*Declare insurance market  to hit N2.5tn in 2025

Dike Onwuamaeze

The Commissioner for Insurance, National Insurance Commission (NAICOM), Mr. Olusegun Omosehin, and the President of Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), Mr. Gabriel Idahosa, have stated that investments in large-scale infrastructure projects like the Dangote Refinery and the Lekki Deep Sea Port would not be possible without a strong insurance ecosystem.
Omosehin and Idahosa made these statements during the LCCI’s insurance group’s “2025 Insurance Stakeholders’ Consultative Forum” with the theme: “Role of Insurance in Economic Recovery.”
According to Idahosa: “Many Nigerians did not know that without insurance, we will probably never have had the Dangote Refinery and the Lekki Deep Sea Port because investors that put their money there would not even touch them without appropriate insurance safeguards.”
He added: “Large-scale infrastructure projects are essential to economic revitalisation, yet they carry significant risks. The insurance sector plays a crucial role in de-risking these investments, enabling the Nigerian government and private enterprises to undertake ambitious projects in energy, transportation, housing, and telecommunications.
“By providing coverage for construction, operational risks, and liabilities, insurers contribute directly to national development and economic expansion.”
Speaking in the same vein, Omosehin said that without a sound insurance sector that could play its role in terms of economic stability and risk management, most of the big investors like the Dangote Group would not have dared to invest in the Nigerian economy.
He said: “Often what people are hearing are the big investors but they do not bother how these big investors are standing. It is the insurance sector that keeps them standing. We take all of those risks and allow them to venture.
“That is where we become very relevant in the economic stability and risk management factors and also in terms of wealth and asset protection that are giving confidence to our investors to be able to perform.”
The chief executive of NAICOM, also used the forum to debunk the perception that the Nigerian insurance sector is a perennial low contributor to national output when compared to its peers in some parts of Africa and beyond.
He also insisted that available data has proved that the insurance sector in Nigeria has been growing at a rate that is faster than Nigeria’s national output rate since 2019, and even in the COVID pandemic period.
He ascribed such perception to false statistical analyses that have failed to compare an apple with an apple.
Omosehin said: “I have heard people castigate us (insurance sector) for not contributing enough to our national output. I am saying that we are gradually seeing two things around that: the first thing is that we are not comparing an apple with an apple. That is one major mistake in the analysis.”
According to him, in most countries the insurance sector comprises the pension, insurance and health, which are lumped together to arrive at high insurance’s contribution to their national economy.
But in Nigeria: “we will remove pension irrespective of its size and put it aside; we also remove some part of health and put it aside, and then isolate insurance and start to compare. Is that fair? There is a whole lot of reworking that needs to be done. Yes, I am not defending the fact that there are gaps for the insurance sector to cover.
“But most of the analyses are deficient in terms of the size of the statistics and the definition of the statistics and hence the rationalisation and the conclusions that were made,” Omosehin said.
He added: “The point I am trying to make is that the Nigerian insurance market grew at a pace that was higher than the national output throughout these years, from 2019 to 2024.
“Even in the year of COVID we grew at a pace that was faster and better than the national output and national growth rate. Data has also revealed that consistently, we have been seeing growth in the sector. And we are hoping that premium generation in 2025 will end up at around N2.5 trillion.”
According to him, the historical trend of the Nigerian insurance industry growth in six years showed that it recorded 19.2, 1.3, 22.7, 25.1, 32.1 and 51.8 percentage growth rates in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 respectively.
He said it recorded these percentage growths by attaining a market size of N508. 2 billion, N514.6 billion, N631.4 billion, N789.6 billion, N1.043 trillion and N1.583 trillion in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 respectively.
In his welcome address, the Chairman of LCCI Insurance Group, Mr. Adeniran Aderinoye, said that as businesses navigate Nigeria’s current economic realities, it has become evident that insurance is playing a critical role in rebuilding and sustaining economic growth.

 “Whether in protecting businesses, securing livelihoods, or fostering financial resilience, a well-structured insurance sector is indispensable to national recovery,” he said.

​