Dangote, Adenuga, Rabiu Make Africa’s Top 10 Billionaires’List

Aliko Dangote of Nigeria is Africa’s richest person and has maintained this position for straight 10 years according to reports. Also Mike Adenuga of Globacom, and Abdulsamad Rabiu of BUA Group, both Nigerians, made it to the list as the 5th and 6th richest person in Africa. The report stated that the continent’s 18 billionaires were worth an average $4.1bn, 12 percent more than a year ago, driven in part by Nigeria’s surging stock market. The report named the second richest person in Africa as Nassef Sawiris of Egypt, whose largest asset was a nearly six percent stake in sportswear maker Adidas. At number three was Nicky Oppenheimer of South Africa, who inherited a stake in diamond firm DeBeers and ran the company until 2012, when he sold his family’s 40 percent stake in DeBeers to mining giant AngloAmerican for $5.1bn. The biggest gainer this year was another Nigerian cement tycoon, Rabiu. “Remarkably, shares of his BUA Cement Plc, which listed on the Nigeria Stock Exchange in January 2020, have doubled in value in the past year.” That pushed Rabiu’s fortune up by an extraordinary 77 percent to $5.5bn, Rabiu and his son together own about 97 percent of the company. The only two women billionaires from Africa had both fallen off the list. The report calculated that the fortune of Folorunsho Alakija of Nigeria, who owns an oil exploration company, dropped below $1bn due to lower oil prices. Isabel dos Santos, who since 2013 had been the richest woman in Africa, was knocked from her perch by a series of court decisions freezing her assets in both Angola and Portugal. The report stated that the 18 billionaires from Africa hailed from seven different countries. South Africa and Egypt each had five billionaires, followed by Nigeria with three and Morocco with two.