Nigerian billionaire Phillip Ihenacho is selling most of Azura Power to an Abu Dhabi buyer

An Abu Dhabi energy investor is buying 90% of Azura Power, ending sixteen years of control by the Nigerian firm that founded it and leaving Phillip Ihenacho's Amaya Capital with a tenth of a business that supplies roughly a tenth of the grid baseload in three African countries.

ePointZero, a subsidiary of the UAE's 2PointZero Group, announced the acquisition on Monday, Aug. 31. It is buying out Actis and Africa50, the co-investors Amaya brought in after founding Azura in 2010, and has partnered with Amaya in the acquisition vehicle. Amaya retains 10%. The price was not disclosed.

Ihenacho is not a career power executive. He was born in Lagos, grew up in Jos in central Nigeria, took a bachelor's degree at Yale in 1987 and a law degree at Harvard in 1990, then spent five years at McKinsey across New York, London, Stockholm and Johannesburg.

He went back to Africa to build. He co-founded Afrinvest, which became a leading West African investment bank, and ran its London arm, Afrinvest UK, handling capital raising and acquisition work in Nigeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast for telecoms operators, oil companies and banks. He sold the business to United Bank for Africa in 2007 after more than a decade, and the London entity became UBA Capital Europe.

Amaya Capital followed in 2009, founded with Sundeep Bahanda, a former Deutsche Bank managing director who ran the bank's top-ranked European retail research team, and David Ladipo, a former Churchill College fellow who founded the corporate advisory firm Lintstock. Bahanda and Ladipo went on to serve as co-managing directors of Azura.

What they built first was the hardest thing to build in Nigeria.

Azura-Edo, near Benin City in Edo State, was developed from a greenfield site into a 461-megawatt open cycle gas plant. It reached financial close in January 2015 at $876 million and was the first Nigerian power project to use the World Bank's Partial Risk Guarantee structure, an instrument designed to give lenders comfort in a market where the state utility's ability to pay was the central question. American Capital Energy and Infrastructure came in as an investor in December 2013.

The project became the reference transaction for private power in Nigeria. It deployed more than $900 million and demonstrated that an independent producer could be financed there at all.

Azura now runs 752 megawatts across three plants in three of Africa's largest gas markets. Azura-Edo is the largest at 461 megawatts. Tobene in Senegal produces 116 and CTRG in Mozambique 175. All three operate under long-term power purchase agreements with national utilities, which is what makes the cash flows predictable enough to attract a buyer of this kind. The development pipeline runs to more than 1.5 gigawatts of gas, renewable and battery storage projects, enough to more than double the platform.

The lenders and guarantors behind those projects read like a directory of development finance: the World Bank, British International Investment, DEG, the US Development Finance Corporation, FMO, the IFC, MIGA and Proparco.

Ihenacho chaired Azura and also served as interim chief executive of Seven Energy, the Nigerian gas infrastructure company Amaya backed, until 2016. He chaired the investment committee of the Aureos West Africa Fund, a private equity vehicle focused on smaller West African companies, and holds a stake in a Kenyan beverage manufacturer.

The thing he is best known for outside business is a house.

Arijiju sits on the 90,000-acre Borana Conservancy in Kenya's Laikipia County. Ihenacho spent more than a decade building it from hand-chiselled Meru stone and wild grass as a family retreat, and Condé Nast Traveller's senior editor Peter Browne called it the most beautiful house in Africa in a 2017 feature that did not name its owner anywhere. That omission was deliberate. Ihenacho does not court publicity, and he built the place to reconnect his children with the continent his career had been spent financing.

The conservation work is not incidental to it. He sits on the Africa Council of The Nature Conservancy and is a trustee of the Tusk Trust, the British conservation organisation, and is involved with African Nature Investors, whose work includes Gashaka Gumti in Nigeria.

For the buyer, this is a first move into African power generation. Mohamed Hesham, ePointZero's chief executive, said Azura brings critical operating assets, an experienced management team and a strong position in markets with long-term power needs, and linked the purchase to the group's existing investment in Elsewedy Electric, the Egyptian engineering and construction group. ePointZero entered the American market earlier this year with the $2.25 billion acquisition of Traverse Midstream Partners.

Sheikh Zayed bin Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, chairman of 2PointZero, framed it as long-term capital going into infrastructure that supports growth in African markets.

Dave Peacock, Azura's group chief executive, called the transaction a significant milestone and thanked the shareholders who had backed the company through ten years of building.

The market both sides are betting on is large and badly served. Electricity demand across Africa is expected to nearly double by 2040, while access across sub-Saharan Africa sits at roughly 55%, according to the World Bank.

Completion depends on regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.