Ivorian billionaire Jean Kacou Diagou is quitting Nigerian life insurance after 15 years

Fifteen years after Jean Kacou Diagou took his insurance group into Nigeria, he is giving up a quarter of what it earns there.

NSIA Insurance has secured approval in principle from Nigeria's National Insurance Commission to transfer its entire life portfolio to CHI Life Assurance, the company's chairman Adesegun Akin-Olugbade said after its annual general meeting in Lagos on Aug. 31. The transaction still requires legal and regulatory completion.

Once it goes through, NSIA stops being a composite insurer in Nigeria, meaning one licensed to write both life and general cover, and operates only in non-life.

The business it is handing over is not small. Life and health generated 8.15 billion naira of insurance revenue in 2025, about $5.86 million at 1,390 naira to the dollar, against 24.87 billion naira from non-life, roughly $17.89 million. That is a 25 to 75 split.

Akin-Olugbade framed the exit as a decision about where the company can win rather than a retreat. NSIA has a comparative advantage in non-life, he said, particularly in motor insurance and corporate risk, and it is a deliberate choice about where growth is available.

The timing owes something to regulation. Nigeria raised capital requirements for insurers under a sector reform adopted in 2025, and NSIA's shareholders responded at the same meeting by converting 6 billion naira of retained profit into share capital, about $4.32 million, lifting it from 9 billion naira to 15 billion. No shareholder put in fresh money.

Running a life book and a general book side by side under higher capital rules costs more than running one well.

Diagou entered Nigeria in 2011 by taking control of ADIC Insurance Company for around 20 billion CFA francs, about $35.53 million at 562.9 francs to the dollar. He described the country afterwards as a more or less obligatory passage for any group intending to matter across Africa, and he has stuck with it through a naira depreciation that repeatedly cut the dollar value of what he had bought.

That currency problem is the unstated backdrop here. An Ivorian group reports in CFA francs, which are pegged to the euro, while its Nigerian subsidiary earns in a currency that has lost a large share of its value against both. Growth in Lagos has not always translated into growth in Abidjan.

The group Diagou built remains one of the larger financial businesses in francophone Africa. NSIA operates in twelve countries across West and Central Africa and holds 21 life and non-life insurance companies, a reinsurer and four banks, alongside asset management and financial intermediation.

Nigeria was always the outlier in that footprint, an anglophone market with a different regulator, a different currency regime and far more competitors than the CFA franc zone where NSIA is dominant.

Neither NSIA nor CHI Life has said what the portfolio transfer is worth.