In the world of finance, Mohammed Garuba, co-founder of CardinalStone Partners Limited, a full-fledged investment banking firm based in Lagos, Nigeria, has carved out a reputation as a resilient leader, strategist, and mentor. With a distinguished career spanning investment banking, asset management, and board-level engagements, he has become a prominent voice in Nigeria’s financial markets. Yet, beyond the numbers and boardroom decisions lies a man deeply passionate about life, relationships, and the pursuit of balance. An ardent Arsenal fan, he strongly believes that supporting the North London club is itself a test of perseverance and one that builds character and mental toughness. He speaks on the lessons that shaped his career, his views on Nigeria’s economy, and the principles that continue to guide his journey. Obinna Chima brings the excerpts:
You’ve had a distinguished career in finance. How do you balance work, family, and your personal passions like boxing, football, and playing golf?
Yes, I would say I have had a successful career, but still working towards achieving a distinguished one, no doubt. When you do what you’re passionate about, you find out that it just comes naturally to you. I don’t see work as work anymore; I see work as something I enjoy, and once you do what you enjoy, you find out that you’re committing a lot of time to doing it. Initially, my philosophy around work-life balance was to work all through my active years, and then when I retire, I rest. So that’s one way to look at work-life balance.
But over time, I’ve realised that there are better ways to achieve the balance, and so as much as possible, I try to free my weekends to reconnect and increase my social capital. I appreciate and cherish lifelong relationships a lot, so I spend a lot of time connecting with friends and family. For me, that’s one big thing I might not have written down in any of my profile or memoirs, but relationships are key. And when I say relationships, it goes back all the way from my primary and secondary school friends up to newer relationships. These are people who knew me when I had nothing. These are people with whom we share old memories and can be frank and honest with me because we all started as peers and not because they expect anything in return. So, I spend time connecting with them. I have a schedule, once a week, I must reach out to people, usually towards the weekend. It’s a conscious, calculated effort in trying to build that social network. I reach out to friends, family, and associates in a conscious manner, and sometimes meet up to share notes on topical issues or to relax.
For football, I’m very passionate about it. I’m an Arsenal fan, unfortunately. Being an Arsenal fan shows that you can persevere. Yes, there’s something about Arsenal fans, people like Aliko Dangote – we are resilience and can persevere. There’s a lot of strength and mental energy required to love the club and remain hopeful. But aside from Arsenal, I also like Real Madrid in the Spanish league. So, I am a fan of two clubs and to choose or decide what to watch during the European Champions League match days and both teams are playing. It is even tougher when they paired to play against each other. But I really love Arsenal and I’ve loved Arsenal for a very long time. When I started watching football actively in the 1990s, I was initially a Liverpool fan. I had an uncle who was passionate about Liverpool, but over time, I got to admire Arsene Wenger’s style of football, especially because he was fond of developing young talents and had a knack for taking risk. I like to groom young people and build leaders. I’m very passionate about that. So, for mentorship, I try to spend quite a useful time with together watching football.
Golf – It’s something I take time off to relax once in a while, just to keep fit and relax. It’s a very interesting game. It’s a unique blend of networking, relationship building and exercise. So, when you combine all together I am doing what I love – building relationships and exercising all at once. That’s why I’m passionate about golf. If I decide on holiday destinations, one of the considerations is where there’s some golf-related activities, because it just helps you bond and build new relationships. It breeds a unique ice breaker. Yes, boxing. My passion for boxing started in secondary school. I’ve learned a few tricks, and ever since then, I have followed boxing passionately. I try to read one book every month, and I choose books that complement my weaknesses. I am quite self-aware, and so the books are either complementing my weaknesses, or they help in setting a direction on where I think the economy or a certain passion is going so I’ve read all manners of books, from medical books to business, engineering, to economics, to insurance books, name it. I just choose topics, but mostly, I prefer business-oriented books and that’s because it’s a continuously evolving sphere. Business is continuously evolving. I swing more towards books written by professors and academia because they are research-based, and they give new insights.
As someone who enjoys mentoring, what values do you try to pass on to young professionals entering finance?
I would say it’s not just finance, but it’s generally about building people’s careers, while I’m passionate about finance. One of the first key values I always pass on is ownership mentality. It is a key to success. Ownership mentality is so important because when you see anything you do like your own, it helps you excel significantly. With that, you’re building your personal brand, and at the same time, also contributing to work. So you find out that it’s a win-win. The first thing I always tell people is, never see yourself as an employee. See yourself as an employer.
Secondly, on the back of ownership mentality, never send low-quality work. Assume you are the CEO, and that anything you are working on, no matter how junior you are, what is going up to superiors for review, is good enough to leave the organisation with little or no corrections. Thirdly, I think another big one is having a long-term view and not being in a hurry. I tell people career is a marathon. Never run with speed. Have a clear goal.
Fourth is understanding the organisation. Any organisation you go to; you must always try to stand out. And by standing out, it’s about building relationships and doing your work at the highest standard, and you would always be noticed, and very easily, people gravitate towards you and you have sponsors. Do your job to the best of your ability as it will make you stand out and gift you excellence overtime. So, I think standing out and making a mark anywhere you go is very essential, and that’s what I mentor a number of young people about.
Humility is another key attribute. It’s even more important in finance and in Nigeria. When you are humble, you will go very far. And another key variable I teach people, and I would say this only became recent. People I have mentored post-COVID, I always tell them that resilience is a key attribute. Never accept no for an answer. During the COVID and post-COVID, things imploded. Those who were resilient, coincidentally, the Firm is a resilient organisation. I’ll say the COVID year a good year because we are resilient. Coincidentally, the Firm started in the middle of the global financial crisis in 2008. So, resilience has always been our watchword. We’re very dogged in what we do. We don’t take no for an answer and so adversity does not weight me down. We believe in the saying that ‘every disappointment is a blessing.’ We believe it and live it. We plan for adversity and so plan multiple scenarios. So we don’t see disappointment as obstacles, we see them as an opportunity to improve and fine-tune our business. I always let people know that being resilient is key in achieving success especially in our volatile environment.
You talked about your love for reading. Which book has had the most profound impact on your outlook on life and business?
Not one book, but four books. The first one was when I started my career. The Firm encouraged every analyst to read Stephen Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People.’ It was like a Bible, and it catapulted my productivity and personal growth. First of all, it improved my self-discovery and catapulted my understanding of what was expected of me. So you can imagine fresh out of university with eagerness to make an impression in my first job, I was able to quickly imbibe a managerial style that was goal oriented, learning to prioritize, and having clarity of vision. It was all because of that book. So it was very important in my career. But then the three other books, two in very quick succession – Built to Last, and Good to Great both by Jim Collins – have significantly influenced my entrepreneurial journey, and most recently, ‘Atomic Habits’ has been so impactful. So, ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People,’ built my self-discovery and my understanding of what is expected of me; ‘Built to Last and Good to Great,’ ignited the entrepreneurial spirit in me, and more recently, ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear transformed me. So these are books that have had tremendous impact in my life. In fact, they’re so interesting that once in a while I go and read them again and again, and each time I read them, I discover new insights. But I’ve read quite a lot of books, but I still continue to remember these and I still go back to them. Also, there are a few other investment books, but these have had a significant impact on my life.
Now to the economy, in your view, what structural reforms are urgently needed to transform the Nigerian economy?
I would say three things. There is no quick fix, unfortunately, because our problems are structural. If we want to emancipate our people, I would say, start first with education is what economies have used to significantly jumpstart their journey to growth and continued prosperity especially if we compare ourselves to a few of our peer countries. For example China in trying to improve the overall education, a percentage of literate people versus the entire population leveraged the ‘One Child policy’ for over three decades. What happened within this time is that the percentage of educated people significantly increased. When I went to university in the 90s, student enrolments were already overstretched and had started to impact on quality. Today, even NYSC does almost four batches in a year compared to just one when I finished university. If not that a decent number of Nigerians are studying abroad, there will be significant under-educated population. So as much as the government is trying, we’re still significantly behind due largely to the rapid population growth. I think education is one key area. The current 6-3-3-4 system was introduced in the 80s and till now it has fully not achieved its aim. Not everyone was supposed to go to university. Some were supposed to finish at Junior Secondary School and move into technical schools. Today, we’re struggling with a huge gap in technical skills. That takes me to my second submission, which is industrialisation. You can’t industrialise without having a strong education base to cultivate talents and also embark on research and development initiatives that suit our environment. So in the whole talk around industrialisation, we will find out that we don’t even have the requisite human capital and experience. Those who have industrialised successfully, the likes of Dangote, BUA, and those also striving for industrialisation had to import knowledge to fill the gap. We are finding out that in almost every sector, whether it’s in the construction or agriculture, we’re harnessing blue collar talents across West Africa who give quality service, because they maintain they have been able to adequately take advantage of technical and vocational education. We have the likes of Shell and Chevron in the Oil and Gas industry who had to create their own training programmes to re-train Nigerian graduates to meet their standards, before absorbing them in their system. So, our ability to take education seriously by ensuring it is well funded it would also lead to huge technological development. Even as ‘Japa syndrome’ increased and we lost some of our best hands to international competition for talents we would be able to ensure we create a decent pool so we still have a significant number of people available to develop the country. Also with a large enough pool of well-educated population those who decide to emigrate actually go on to become good ambassadors and role models, as opposed to becoming liabilities in the host countries when we leave a larger population uneducated. So, the more people we educate, the higher the possibility of good representation of Nigeria globally. In fact, an educated populace has a better tendency to demand good governance, better voting outcome and quality of life. Closely following is agriculture. Till today, for a country like Nigeria, we still do more subsistence farming than mechanised farming. As far back as the late 70s, we already had a problem with food which was why initiative like Operation Feed the Nation was launched to enable us achieve self-sufficiency in food production with citizens were encouraged and incentivised to go into farming. The government rules allow workers to have a second job in the form of farming but not adequate incentives to make it a reality. Based on National Bureau of Statistics data, we give birth to roughly 600 children every hour in Nigeria. That’s roughly 14,400 children every day and about 5.2 million a year. If you consider a typical school having six hundred pupils, then it means we literally are giving birth every hour to roughly the size of a whole secondary school every hour. When you work with facts and statistics, you will discover that even with the revenue we generate as a country will be difficult to such a rapidly growing population considering years of under investments. The more we educate our people, the better for us and we’ve seen countries do that successfully. Indians have successfully emigrated to different parts of the world and make a mark especially in the USA and UK culminating in the British Prime Minister of Indian roots. They had a highly educated populate who emigrated and could compete and are now running some of the biggest organisations in the world. So education, industrialisation are key, and then closely followed is agriculture. Inflation numbers today is heavily influenced by agriculture.
All these you mentioned are long-term measures, what do you think they should focus on in the short to medium term?
No doubt, there are short-term wins especially to tackle the debilitating effect of food inflation by leveraging our huge population as well as technology. Many things that can be done, but what is paramount is to have in place a clear policy direction. Nothing stops the government, for example, from considering a four-day working week for certain sectors whereby a day is allocated to farming staple crops. For example, a policy can, be put in place to leverage the National Youth Service Scheme to support agricultural cultivation of cash foods and you would see a multiplier effect in food production. But government, too has to then fix the main challenge which is mechanized farming and the provision of agricultural infrastructure like irrigation and storage. Use Dubai, for example, they have no rainfall, as we do in Nigeria, but they farm all year round. So, there are two things lacking that government will need to fix for this to happen. The first is irrigation, and the second is storage. Once these two critical issues are tackled, we will see the transformation of agriculture towards food sufficiency. Wastage is reduced and we can farm all year round. I don’t need to wait for the rainy season. There’s water to wet my crops, and I’m farming all year round. I see that the current Ministry of Agriculture is doing wonderful, because they’re putting the building blocks to enable this growth. But for short-term wins, I feel, from a monetary policy point of view, we are seeing stability, and businesses are now able to plan better, and the results are showing across the economy. Most of the short-term wins, the government recognised them and very quickly moved to resolve them. The oil subsidy was a hydra-headed monster that was sinking the country. We were burning cash, and it is bitter pill for the citizens to swallow but it was inevitable. I personally do not think the government has done a good job in explaining the positives of the subsidy removal but hopefully, as benefits begins to trickle down, it will be generally accepted. So the subsidy and FX reforms have created a much more conducive environment for businesses to plan and contribute to stable economic growth. And then another quick win is resolving security, which I think the government has also recognised and is doing everything to address. They have adopted a multi-pronged approach, and I am confident that security will improve, albeit slowly. The setting up of ‘forest guards’, a dedicated security outfit is a welcome development. It will not only create employment for over 100,000 people, but it will also help improve the security architecture. They’ll be trained to combat insecurity and criminal activities affecting communities and safeguarding natural resources. Two things happen there: One, it improves agriculture output will be encouraged to return to their farms, and it supports the mining sector.
How is your Firm positioning itself to attract and retain investors in an environment where market volatility, inflation, and policy somersault remain significant challenges?
I think we’ve done this quite well with research. Again, it’s about informing and guiding investors. The more you inform people, investors would continue to come. We spend a lot of time educating and informing investors. One key principle we abide by is that there is no one that can manage an investor’s money better than them. They’re certain investors who knew nothing about the stock market before, and when they started getting close to the Firm, we started educating them. We find that some of them take even far better decisions than some professionals, because they’re bringing their unique experience from a different sector, and we’re supporting them with the right quality of research. We cover macroeconomic research, we do sector-specific research, and we do company-specific research. When you combine all of these, you’re able to understand the economy, the industry, as well as certain key sectors. We also do thematic reports. There are certain sectors or companies that we don’t cover, but investors require specific information on them, and we spend time curating research reports on those companies.
What is your expansion plan?
We started as an asset management firm, and we want to continue strengthening that franchise. We’ve also been building and growing our asset management base significantly. We started off as a purely investment banking firm, but today we see ourselves as an investment franchise. While we’ve done very well in traditional asset management, we also pivoted into alternative asset management. Also I am looking to build a strong franchise that would focus a lot more on real sector by leveraging financial sector expertise and processes particularly looking at the entire real estate value chain as well as key infrastructure that would support the growth objectives of the economy.
How soon are we expecting to see the take-off of the real sector business?
We’ve started most of the initiatives. Some of them are policy-oriented, and we’ve started pushing some of these initiatives to the relevant government agencies. Luckily, we have a fairly supportive government that is very hungry to put reforms in place to catapult growth. The government at the moment is driving quite a lot of initiatives in the housing sector… Just recently, the Minister of Housing was at the Lekki Free Trade Zone to secure a huge expanse of land to support a new building materials hub. Alhaji Aliko Dangote in his desire to contribute to the growth of the economy leveraged similar reforms to venture into Cement manufacturing about two decades ago and today we are self-sufficient in cement and no longer import cement. The real sector is huge and fixing of the housing gap in Nigeria can be achieved as the ecosystem is been built. In Africa, there’s a housing gap of about 50 million units and Nigeria alone accounts for about half of the deficit. As we look to fix the housing gaps caused by rapid urbanization, the focus typically is in residential housing which in turn leads to the development of commercial buildings to complement the symbiotic relationship caused by increased population density that then creates demand for local businesses and services like offices, restaurants, shops and recreation. This demand, in turn, attracts businesses, leading to the construction or conversion of commercial properties to support the residential community.
Looking ahead, what are your top three strategic priorities for the Firm in the next five years, and how do you see the firm shaping Nigeria’s broader investment landscape?
It’s to continue to grow our assets under management. Pension business is very key for the Firm. We have a pension business and we believe, we have a lot to offer in that sector. We want to optimise returns for investors in collaboration with the government, as well as the National Pension Commission, that’s very key for us. We want to also continue to encourage Nigerians in diaspora to believe in Nigeria, to invest in Nigeria, both in the real sector, various safe financial instruments And thirdly, to support government initiatives significantly in the provision of infrastructure and the real sector.
You sit on the board of the Nigerian Exchange Limited. We saw the stock market gain approximately N26 trillion in the first eight months of 2025. How do you assess the resilience of Nigeria’s markets against global shocks, such as rising interest rates or geopolitical tensions?
I would say it’s multi-pronged. First, it’s a signal of confidence in the economy as the stock market is a leading indicator for growth. That’s the biggest reason, because while reforms are ongoing, certain sectors show the impact quickly and the stock market is a barometer for the economy. Secondly, we are seeing new set of investors enter the capital market. Foreigners are getting more confident as they see green shoots in the economy. For the last few years the stock market was almost wholly dominated by local investors because of the Foreign exchange challenges. So, as FX is stabilising, we’re seeing a more diverse make up of investors in the Nigerian stock market. I would not say it’s an appreciation, per say but more of a correction, especially for the blue-chip companies. And why I say that, is because when you look at the exchange rate equivalent of stocks about two years ago, specifically, before the devaluation, some of these stocks have just risen back to the dollar equivalent, so it is more like par for a foreign investor re-entering the stock market. A quick example is GTCO, which was around N25 two and a half years ago, before the devaluation, today it is about N100 and within this period the exchange rate has moved from around N400/$1 then, to about N1,550/$1 today. As we improve our overall economic indicators, opening our market and internationalising it again by attracting foreign portfolio investors, one thing we will achieve with that is a much more effective and transparent pricing mechanism. The investors in the stock market still see tremendous growth. One simple way to determine if a stock is expensive is to do a relative comparison using multiples. One of the popular ones is the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio. If you compare the P/E ratio of the Nigerian market versus the P/E ratio of other African and frontier markets, you find out that Nigeria is still relatively cheap, so there’s still room for growth, especially as foreign portfolio investors take a holistic emerging and global market view in making investment decisions. Also, as we see stability in foreign exchange and growth in economic indicators, the inclusion of Nigeria in the MSCI Index and other global index funds is imminent. It is only a matter of time. But by and large, investor confidence is key. The Central Bank of Nigeria, in trying to instill best practices, improve transparency and build confidence in the banking sector issued a circular on forbearance. What initially seemed negative, actually turned out to be more positive for investor confidence in the banking sector. It made more investors trust the financials of the bank even more. And when you believe more in something, you want to invest more. So, post that announcement, there was an initial dip in prices, but the banks have since seen share price appreciation largely because there is a lot more confidence. There is more confidence, and the regulators and government are key contributors.
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