Imagine buying shares in a Nigerian company as a university student, forgetting about the investment for almost 20 years, then checking your account only to find your ₦9,000 investment is now worth around ₦9,900. You would probably feel cheated, right?

That is exactly the kind of story that can make someone question the entire idea of investing in shares.

A woman recently shared on X about how her husband bought Transcorp shares with ₦9,000 when he was a first-year university student about 20 years ago. When he checked the investment years later, he reportedly found that it was worth only about ₦9,900.

His reaction was understandable: he wished he had used the money to buy beer instead. But this story hides a much bigger financial lesson. The question is not simply, “Why didn’t the shares make him rich?”

The better question is:

What actually happens when you buy shares in a company, hold them for decades, and do nothing else?

To answer this lady’s ponderings, we will use Transnational Corporation Plc, commonly known as Transcorp Group, as an interesting case study.

What happened to Transcorp over the past 20 years?

Transcorp was listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange in November 2006. According to contemporary reporting, the company listed 18.553 billion shares at ₦6 per share. On its first day of trading, strong demand pushed the closing price to ₦6.30.

Read the contemporary report on Transcorp’s 2006 listing.

The great news is that as of  September 21, 2026, Transcorp trades at about ₦36.15 per share. Its recent 52-week range has been ₦33 to ₦55.05.

View Transcorp’s current and historical share-price data.

At first glance, this seems impressive. A share that traded around ₦6 in 2006 is now around ₦36. That is almost a sixfold increase in the quoted share price. I know you have started calculating what it would have cost to buy ₦10 million worth of shares; that would be about ₦60 million today, right?

But this is where the story gets more complicated, and your excitement might suddenly plummet. You cannot simply compare the ₦6 price from 2006 with today’s ₦36 price and calculate an investor’s actual return.

Why? Because Transcorp has changed its share structure over the years.

The number of shares changed too.

Transcorp’s own historical records show that its issued shares changed significantly. In 2006, the company had about 18.55 billion shares after its listing. In 2007, this increased to approximately 25.81 billion shares.

In 2013, the company conducted a rights issue, bringing the number of shares to approximately 38.72 billion. Then, in 2016, a bonus issue increased the issued shares to approximately 40.65 billion.

Read Transcorp’s historical share-capital information in its annual report.

Then came another important event. In 2024, Transcorp carried out a 1-for-4 share reconstruction. The company’s issued shares fell from approximately 40.6 billion to 10.2 billion. That sounds frightening until you understand what a share reconstruction means. Transcorp explained that shareholders’ share count would decrease proportionally, but the reconstruction itself would not change the total value of their investment.

That is why looking at an old share price without considering corporate actions can create a misleading picture.

Read Transcorp’s explanation of the 2024 share reconstruction.

So what would ₦9,000 invested around 2006 look like today?

Suppose the person who invested exactly ₦9,000 made their investment around the time Transcorp was listed at ₦6 per share.

At ₦6 per share:

₦9,000 ÷ ₦6 = 1,500 shares. (This would be treated only as an assumption that he bought on the day of the IPO)

We do not know his exact purchase date or price. It is simply an illustration using Transcorp’s 2006 listing price. The 2016 bonus issue increased the number of shares outstanding from about 38.72 billion to 40.65 billion. If this X user’s husband had 1,500 shares before that bonus issue, the holding would have increased to approximately 1,575 shares. (This is more like a ratio of how much everyone gets based on what they own and what is to be distributed)

Then the 2024 1-for-4 reconstruction would reduce that holding proportionally to roughly 394 shares, subject to the exact treatment of fractional shares. (However, bear in mind that Transcorp didn’t just divide the shares into 1/4; they did it so the monetary value of the shares they received was the same as what they held before the split.)

At today’s approximately ₦36.15 share price, that would put the investment at roughly:

394 × ₦36.15 = about ₦14,200.

Again, this is an illustration, not a reconstruction of the husband’s actual account. But it gives us an interesting result. An investment of ₦9,000 could potentially have become roughly ₦14,000 in capital value over about 20 years, before considering dividends.

That is nowhere near the kind of wealth people imagine when they hear the phrase “long-term investing.” This is where the real lesson begins. But before we go further, a big question is: what about dividends?

What about dividends?

This is where the ₦9,900 story becomes even more interesting. A shareholder does not make money only when the share price increases. There are two major components of stock-market returns:

Capital appreciation & dividends.

Transcorp has paid dividends to shareholders over its history. For example, the company announced a 6-kobo-per-share dividend for 2014. More recently, dividends have become considerably larger.

For 2024, Transcorp recommended a ₦1.00 dividend per share, comprising a 40-kobo interim dividend and a 60-kobo final dividend.

For 2025, Transcorp reported another major increase in its business performance and paid shareholders a total dividend of ₦2.00 per share for the year, according to reporting on the company’s 20th AGM.

And in 2026, the company declared another 40-kobo interim dividend following its first-half results.

Read Transcorp’s H1 2026 results and dividend announcement.

Therefore, someone looking only at the difference between the original purchase price and today’s share price could underestimate the actual return.

The critical question becomes: Did the investor receive the dividends, and what did they do with them?

If the investor collected and spent the dividends, they contributed to overall wealth but did not increase the number of shares owned. Reinvesting means they could have purchased additional shares and generated more dividends in the future.

That is the power of compounding.

Did Transcorp rug her and her husband’s finances?

This is where the lady feels cheated: Transcorp has grown significantly, but my shares haven’t amounted to anything significant; of course Transcorp has cheated me.

“But Transcorp became a much bigger company. So why didn’t the shareholder become rich?”

The reality here is that company growth and individual investment growth are related, but they are not the same thing. Transcorp today is dramatically larger than the business investors knew in 2006.

In 2024, the company reported revenue of ₦408 billion, compared with ₦197 billion in 2023. Profit after tax increased from ₦32.6 billion in 2023 to ₦94.1 billion in 2024. Total assets increased to ₦751.6 billion, while shareholders’ funds reached ₦271.7 billion.

Read Transcorp’s FY2024 financial results.

The company grew even further in 2025. Transcorp reported ₦544 billion in revenue, up 33% from 2024, while profit after tax rose 44% to ₦135.9 billion. Its total assets crossed ₦1 trillion for the first time.

Read Transcorp’s FY2025 results.

So the original investor’s problem isn’t necessarily that Transcorp failed to grow. The company clearly grew. The problem is that owning a small, fixed number of shares isn’t the same as continuously increasing your ownership in a growing business.

This is where regular investing changes the equation.

Let’s imagine two investors. Investor A buys ₦9,000 worth of Transcorp shares once and never invests again, while Investor B also starts with ₦9,000 but continues buying shares periodically for the next 10 or 20 years.

Investor B could be buying at ₦1, ₦2, ₦3, ₦5, ₦10 or ₦20 at different points in the company’s history. When the share price falls, Investor B can acquire more shares with the same amount of money. When the price rises, the shares you’ve accumulated become more valuable.

This is the basic principle behind naira-cost averaging: investing a consistent amount periodically rather than trying to make one perfect purchase. It doesn’t guarantee profits, and it doesn’t eliminate the risks of owning individual stocks. But it changes the mathematical relationship between the investor and the company. You are no longer simply waiting for the shares you bought 20 years ago to appreciate. You are continually accumulating ownership.

Transcorp’s price history proves Naira-Cost Averaging Works.

Transcorp’s historical journey was anything but smooth. The company listed around ₦6 in 2006, but its share price later fell sharply and traded at much lower levels for long periods before its major appreciation in recent years. That means an investor who bought once had to sit through years in which the investment could have looked disappointing.

An investor who continued accumulating during those periods would have had a completely different cost basis.

This is why saying “shares don’t make people rich” based on one old investment can be misleading.

A better conclusion is: One investment is not the same thing as an investment strategy.

The real lesson from the ₦9,000 Transcorp story

The husband in this story may have made an overly optimistic investment decision, but that optimism will not suffice for a poorly informed, inconsistent investment strategy.

To build a successful & significant investment portfolio, you need an effective investment strategy. This begins with proper research into the company’s ethics, history and financial books.

Below are a few things to note:

  • The current market price.
  • A history of the volatility over the years.
  • The market valuation of the company.
  • Existing company policies around issuing new shares.
  • Whether or not they give dividends.
  • Your averaging strategy over a period
  • Your share target you plan to own

The list above includes a few of the things I ask myself before considering any investment as a strategic long-term buy.

The bigger investment lesson

The Transcorp story teaches us something that applies far beyond Transcorp: building wealth through shares is usually not about buying one stock once and forgetting about it. It is about understanding what you own, investing consistently, letting your investment compound, reinvesting income where appropriate, and giving it enough time to work.

There is also a second lesson:

Never judge an investment by share price alone. Look at total returns, dividends, corporate actions, earnings, the company’s balance sheet, and how many shares you actually own.

The man who invested ₦9,000 twenty years ago may feel he “lost” because he expected the investment to grow dramatically. But the real question is not whether Transcorp became richer; it did.

The real question is whether his ownership of Transcorp increased enough, and whether the returns from that ownership compounded enough, to create substantial personal wealth.

That is a completely different question, and every new Nigerian investor should understand it before putting money into the stock market. The stock market can create wealth. But buying a share is not the same thing as having an investment strategy.

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