Aliko Dangote and Folorunsho Alakija: Nigeria's Billionaire Firsts

Two Nigerians came to define wealth on the African continent through the 2010s: Aliko Dangote, whose industrial conglomerate made him Africa’s richest person for the better part of fifteen years, and Folorunsho Alakija, whose oil license turned a fashion designer into the world’s most frequently cited Black woman billionaire.

Dangote was born in Kano in 1957 into a wealthy trading family and started his own commodities trading business in 1977 with a loan from an uncle. Over the following decades he built the Dangote Group into a conglomerate spanning cement, sugar, salt, and flour, expanding cement production across roughly ten African countries and becoming, by most estimates, the continent’s largest cement producer. In June 2013, Forbes reported that Dangote had become the first African to cross a $20 billion net worth, a threshold reached largely on the strength of Dangote Cement’s stock listing on the Nigerian exchange. His fortune has swung considerably since, tracking cement demand, the naira’s value, and, more recently, the enormous Dangote Petroleum Refinery near Lagos, one of the largest single-train refineries in the world when it began operations in the 2020s. Forbes has ranked him Africa’s richest person in most years since 2008, a run interrupted only occasionally by South African rivals such as Nicky Oppenheimer or Johann Rupert.

Alakija’s path started differently. Born in Ikorodu in 1951, she trained as a fashion designer in England and built a successful couture label in Lagos in the 1980s before pivoting into oil. In 1993 the Nigerian government awarded her company, Famfa Oil, an exploration license over a large offshore block that would become known as OML 127. A subsequent partnership with Texaco, later absorbed into Chevron, developed the block into a productive deepwater field, and Famfa’s roughly 60 percent stake became the foundation of Alakija’s fortune. By the mid-2010s, outlets including TIME reported her net worth at roughly $3.3 billion, and framed her, at that valuation, as having overtaken Oprah Winfrey to become the world’s wealthiest Black woman. That claim has always carried a caveat worth noting: net worth estimates for privately held oil interests move sharply with crude prices, and different outlets have placed Alakija’s fortune anywhere from roughly $1 billion to $3.3 billion depending on the year and the price of oil at the time, so the “richest” title has shifted back and forth between her and Winfrey more than once in press coverage rather than being a fixed, settled fact.