Why Femi Otedola Kept Falling Off, and Back Onto, Forbes's Billionaire List

Femi Otedola first appeared on Forbes’s World’s Billionaires list in 2008, becoming, at the time, only the second Nigerian on the list after Aliko Dangote. That first stint didn’t last: he fell off the ranking the following year as his fortune, built substantially on his stake in the downstream oil marketing company Forte Oil, proved considerably more volatile than the industrial and cement wealth underpinning Dangote’s far larger and more stable fortune.

Otedola’s most dramatic reversal came in October 2016, when Forbes reported that his net worth had collapsed from an estimated $1.8 billion earlier that year to roughly $550 million, effectively erasing his billionaire status. The immediate trigger was a sharp decline in Forte Oil’s share price, which fell to a one-year low after peaking earlier in 2016, a collapse compounded by the Central Bank of Nigeria’s move that June to devalue the naira, which further eroded the dollar value of a fortune concentrated in a single Nigerian-listed stock. Forbes’s reporting at the time made the reversal explicit, running under a headline stating plainly that Otedola was “no longer a billionaire” as a direct consequence of Forte Oil’s fizzling share price.

That absence extended through the following years, including Forbes’s 2019 ranking of Africa’s billionaires, a list on which Otedola’s name did not appear despite periodic public curiosity about the omission given his earlier prominence. By that point, Otedola had moved to exit the position that had made and then unmade his billionaire status in the first place: he sold his 75 percent controlling stake in Forte Oil to Prudent Energy in stages beginning in late 2018, with the divestment fully completed by mid-2019, closing out the chapter of his career most directly tied to the 2016 collapse.

Otedola’s billionaire status proved cyclical rather than permanently lost. He returned to Forbes’s billionaire rankings in subsequent years as his broader business interests, including investments beyond the oil-marketing sector that had cost him so heavily in 2016, recovered and expanded, illustrating a pattern common among Nigerian business figures whose fortunes are closely tied to the performance of a small number of listed local companies: net worth calculated against a single volatile stock, rather than a diversified portfolio, can move a person on and off a billionaire ranking within the space of a few years.