John Alamu built Nigeria’s biggest cocoa processor at 34

John Alamu built his business on a calculation. Export a tonne of raw cocoa beans from Nigeria and you earn about $8,000. Turn the same beans into cocoa butter and you earn roughly six times that. Turn them into chocolate and the value rises up to thirty times.

Nigeria is the world’s fourth-largest cocoa producer and ships most of its crop out as raw beans, which means the country captures the thinnest slice of a chain that ends on European and American supermarket shelves. Alamu has spent a decade trying to move his own position along that chain, and he now runs ten factories with the capacity to process up to 48,000 tonnes of cocoa a year.

He started with 100,000 naira, about $550 at the time, lending small sums to farmers and market women in rural Nigeria in 2014. He was in his early twenties.

Today he controls two holding companies. CapitalSage Holdings covers financial services and Johnvents Group covers agribusiness and manufacturing. Together they employ more than 2,000 people, work with over 10,000 farmers and operate across Nigeria, The Gambia, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates and beyond. Alamu is 34.

The statistician

He is not a banker or an agronomist by training. He is a statistician.

Born on Aug. 21, 1992, Alamu studied at the Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta and at Olabisi Onabanjo University in Ogun State. The discipline shows in how he discusses his businesses, which is almost entirely in terms of margins and multiples rather than mission.

His first jobs were in development rather than commerce. He worked as a local consultant at Catholic Relief Services, the American humanitarian agency, and then as a monitoring and evaluation consultant and specialist at the International Fertilizer Development Center, assessing agricultural practices and fertiliser technologies. Monitoring and evaluation work involves measuring whether development programmes achieve what they claim, which meant spending his early twenties examining why interventions in Nigerian agriculture succeeded or failed.

That is an unusual apprenticeship for someone who later built a business around the same farmers.

One hundred thousand naira

The lending started informally in 2014, without a company behind it.

Alamu offered small loans to farmers and market women in rural areas, the classic microfinance customer, people with working capital needs too small for a commercial bank to serve profitably. He has described the sum he started with repeatedly since, and it has become the anchor of how he tells the story.

“We started with 100,000 naira,” he told Forbes Africa. “Today, we’re building global businesses from Africa.”

It ran as an informal operation for four years. In 2018 he integrated the various offerings and formally incorporated the business as CreditAssist Investment Limited, after expanding across Nigeria. That entity grew into CapitalSage Technology and then into CapitalSage Holdings.

What CapitalSage became

The financial services group is considerably more complicated than a microfinance lender.

Kolomoni Microfinance Bank is the digital banking arm, operating in Nigeria and The Gambia, where the central bank granted it a licence. It offers savings, loans and USSD banking, the menu-based service that works on basic phones without internet access, which is how a large share of rural Nigerians and Gambians bank.

ERCAS handles payments infrastructure. CreditAssist provides structured lending. Regius Asset Management and Regius Capital cover asset management and capital markets. Tiki by Kolomoni and SageBrush Wealth complete the set. The group operates through more than 60,000 agents and merchants, the network of small shops and kiosks that function as bank branches across Nigeria.

Alamu has described the architecture in his own terms. From its origins in grassroots lending, he said, CapitalSage has evolved into an integrated financial services platform, with structured credit through CreditAssist, digital banking via Kolomoni, asset and capital markets through Regius, and payments infrastructure through Ercas.

The group has been raising money in the Nigerian commercial paper market for years. CapitalSage Technology ran a 15 billion naira programme and redeemed its 3.8 billion naira Series 1 and 2 issuance in October 2023, alongside repaying a further 2.5 billion naira and receiving a credit rating upgrade.

Commercial paper is short-term corporate debt, typically running under a year, which companies use to fund working capital without going to a bank. For a Nigerian company it is often the cheapest available option, though cheap is relative in a market where policy rates have sat above 26%.

In April this year CapitalSage restructured its board, adding independent oversight as the group expanded. Alamu said the change was about clearer accountability as the organisation grows, and a new chief executive was appointed to run the financial services businesses.

Buying the factories

Johnvents came second, in 2016, and it is the part of the empire that scaled fastest.

It started where most Nigerian agribusinesses start, aggregating beans from smallholders, financing their harvests and selling the raw crop on. Then it moved up the chain into processing, turning beans into butter, liquor and cake, the semi-finished products that command higher prices overseas.

The first significant capacity came in Akure, the Ondo State capital at the centre of Nigeria’s cocoa belt. Rotimi Akeredolu, then governor of Ondo State, commissioned a 15,000 tonne Johnvents facility in 2021 and publicly commended the investment. The company won Best Cocoa Dairy Company in Nigeria at the BusinessDay Leadership Awards the following year.

The bigger move was an acquisition. In 2023 Johnvents bought Premium Cocoa Products Ile-Oluji, one of the oldest cocoa plants in Nigeria, with installed capacity of 30,000 tonnes a year. That purchase made Johnvents the largest cocoa processor in the country.

Johnvents has also pushed back down the chain toward the farms, distributing agricultural inputs to 6,000 farmers in Ondo State, which secures supply while giving growers reason to sell to it rather than to a competing aggregator.

The British money

The transaction that changed Johnvents’ standing came in February 2025.

British International Investment, the United Kingdom’s development finance institution, signed a $40.5 million long-term financing deal with the group in Abuja. The money went specifically to Premium Cocoa Products Ile-Oluji, funding machinery, refurbishment and expansion so the plant could reach its installed capacity of 30,000 tonnes. It had been running at 13,000.

Benson Adenuga, who heads BII’s Nigeria office, framed the investment as addressing structural barriers in the cocoa industry rather than backing a single company, arguing it would benefit local farmers while improving Nigeria’s trade balance. He described it as part of BII’s commitment to backing what he called ambitious Black-owned and led domestic champions.

Jonny Baxter, the British deputy high commissioner in Lagos, said the United Kingdom was proud to back sustainable investment that creates jobs.

Attached to the money is a target. Johnvents has committed to achieving 100% traceable cocoa by 2027, with at least 90% certified. Traceability means being able to identify which farm each bean came from, and certification means independent verification of how it was grown. Both matter increasingly because the European Union now restricts imports of commodities linked to deforestation, and a Nigerian processor that cannot document its supply chain will struggle to sell into its largest market.

Alamu said the investment would boost processing capability while empowering thousands of farmers.

Borrowing at 23%

The most revealing thing about how Alamu funds his expansion is what it costs him.

In October 2025 Johnvents Industries launched its Series 20 commercial paper, part of a 100 billion naira programme worth about $67.5 million. The 270-day note carried a headline implied yield of roughly 23% a year. The issue opened on Oct. 17 and closed on Oct. 24, raising working capital as the company ramped up production in Ondo State and expanded exports.

Series 20 means nineteen previous issues. Johnvents has been going back to the Nigerian debt market repeatedly rather than raising equity, which keeps Alamu’s ownership intact but means the business services short-term debt at rates that would be prohibitive almost anywhere else.

Paying 23% for working capital only works if the margin on the product is wider than that, which is precisely the argument behind the value-addition thesis. Selling raw beans at $8,000 a tonne does not cover a 23% cost of capital. Selling butter at six times that does.

Everything else

The rest of the portfolio is harder to categorise.

Johnvents Foods handles consumer products. Best Western Hospital is a healthcare business. Kolomoni Gambia operates as a separate licensed entity from the Nigerian bank.

The geographic spread now covers Nigeria, The Gambia, Kenya and the United Arab Emirates within the financial services group, with Johnvents describing operations across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East through its export business.

Alamu received the Business Conglomerate Leadership Award at the Marketing Edge Awards, and has become a regular speaker on Nigerian economic diversification, where his line is consistent. He has argued that processing cocoa into finished products for export is more profitable for the Nigerian economy than shipping raw beans, and that the country’s next struggle after political independence is economic, requiring what he calls courage, disruption and African confidence.

What is not known

Neither CapitalSage Holdings nor Johnvents Group is listed, and neither publishes accounts.

There is no disclosed revenue figure for either company, no valuation, and no public record of what Alamu owns of them. The commercial paper programmes are the only place where the businesses submit to outside financial scrutiny, and those disclosures cover the specific issue rather than the group.

What can be established is the trajectory. A statistician who spent his early twenties evaluating agricultural development programmes started lending small sums to the farmers he had been studying, formalised the lending into a bank, and then used the same customer base to build a processing business that now handles more cocoa than any other company in Nigeria.