The Johannesburg Stock Exchange does not usually campaign in public. This week it made an exception. New chief executive Valdene Reddy told CNBC Africa that Africa's largest bourse is bidding to host a secondary listing of Nigeria's Dangote refinery, once the company completes its planned initial public offering at home later this year.
The prize is enormous. Reuters reporting, carried by News24, puts the Dangote IPO at roughly $5 billion, about R82 billion, a raise expected to conclude around October and likely to be the largest ever on the continent. The refinery, Africa's biggest, running at 650,000 barrels a day in Lagos since 2024, has drawn a crowd of suitors, with exchanges in South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Ghana and Rwanda all angling for a slice.
Why Johannesburg thinks it can win
The JSE's pitch rests on liquidity. It records average daily trading of between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, against roughly $10 million to $20 million a day on Nigeria's own exchange, a market perhaps a hundred times deeper. Reddy framed Dangote as part of a robust pipeline of second-half listings spanning mining, fintech, property and construction, and said the company will go and list in Nigeria first but with a strong intent to come to Johannesburg shortly thereafter. South Africa is already close to the deal in another way: Standard Bank, the continent's largest lender, is a lead adviser through its Nigerian arm.
The catch behind the courtship
Here is where enthusiasm meets fine print. A cross-listing of the actual shares in a second country is not planned at this stage, according to the Reuters reporting. Instead, exchanges like the JSE would more likely offer investors depositary receipts or similar instruments that merely track the Nigerian shares, not the shares themselves. So even a successful bid could deliver a shadow of the listing rather than the real thing. The valuation, too, is contested, pegged somewhere between $40 billion and $50 billion depending on the source.
For an exchange that has watched its roster of listings thin out for two decades, landing even a piece of Dangote would be a statement of relevance. But strong intent is not ink on a page. Whether Johannesburg's public courtship turns into an actual listing, and in what form, is the thing to watch.
