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Idrissa Nassa started out trading bicycle parts in 1984. In 2001 he bought a struggling Burkinabe lender, and today Coris has about $9 billion in assets and a share price up 196% this year. How the trader built the bank, and what his move into Central Africa will test.
Wale Tinubu started as an oil trader in 1994. In 2024 he bought Eni's Nigerian business for $783 million and became operator of four major oil leases. Now he wants to triple Oando's output. The story of the oil man, and of the fundraising his plan depends on.
Douw Steyn sold insurance by telephone before anyone else in South Africa, built a business across two continents and lent his Johannesburg home to Nelson Mandela. That home, The Saxon, has just been named Africa's leading luxury boutique hotel. The story of the man who built it.
Edha Nahdi was 19 when he started a fuel importer in Dar es Salaam. Since then his family's Amsons Group has bought Kenya's Bamburi Cement, taken control of East African Portland and now agreed to buy Oryx's Tanzanian business for over $230 million. The story of Tanzania's youngest billionaire.
In 1977 Stella Okoli opened a chemist's shop in Lagos with ₦5,000, using her father's house as collateral. Emzor now makes more than 140 medicines and is building what it says will be sub-Saharan Africa's first plant for active ingredients. The story of the founder, as she steps back.
In 1997 a young Johannesburg lawyer bought gold shafts the big miners were giving up. Today Patrice Motsepe runs African Rainbow Minerals and African football. This week both came under pressure: a lawsuit from his mining partner and unrest inside CAF. The man, and the two fronts.
In 2002 Herbert Wigwe and Aig Aig-Imoukhuede took over Access, then 65th of 89 Nigerian banks, and bought their way to the top. Since his death in February 2024 the shares have lagged every big rival. The story of the deal-maker, and of the bank he left behind.
Expelled from Uganda at 16, Sudhir Ruparelia came home in 1985 with $25,000, opened the country's first licensed forex bureau and built its largest indigenous bank. Then the central bank took it over. As his London trial opens today, the story of the man and the bank.
Femi Otedola sold his oil business near its peak, built a power company worth more than ten times its listing value, then sold that too and put the money into Nigeria's oldest bank. Five years later he is its chairman and largest owner. The strategy behind his $815 million quarter.
Coleman was incorporated in 1975 and did not manufacture a cable until 1996. It is now West Africa's largest cable maker, and it spent $20 million building its own power supply to get there. Fifty years, two generations, and the real cost of manufacturing in Nigeria.
In 2002 Mzi Khumalo paid $15.5 million for the Zimbabwean gold mines Lonmin no longer wanted. Within a decade they produced about 100,000 ounces a year and Metallon was the country's largest gold miner. By 2019 the group owed roughly $200 million. The full arc of a contested career.
In 1977, GT Ferreira and two partners applied for a banking licence in South Africa. They were refused. So, over the next eight years, they simply built the thing the regulator wouldn't hand them — buying their way into control of a merchant bank and turning it into the foundation of FirstRand.
Ethiopia is one of the hardest markets in Africa for foreign money to enter — the state held telecoms, banking and energy for decades, land cannot be owned, and getting cash out is a struggle. When Japan Tobacco wanted in, it paid $1.4 billion and needed a local partner.
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.