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Folorunsho Alakija
A dressmaker to the elite who asked for an oil block, got one, and then beat the state to keep it.
The rise
Born in Ikorodu in 1951, one of the 52 children of a Lagos chief, she trained as a secretary and then in fashion in London, worked at First National Bank of Chicago and at International Merchant Bank in Lagos, and in 1985 founded Supreme Stitches, a label whose clients included the first lady, Maryam Babangida.
What they did
In May 1993 Famfa Oil, her family firm, won OPL 216, a 617,000-acre deepwater block off the Niger Delta; Texaco's Star Deep took 40 per cent in 1996 and the Agbami field pumped first oil in 2008. When the federal government took half of Famfa's stake in 2000 she sued; in May 2012 the Supreme Court ruled the seizure unlawful. Her Rose of Sharon Foundation (2008) aids widows and orphans.
The full picture
The block came in the last months of the Babangida junta, when she dressed the first lady; she says Maryam Babangida only opened the minister's door and that she 'did my homework'. Oil-block awards of that era remain a byword for opacity, though no wrongdoing was found against her. Forbes dropped her as a billionaire in 2021.
Why it matters
She won an oil licence, then won it back from the state in court — a rare case of a private Nigerian owner, and a woman, beating the federal government over petroleum rights and keeping the asset.
“How about all the others who got all the license and who weren't in the oil industry at the time that they got the license? So because they are men, they have two heads? Is it fair on womanhood?”