Chairman of BUA group Abdulsamad Rabiu, has been named among 13 black persons from around the world who made it to the 2019 List of World Billionaires released by the financial magazine, Forbes.
Four Nigerians were listed among the 2,153 world’s richest, which recorded an increase in the number of blacks from 11 last year to 13. Forbes, publishers of the world’s most acknowledged and eminent annual list of billionaires, yesterday released its 2019 list of black billionaires comprising 13 billionaires of black origin around the world.
Nigeria and USA topped the list with four billionaires apiece while Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa, Canada, and Britain had one representative each on the list. Top on the list is Aliko Dangote with a net worth of $10.9 billion, according to Forbes – a fortune made from Sugar, Cement, and flour production. Dangote is building an oil refinery to produce 6500,000 barrels a day when it finally comes on steam a few years from now. Mike Adenuga, the founder and executive chairman of Globacom, follows closely with an estimate of $9.1 billion.
Conoil, one of Nigeria’s first indigenous oil exploration companies in the early 90s and Cobblestone Properties, with hundreds of prime residential and commercial properties all over Nigeria. Third amongst the Nigerians is AbdulSamad Rabiu, founder and executive chairman of BUA Group, a Nigerian conglomerate with interests in sugar refining, cement production, real estate, steel, port concessions, manufacturing, oil, gas, and shipping.
He is Africa’s 16th richest billionaire with an estimated wealth of $1.6 billion. Also on the list is Nigeria’s first female billionaire, Folorunsho Alakija, with a net worth of $1.1 billion. Alakija is the founder of Famfa Oil, a Nigerian company that owns a lucrative oil block on the Agbami deep-water oilfield in Nigeria.
Others are: Robert Smith, $5 billion, American; David Steward, $ 3 billion, American; Oprah Winfrey, $2.5 billion, American; Strive Masiyiwa, $2.4 billion, Zimbabwean; Isabel Dos Santos, $2.3 billion, Angolan; Patrice Motsepe, $2.3 billion, South African; Michael Jordan, $1.9 billion, American; Michael Lee-Chin, $1.9 billion, Canadian, and Mohammed Ibrahim, $1.1 billion, British.
Alakija of Nigeria, Oprah Winfrey of the US and Angolan investor Isabel Dos Santos are the only black female billionaires in the world. The Forbes Annual Billionaire list is the most prestigious and recognized platform that measures the wealth of the world’s richest every year.
