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Uche Ogah registered his own oil company while still an assistant general manager at Zenith Bank, then quit to build Masters Energy — fuel, noodles, tricycles, gas, plastics. The story of a banker who bet on selling everything to everyone, and then ran for office.
Naushad Merali built one of Kenya's great fortunes buying troubled companies cheap and selling high — most famously turning a mobile venture into a windfall worth hundreds of millions. He died in 2021. This week his heirs stepped back toward manufacturing. Can the gift be inherited?
In one of Africa's smallest economies, Muhammed Jah turned $16,000 — a student stipend and an uncle's loan — into The Gambia's largest conglomerate: its first internet provider, first 3G network, a bank and its first data centre. A national champion built from almost nothing.
Jean Kacou Diagou helped write the insurance rulebook for 14 African countries — then quit to compete in the market he'd regulated. From a €457,000 start in 1995 he built NSIA into a 12-country bank-insurance group. This week he pruned it, exiting Nigerian life insurance.
In 1977, Stella Okoli opened a small chemist's shop in Lagos with 5,000 naira and her father's house as collateral. She built it into one of Nigeria's largest drugmakers.
Mo Dewji turned his father's trading house into a $2 billion pan-African conglomerate and became Africa's youngest billionaire. Now, courting Mozambique and Botswana and betting on EV-battery graphite, he wants to triple MeTL to $10 billion by 2035. Inside the expansion.
In 1984 Idrissa Nassa moved bicycle parts across West African borders. Today he controls a $9 billion banking group in eleven countries — built by serving the traders big banks ignored — and just pledged to mobilise $712 million for Burkina Faso's hospitals and schools.
Justin Stanford left school alone as a teenager, built a cybersecurity firm from a Cape Town garage, then spent 15 years seeding the companies that became African tech — VALR, Wasoko, Aerobotics. He isn't a billionaire. He may be the man who built the ground they stand on.
Herbert Wigwe built one of Africa's great banks, then poured a reported $500 million into the project he called his most ambitious: a world-class university in his home town.
Most people have never heard of Hassanein Hiridjee, and that is rather the point. From a family business in Madagascar, he has quietly built Axian into one of Africa's largest telecoms and energy groups, and is now positioning around Jumia, the continent's biggest online retailer.
For a generation, Kate Fotso ran Cameroon's cocoa trade in partnership with Cargill. In January 2025 she walked away from it. The next season was the worst in her company's history. This one, she took the export lead back.
Ladi Delano built a premium vodka brand in China and got rich. He announced a $1 billion Nigerian investment venture that produced nothing anyone can point to. This week his third act, the mobility company Moove, raised $250 million at a $2.1 billion valuation.
Magda Wierzycka arrived in South Africa at thirteen, a Polish refugee with almost nothing, learned two new languages, and built a financial-services firm now worth billions of rand.
Paul Obambi bought the iron-ore project a South African major had given up on, then spent a decade chasing the one thing that would make it worth anything: a 450-kilometre railway to the ocean.
In the early 1990s a French engineer bought an ageing Gabonese oil field that Amoco had written off. That single unwanted reservoir became the model for an $11.4 billion fortune built almost entirely on the barrels the majors abandoned across Africa.
Stephen Saad said you have to be within six months of the first launch to be part of market formation. This week Africa's largest drugmaker won approval to sell a generic Ozempic in Canada — and then discovered it has no ingredient to make it with.