Femi Otedoal salutes Mike Adenuga on his 73rd birthday

Femi Otedola marked Mike Adenuga’s 73rd birthday on Tuesday with a public tribute rooted in a memory from 24 years ago, recounting how the Globacom founder pulled him aside at a Lagos birthday party in 2002 and told him, with the kind of certainty that only a man who reads people well can muster, that he would be a great man.

The moment happened on April 3, 2002, at the 70th birthday celebration of Otedola’s mother, Dame Doja Otedola, held in Epe, Lagos State. Otedola was 40 years old then, the chairman of Zenon Petroleum and Gas, a businessman on the rise but not yet the billionaire he would become. Adenuga, already a figure of enormous commercial weight, said the words and moved on. Otedola held onto them.

“24 years ago at my Mum’s 70th birthday in Epe, you said I would be a great man,” Otedola wrote in a post on X, marking Adenuga’s birthday. “Your wisdom, mentoring and guidance have stayed with me ever since. Today, on your 73rd birthday, I celebrate you Otunba Dr. Mike Adenuga, GCON. A true African icon whose vision continues to inspire us all. Wishing you good health, strength and many more wins ahead.”

The tribute captures something real about the relationship between Nigeria’s interconnected business elite. The party in Epe in 2002 was attended by Adenuga, Otedola and Aliko Dangote, 3 men who collectively account for tens of billions of dollars in wealth today. Otedola was then the least prominent of the 3. Adenuga saw something in him anyway.

Otedola is now chairman of FirstHoldCo and one of Nigeria’s most prominent billionaires, with a net worth that Forbes estimates at approximately $1.7 billion. The arc from the party in Epe to the boardroom of First Bank is the kind of story that makes Adenuga’s 2002 assessment look prescient in hindsight.

President Tinubu’s tribute

President Bola Tinubu also weighed in on Adenuga’s birthday with a formal statement that positioned the Globacom founder as both a business icon and a national institution.

“I congratulate the Guru, a businessman with the Midas touch, on his birthday today, April 29,” Tinubu said. “Mike’s life is an affirmation of the audacity of hope, belief, and vision. From humble beginnings, he rose to become one of Africa’s finest entrepreneurs.”

Tinubu added that Adenuga’s achievements in business were a testament to the possibilities of the Nigerian enterprise and an inspiration to younger Nigerians who aspire to build something significant.

Who Mike Adenuga is

Mike Adeniyi Agbolade Ishola Adenuga Jr. was born in Ibadan on April 29, 1953, into a family of modest means. He attended Baptist Boys High School in Abeokuta, then crossed the Atlantic to study at Northwestern University in the United States, where he earned a business administration degree in 1975, followed by an MBA from Pace University in New York in 1977. He put himself through American universities partly by driving a taxi. He sold lace and beads. He did what he had to do.

He returned to Nigeria in 1979 and went into commodities and real estate. His first telecommunications venture came in 1990, when he won one of the first private mobile telephone licences in Nigeria. The timing was too early; the Central Bank would not guarantee naira convertibility for the kind of international transactions mobile operations required, and he surrendered the licence after 10 months. He went back to other things and waited.

When Globacom launched on August 29, 2003, it broke open a mobile market that MTN had controlled alone for 5 years. Adenuga’s weapon was per-second billing, a pricing model that MTN did not offer. Nigerian consumers had been paying for entire minutes they did not use. Globacom charged them only for the seconds they actually spoke. Within weeks of launch, MTN, Airtel and every other operator in the market had to match Globacom’s billing model or lose customers. The entire Nigerian mobile market was repriced by one man’s decision.

Globacom now carries approximately 60 million subscribers, making it Nigeria’s 2nd largest mobile network. It operates across Nigeria, Ghana, Benin Republic and Ivory Coast. The Glo 1 submarine cable, which Adenuga built to connect West Africa directly to the United Kingdom, provides the backbone infrastructure for much of the data traffic that runs through his own network and others. He also owns Conoil, listed on the Nigerian Exchange, which operates in petroleum marketing and upstream exploration, and built an extensive Lagos real estate portfolio over decades.

His net worth is estimated at $6.5 billion on the Forbes 2026 Africa list, making him Nigeria’s 3rd richest individual behind Aliko Dangote and Abdulsamad Rabiu. The national honour of GCON, the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger, which he holds, is the highest civilian award the Nigerian state confers.

He is known in business circles as “The Bull,” a nickname that reflects both his physical presence and a negotiating style that his associates describe as direct and decisive. He is not a man who spends time on uncertainty. He saw something in Otedola at a birthday party in Epe in 2002 and said it out loud. Twenty-four years later, the man he saw it in is on X telling 3 million followers exactly what he heard.