illiquid

Think of a plot of land your father bought in the village decades ago. It is valuable, everyone agrees, but try selling it this weekend. You will need a buyer, an agent, a lawyer, weeks of back and forth, and probably a lower price than you hoped for because you are in a hurry and buyers can smell that. That land is illiquid. It has worth, but that worth is locked in and slow to reach your hand.

Now bring that same idea into the stock market. Some shares on the Nigerian Exchange trade all day, every day, with buyers and sellers lined up like the queue at a busy bank branch. Others barely move for weeks. A small manufacturing company with few shareholders might see only a handful of shares change hands in a month. If you own a large chunk of that stock and need cash urgently, you may have to sell at a much lower price just to find a willing buyer, or wait a long time to sell at the price you actually want.

The same thing happens with property in London. A flat in central London usually sells faster than a large detached house in a small town, simply because more people want the flat. Fewer interested buyers means more time and often a lower final price. That gap between what something is worth on paper and what you can actually get for it quickly is the whole story of illiquidity.

For someone abroad sending money home or investing in Nigerian shares from the diaspora, this matters more than it looks. Money in a savings account is liquid, you can move it today. Money tied up in an unlisted family business or a thinly traded stock is not. Before you commit funds, it helps to ask a simple question: if I needed this money back next month, how easily could I get it?