Spotlight on Folorunsho Alakija

Worth: $2.5 Billion

Folorunsho Alakija

Nigeria Self-Made
Age: 63

Daughter of a wealthy man who had eight wives and 52 children, Alakija is Nigeria’s first female billionaire, thanks to her own lucrative oil-producing asset. After working as a secretary in a Nigerian merchant bank in the 1970s, Alakija quit her job to study fashion design in England.

She subsequently founded Supreme Stitches, a Nigerian fashion label that catered to upscale clientele, which reportedly included Maryam Babangida, wife to Nigeria’s former military president Ibrahim Babangida. The government awarded her an oil-prospecting license for a 620,000-acre plot in 1993. She hired Texaco to assess the oil potential three years later, creating Famfa Oil. It went on to become OML 127, one of Nigeria’s most prolific oil blocks.

Famfa Oil owned a 60% stake in the block until 2000, when then President Olusegun Obasanjo tried to take back as much as a 50% interest. Famfa Oil went to court to challenge the acquisition. The Nigerian Supreme Court reinstated the stake to Famfa Oil in May 2012; it is now the bulk of her fortune. 

Says Alakija of her fate: “My entry into this [oil] business was God’s own way of leading me down a particular path.”