LAGOS, Nigeria—Two top Nigerian stock-exchange officials were removed and a fugitive former bank executive surrendered, as efforts to clean up the financial sector accelerate.

These developments, together with an expected cabinet reshuffle by President Goodluck Jonathan, come just months before January presidential elections. Mr. Jonathan’s effort to project a cleaner government is considered a centerpiece of his election platform—though he has yet to officially declare his candidacy—and a former head of the country’s financial crimes watchdog is expected to run against him.

On Thursday, Nigeria’s Securities Exchange Commission named Emmanuel Ikazoboh, a former chief executive of accounting firm Deloitte in West and Central Africa, as interim stock-exchange head.

The appointment comes a day after a shakeout at Nigeria’s Stock Exchange, Africa’s second largest. Stock Exchange Director-General Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke was fired and the exchange’s president, Aliko Dangote, was suspended. Mr. Dangote, head of a business conglomerate, is one of Nigeria’s richest men.

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By WILL CONNORS and SARAH CHILDRESS

Foreign consumer-goods companies including Coca-Cola Co., Nestlé SA and Unilever PLC have been in Africa for decades without much competition from local players. Now, home-grown companies are expanding aggressively across the continent, eager to accommodate a growing middle-class among the billion-person population.

Among the most prominent of these consumer upstarts: African retailers such as Nakumatt Holdings Ltd. of Kenya, the top supermarket chain in East Africa, MTN Group Ltd., Africa’s largest cellphone provider, and South African restaurant chain Spur Corp. Nakumatt has expanded into three neighboring countries while 348-restaurant chain Spur has opened in seven other African countries.

Nakumatt chose to emulate an American icon: Kmart. On a visit to Florida in the 1980s, founder Atul Shah, a former mattress salesman, wandered into a Kmart and marveled at its cleanliness. He was so impressed at how the store sold food, household goods and furniture under one roof that he hung out there for hours a day for eight months. He became such a fixture that customers asked him for assistance. “Everybody was happy to be assisted by me,” said Mr. Shah.

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BY NGUYEN ANH THU IN VIETNAM, DARCY CROWE IN VENEZUELA, AND WILL CONNORS IN NIGERIA

The U.S. dollar, once universally accepted as the world’s strongest currency, has been trounced in recent months by everything from the euro to the Brazilian real to the South Korean won. But in the back-alley markets where business is done in many of the world’s developing economies, the dollar still reigns.

In jewelry stores in Vietnam, taxicabs in Venezuela and outdoor markets in Nigeria, black-market money-changers say the dollar is still the currency of choice, even though its value has fallen in some cases.

“The U.S. dollar is losing value, but not here in Vietnam,” said Vu Manh Quynh, a…

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By WILL CONNORS

ABUJA, Nigeria – A number of foreign banks, including four South African institutions and a British firm, have expressed interest in buying into Nigeria’s troubled banks, said central bank chief Lamido Sanusi.

In August, Mr. Sanusi orchestrated a $2.6 billion bailout of five Nigerian banks, which the central bank said were teetering because of mismanagement and underperforming loans. Four additional banks were bailed out this month, with an additional cash injection of $1.3 billion.

Mr. Sanusi has suggested he’d try to find domestic and foreign investors for the troubled banks. In an interview Thursday, Mr. Sanusi said he expected a number of healthier Nigerian banks to express interest in stakes, probably with foreign partners.

He said, however, that the central bank wasn’t inclined to have any one bank attain more than a 20% market share in Nigeria’s domestic banking sector. He said the central bank would likely step in to prevent a deal that would create a combined bank with a greater market share.

“I would probably stop it,” he said.

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LAGOS, Nigeria — One of Africa’s richest men and Nigeria’s only billionaire, Aliko Dangote, said Thursday that a list of debtors published by the Central Bank that cited him as owing millions of dollars to two banks was inaccurate, and he chastised the Central Bank for not alerting the affected parties before the list was made public.

“I don’t think they understand the consequences of what they’ve done,” Dangote said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires Thursday evening. “The Central Bank should have at least checked with people before going to press.”

In the list of debtors published Wednesday, Dangote Industries Ltd. was cited as owing bailed-out Oceanic Bank International (Nigeria) Ltd. (NIG.LA) 2.5 billion naira ($16 million). The list also cited a company called Dansa Oil & Gas Ltd., of which it said Dangote was a stakeholder, as owing bailed-out Intercontinental Bank NGN8.8 billion ($56 million).

“For [the Oceanic Bank] debt we’ve sent a check to the bank, and they’ve collected it and given us a receipt that they have it,” Dangote said. “For a group like ours, two and a half billion naira, that is actually just about 10% of our cement turnover per month. We’re a well-diversified organization.”

A Dangote official said later that Dangote Industries Ltd. had recently paid Oceanic Bank NGN 3.1 billion for its debt and other fees.  They did not say when they had paid off the debt.

An official at Oceanic Bank declined to comment, saying the bank didn’t discuss customers’ accounts.

A senior government official affiliated with the Central Bank admitted that there may have been mistakes in the debtors list released Wednesday, and that since it was for debts not paid through the end of May, some debtors may have settled their loans in the interim.

Part 5 of 5 of my series for Slate

LAGOS, Nigeria—Did you ever wonder what happened to that clunky 12-inch television you used to watch Seinfeld on? Or to that old CD player you wore out in the ’90s listening to Pearl Jam and P.M. Dawn? There’s a decent chance it ended up here, on the western outskirts of Lagos, in West Africa’s biggest electronics market, Alaba International.

Franklin Azubuike wants you to know that your old appliances are doing fine. And, by the way, thank you.

According to Azubuike, public affairs officer for the Alaba secretariat, the market’s 3,000 shops sell “anything electronic within the imagination of any man” to more than 300,000 people every single day. During the holiday season, the numbers are much, much higher.

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Part 2 of 5 of my series for Slate

LAGOS, Nigeria—Taye paddles us between the stilt-borne homes. Women glide by in canoes on their way to the market, men on their way to sea. Small children paddle themselves to school. They look at me warily, and I try to return their gaze, but my eyes still sting. The smoke from the cars grinding their way across the 7-mile-long bridge toward the city center has crept across the lagoon and gotten into my clothes, nose, and eyes.

It is morning in Makoko, a slum neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, built above lagoon water fetid with pollution and industrial and human waste. Men and women fish from dugout canoes as they have done for centuries. They also have two or three cell phones, each from a different service provider, which they use according to which mobile network is functioning best that day.

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Growth Continues, With or Without a Plan

part 1 of my 5-part series for Slate

LAGOS, Nigeria—Bar Beach wakes up later than the rest of Lagos. The prostitutes, touts, and religious devotees who live here on the breakwaters of the Atlantic Ocean emerge from their small shacks or from underneath tarps after the rest of the city has already begun its daily hustle. They had a late night.

Jutting up against the shoreline is a long concrete sea wall, similar in color, shape, and seeming disdain for aesthetics to Chicago’s south side Promontory Point revetment, with hundreds of tractor-tire-sized X-blocks meant to protect the nearby high-priced real estate. On a recent morning, I walked down the sea wall as men, women, and children appeared from behind the X-blocks, taking pulls from small brown bottles, smoking joints, or picking at their teeth with bits of plastic.

A few city employees were bent over, sweeping the causeway of dirt. Beside them was a sign that read, “Eko o ni baje!” Yoruba for “Don’t spoil Lagos.” The signs are posted all over the city. Few heed them, from the state minister driving by in his Bentley to the tattered guy next to me drinking his breakfast.

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Feature of mine in today’s Wall Street Journal:

LAGOS, Nigeria – In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and biggest oil producer, low crude prices are dragging down growth expectations, foreshadowing a dramatic slowdown in an economy that was teetering even in the good years.

Nigeria has long struggled with a fractious federal system, endemic corruption and ramshackle infrastructure — all factors that kept the commodities boom from lifting living standards significantly for most of the country’s 148 million people.

Now, falling oil prices and a struggling banking sector have forced the government to tap into a reserve account tied to excess crude-oil revenues that had bulked up during last year’s commodity boom. Nigeria depends on oil for more than 90% of its export earnings and 80% of its revenue.

…read the full article