JP MORGAN FINALLY MOVES TO EXIT NIGERIA FROM ITS BOND INDEX.

There is an African story about a child very much loved by his parents who would go into the bush and cry for help 'the Lion is here! the Lion is here!' The village hunters would rush out to save the boy,but to their chagrin they found him laughing so hard and enjoying the joke . This often went on for a while until the day the lion really came and ate the boy alive. JP Morgan has severally warned that it will remove Nigeria from its Government Bond Index (GBI-EM) and infact do this by the end of October, the bank said on Tuesday, after warning the government of Africa's biggest economy that currency controls were making transactions too complicated. The removal will force funds to sell Nigerian bonds, triggering potentially significant capital outflows and raising borrowing costs for the government. Struggling with a plunge in vital oil revenue, Nigeria had imposed currency restrictions to defend the naira after the burning of dollar reserves failed to halt a slide. The JP Morgan index tracks around $210 billion in assets under management. Some bonds will be removed from the index by the end of September and the rest by the end of October, JP Morgan said. The bank had warned Nigeria that to stay in the index, it would have to restore liquidity to its currency market in a way that allowed foreign investors tracking the index to conduct transactions with minimal hurdles. Nigeria became the second African country after South Africa to be listed in JP Morgan's emerging government bond index, in October 2012, after the central bank removed a requirement that foreign investors hold government bonds for a minimum of one year before exiting. Like the proverbial hunters, the Nigerian monetary authorities may not take this too seriously.