Nigerian multi-investor and owner of a terminal in Lagos port, Chief Executive Office of the Dangote Group; Alhaji Aliko Dangote has emerged the richest African for the year 2013 with $20.2billion investment, Ventures magazine has said.
Aliko Dangote, 56 is now Africa’s richest man and he started building his fortune three decades ago after taking a business loan from his maternal uncle to begin trading in commodities such as flour, sugar, rice and cement.
He also owns Greenview Development Nigeria Limited(GDNL) in Apapa port.
Nigerian multi-investor and owner of a terminal in Lagos port, Chief Executive Office of the Dangote Group; Alhaji Aliko Dangote has emerged the richest African for the year 2013 with $20.2billion investment, Ventures magazine has said.
Aliko Dangote, 56 is now Africa’s richest man and he started building his fortune three decades ago after taking a business loan from his maternal uncle to begin trading in commodities such as flour, sugar, rice and cement.
He also owns Greenview Development Nigeria Limited(GDNL) in Apapa port.
In the early 2000s, he started producing these items himself. His Dangote Group is now the largest manufacturing conglomerate in West Africa and owns sugar refineries, salt processing facilities, a beverage manufacturer and a string of cement plants across Africa.
In October 2012, Dangote sold a controlling stake in his flour milling company to Tiger Brands, a South African manufacturer of consumer goods.
He pocketed $190 million from the sale. Dangote’s biggest asset is Dangote Cement, a $20-billion (market cap) cement manufacturer with operations in 14 countries and an annual production capacity of 30 million metric tonnes.
In June this year, South Africa’s Public Investment Corporation acquired a 1.5-percent stake in the company for $290 million. Dangote is also Africa’s most generous philanthropist. Within the last 12 months, he has given away over $100 million to causes ranging from youth empowerment to flood relief, religious causes and education. His younger brother, Sani Dangote, is Vice Chairman of Dangote Group.
Meanwhile , Mike Adenuga 60 occupied the third position with $8 billion, he is into Oil and gas and telecommunication industry.
Nigeria’s second richest man made his first fortune in his mid-80s by distributing lace fabrics and Coca- Cola, and by handling lucrative government contracts during the regime of former Nigerian military President, Ibrahim Babangida.
In the early nineties he founded Conoil Producing, an indigenous oil exploration and production outfit that was the first Nigerian company to strike oil in commercial quantities. Today, Conoil Producing’s assets produce more than 100,000 barrels of crude a day. Adenuga’s other holdings include Globacom, a Nigerian mobile telecommunications network that boasts more than 25 million customers in Nigeria and Republic of Benin.
He also owns a 74-percent stake in Conoil PLC, a petroleum marketing outfit listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange.
However, Folorunsho Alakija,62, came 4th $7.3 billion. Africa’s richest woman sits atop Famfa Oil, a Nigerian oil company that owns a 60-percent stake in OML 127, one of Nigeria’s most prolific oil blocks located at Nigerian offshore Agbami deepwater field.
Daily production at OML 127 stands at over 200,000 barrels per day. Alakija studied fashion design in England in the 1980s, returning to Nigeria to found Supreme Stitches, a Nigerian fashion label which enjoyed patronage from the more successful women in Nigerian high society.
One of her clients was late Maryam Babangida, the wife to former Nigerian military President, Ibrahim Babangida. Alakija is believed to have ridden on the crest of this relationship to acquire an oil block in 1993 at a relatively inexpensive price.
Famfa immediately entered into a joint venture agreement with Star Deep Water Petroleum (a subsidiary of Chevron and Brazil’s Petrobas), ceding a 40-percent stake to the two companies. Famfa owned a 60-percent interest in the block until 2000, when the incumbent Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, forcefully acquired a 50-percent stake in the block, transferring it to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation – a government-owned oil company.
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