark for the first time in the history of trading on the market.