Nigeria’s business mogul and third richest man, who cemented his return to Forbes’ African Billionaires List this year since dropping off it in 2015, says he owes his $1.6 billion net worth to being a disruptor – and to being stubborn.



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The inside of Abdulsamad Rabiu’s office, on the corner of
Churchgate Street, in Victoria Island’s commercial district in the heart of
Lagos that is notorious for chaotic, rambunctious traffic, is marked by a
serious lack of clutter. 



The expansive room is tastefully decorated in cream and
black hues. Rabiu’s desk is organized in a manner that seems as though
everything is exactly where it should be; completely spotless and devoid of any
distractions that will hinder the 58-year-old founder of BUA Group from
managing his vast empire, a conglomerate spread across southern and northern
Nigeria. 



A firm believer in strategy, the cement and sugar tycoon
boosted his fortunes by a whopping $650 million this year when he merged
Kalambaina Cement, a subsidiary company of his BUA Cement, with the publicly
traded Cement Company of Northern Nigeria (CCNN), where he was a controlling
shareholder. 



That calculated move has made him the third richest man in
Africa’s largest economy, with a staggering net worth of $1.6 billion,
according to the latest Forbes African Billionaires List, which he dropped out
of.



“Nigerian cement mogul Abdulsamad Rabiu, who runs and owns the BUA Group, returns to the list for the first time since 2015. He merged his Kalambaina Cement firm into publicly-traded Cement Company of Northern Nigeria, which he controlled, in late 2018. Rabiu now owns 97% of the list entity,” Forbes reported.



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He says his fall from the coveted list was due to the
devaluation of the Naira, which meant that the exchange rate went from N190
against the&nbsp; dollar, to N300.



“That was the main reason I dropped off the rich list. Also,
most of our other assets were not being considered because once you are not
listed, it becomes more challenging to get an accurate valuation. 



“Our assets, in the cement industry alone, are worth more
than $2 billion, but that is because Obu Cement [Plant], which is our biggest
cement plant, is not listed,” Rabiu says.



&nbsp;His return to the
billionaire boys’ club is due to five years of strategic expansion and a much
more stable Nigerian economy. However, it is about more than just numbers for
Rabiu. 



“It is a good feeling to be on the rich list, the most
important thing is not about how much money you make, but the impact you make.
Touching people’s lives is more important because money is a number. What you
need in terms of your day-to-day is not that much.”



One of the secret ingredients to his tremendous success is
that Rabiu is a firm believer in delegation. 



His phone purrs only occasionally, but this is also because
his plants run with clockwork precision in an environment that is chaotic at
the best of times. 



He has a calm and soft-spoken demeanour, a trait which is,
quite frankly, unconventional for someone who has fought his way through hell
and high water in business. 



“I am quiet but I am very stubborn. If I want something I go
for it and if I don’t want it, no matter how much I’m pushed, I don’t do it. If
somebody is stubborn, sometimes it’s seen as arrogant but I don’t think I am an
arrogant person,” Rabiu says.



&nbsp;It is also
immediately clear that he is not a man who rushes into things. He would rather
move methodically, with clarity and precision, a skill he picked up in the
early days learning the ropes from his industrialist father. Case in point is
how he built his empire brick-by-brick from the early days as an importer.



“In 1988, I started my own business and founded BUA
International Ltd. At the time, the in-thing was importation of rice, sugar,
fertilizer, agriculture etc. So the challenge was that, if there was scarcity
of any product, everybody would now go and import the same thing. This pushes
the price up and everybody will say the price of fertilizer has doubled, so
everyone would now go and import fertilizer and within a short time, the
product would now come down to half price and everyone would lose money,” Rabiu
says. 



He decided to break the mould and instead adopted a
value-added approach. He focused on bringing in raw materials to process it
locally. 



“We started with oil in Kano. We were processing crude palm
oil to refine it. We were also getting peanuts from Kano and then crushing and
processing, and that was a good business at the time because it was adding
value and people were not used to adding value to anything at all. They were
importing everything.”



In 2000, BUA acquired Nigeria Oil Mills, which was a peanut
processing company in Kano. In 2005, he set up the BUA Flour Mills factory in
Lagos. Rabiu saw very early on that he had to be distinctive in a sea of
importers who simply followed the trend. 



It is this measured philosophy of value that has allowed BUA
Group to innovate and expand capacity to about 2 million tons of cement per
annum with its new merger. Rabiu says with the consolidation, BUA Group has a
market valuation of about $800 million. A far cry from the company’s humble
beginnings.



Returning to Kano as a newly-minted graduate with a degree
in economics from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, in the United States, a
lot had changed while Rabiu was away.



&nbsp;The country was being
run by a military leader and there were severe shortages in foreign exchange
which made the business of importation extremely difficult. Following his new
ethos of adding value to the production line, Rabiu set his eyes on the sugar
business by establishing the 2,000 metric ton (MT) per day capacity plant in
Lagos which is the second largest refinery in West Africa, after the Dangote
Sugar Refinery. 



But the BUA story isn’t without its share of trials and
tribulations. The fight began in the early years of business, when the Nigerian
government introduced the backward integration policy in the sugar business. 



“This is where you were allowed to import raw sugar and
process into refined sugar and you must have a sugar refinery facility. So, if
you have the facility for a sugar refinery, you were able to import sugar and
pay a duty of 5% to 10%, while everybody else was importing refined sugar and
paying 50% duty,” Rabiu says.



&nbsp;At the time, it was
only the Dangote Group that had the refinery facility, so Rabiu decided the
lack of saturation made sugar a viable business to go into. 



The government’s backward integration policy is a well-known
competitive strategy which allows an organization to control more of its supply
chain in order to bring down the costs.



&nbsp;It means that a
company is allowed to purchase or internally produce segments of its supply
chain. This is done to ensure the supply, along with securing bargaining,
leverage on vendors. 



To take advantage of backward integration, a company needed
to have its sugar refinery at the ports in order to import raw materials in
bulk, which made having a terminal at the port a prerequisite.



“At that time, everything was owned by [the] Nigerian Ports
Authority (NPA), so you had to go and lease land from them, together with the
storage. This was a huge capital investment, and to make matters worse, there
was no land at the time because everything was taken.”



&nbsp;Luckily, Rabiu was
able to find a company that had a facility that was not being utilized. 



“We paid a lot of money to that company, got all the
designs, bought all the equipment, we were about to start the company, then the
lease was revoked and we could not go there. This was during the [Olusegun]
Obasanjo regime. Most of our money had been spent on getting the land and
equipment and they revoked the lease and gave it to somebody else. It took us a
year and almost $50 million in cost before we were able to start all over
again,” he says. 



Incidentally, that site was given to Rabiu by his father.
Once they took off, the business worked out so well that they were able to
recoup their money within a very short period of time. The sugar venture was a
cash cow. 



The company was able to reap huge margins due to the
difference in duties for imports of raw sugar, and, yet again, Rabiu found
validation in his strategic approach to business.



&nbsp;Even in those early
days, his penchant for success was apparent. The sugar refinery is still
operating at capacity and Rabiu is in the process of commissioning another
refinery at Port Harcourt in Nigeria. They say the apple does not fall far from
the tree, and this is true for Rabiu. 



His father, Isyaku Rabiu, was a renowned businessman, who
also made his fortune in trade decades after Nigeria’s independence. 



His wealth grew significantly until the 1983 coup which
toppled the government and led to the arrests of President Shehu Shagari and
his close allies, including Isyaku, leaving his business empire in a precarious
state.



But where his father lost his footing in trade, Rabiu was
destined to find his in cement. Opportunity came knocking in 2007 when the
price of cement was so high that the Nigerian government decided to introduce
yet another backward integration in the cement industry.



&nbsp;The idea was simple.
You could only import cement into Nigeria, if you had a cement factory. At the
time, there were only two multinational organizations in the country with the
capacity to build their own cement plant. 



Local companies like the Dangote Group and Flour Mills of
Nigeria were the only two other companies that had signed contracts to build
cement factories in Nigeria.



“Nobody else was allowed. So President [Umaru Musa] Yar’Adua
was alarmed that the prices of cement was going up every day and he called for
a meeting when the price was $300 per ton. He said it was too much, so what do
we do? He was briefed on the reason nobody else could bring cement into Nigeria
and told that there was a policy in place that only those building factories
could import cement into Nigeria, and we did not have enough capacity in terms
of manufacturing to meet Nigerian demand.” 



There were only three or four cement plants in Nigeria at
the time producing about 4 million MT per annum against what the country needed
– almost 10 million MT.



The president ruled that the existing backward integration
policy could not be continued and established a committee who came up with the
idea that the policy should allow companies outside manufacturers who were
building plants, in order to bring prices down. 



“So they selected six companies to be able to import cement
and we were chosen as one of the six companies,” Rabiu says. 



But there was a big challenge. 



“How do you import a million tons in a year or even 100,000
tons a month in bags? That will be like five or six cargos a month, to be able
to take the bags out and transport them all over the country, so nobody could
actually do it.



&nbsp;“The other guys had
terminals, which means they were discharging the cement in bulk and taking it
to their warehouses and bagging them in the warehouses and they had been in the
business for a long time,” Rabiu says.



In order to reap the rewards in the lucrative cement
industry, all the new six companies who had been granted licenses needed to
secure terminals at the port. But the barriers to entry were significantly
high. 



Rabiu decided on a disruptive approach. “So I now came up
with the idea of the floating terminal. It is like a factory on a vessel, so it
moves. It is a big ship with a terminal in the ship. It was an idea I read
about a long time ago and I decided to be innovative.” 



He approached the only terminal at the time that was free in
Greece and agreed on a price.



&nbsp;Fearing the size of
the competition, Rabiu knew he needed to get protection for his business, if he
stood a chance of competing favorably in the new venture.



“I knew that we had tough competition from the people who
had factories and they were not happy with the government giving us the license
because they were making so much money they did not want anyone to come into
the business. 



“So they were doing everything to frustrate it [the
process]. I knew that there would be a problem. So before I bought my vessel, I
came to Nigeria and sought an appointment to meet the president who granted me
an audience and I explained everything to him.”



Rabiu made an impassioned plea to President Yar’Adua —&nbsp; he knew he could drive down the price of
cement from $300 per bag to $150 if he had his own terminal. 



However, building the terminal would take more than a year
to complete, during which time cement prices would continue to rise, which
would be detrimental to the Nigerian economy. 



A floating terminal meant that the timeline of going to
market was significantly reduced but more importantly, without the blessing
from the president, the other giants in the industry would muscle him out of
the game.



Once approval from the president was secured, Rabiu
purchased his floating terminal and was ready to reap in the millions of
dollars awaiting him in bags of cement.



&nbsp;It was logistically
impossible for Rabiu to set up shop in Lagos. These circumstances pushed him to
explore other means through which he could realize his goal. He approached Port
Harcourt and this move proved to be fortuitous for him because all the eastern
markets were coming to the port as there was nothing in the east. 



However, not everything was ideal as he was allowed only one
week in a month after which point he had to leave the port, making it difficult
to offload his cement. 



Rabiu was faced with more hurdles but eventually, was forced
to consult the highest authority in the country to explain the barriers he
encountered.&nbsp; 



It was only after an order from the president that the
impediments to Rabiu’s business stopped and, with that, came the growth of the
BUA Group, to become one of the leading conglomerates in West Africa. As the
monopolists gradually loosened their grips on the cement industry, Rabiu used
the opportunity to build capacity. The company has five plants now.



“That experience strengthened my resolve because it was not
easy. I never thought I was going to quit. If you don’t fight back or if you
are weak, you will never survive. You have to understand that this is not
personal but business and you have to keep fighting. When they see that you are
fighting and not giving up then they let go because most of these things are
illegal anyway,” says Rabiu.



BUA Group steadily expanded to cover new ground. With the
new merger, Rabiu has seen an opportunity outside Nigeria’s borders. The demand
between Sokoto and Niger through to Burkina Faso is estimated to be about 4
million MT of cement per annum. 



Coupled with the fact that these countries are landlocked,
there is a need to import all their clinker, the raw material needed for making
cement. 



His new merger with CCNN will create the second largest
cement company on the Nigerian bourse after African mammoth, Dangote Cement.



Rabiu believes in Nigeria’s ability to produce its own
products without relying on imports from other countries and in so doing,
create tens of thousands of jobs for the Nigerian economy.



&nbsp;As the avenues to
expand in Nigeria get limited, BUA Group has consistently sought to broaden its
reach to new territories. 



The fighting days are long gone and BUA under the aegis of
its bold leader is ready to conquer new turf in Africa.

BUA-GROUP-3-27

How mogul Abdulsamad Rabiu has become a billionaire again

It took weeks of hard work to verify Rabiu as Africa’s newest billionaire. It took research and calculations by the wealth unit of FORBES, in the United States, and FORBES AFRICA journalists in London, Lagos and Johannesburg.
It is certain that Rabiu will move up the FORBES list of Africa’s richest, which will be expanded from 40 to 50 this year. He was ranked 21st last year. This year’s list will be published in the December-January issue of FORBES AFRICA.
According to Kerry Dolan, the senior editor at FORBES in charge of the wealth unit in San Francisco, the list only adds a few billionaires from Africa to the rankings each year.
“It is too early to say what we are finding. We know that Abdulsamad Rabiu will be on the list as a new billionaire from Nigeria, thanks to reporting by FORBES AFRICA,” says Dolan.
Rabiu, unlike many billionaires on the continent, opened up his books and bank accounts to prove his wealth. The 53-year-old heads the BUA Group, with headquarters on Victoria Island, Lagos. An investigation by FORBES AFRICA turned up a string of assets.
The BUA Group has interests in key sectors similar to those of countryman, Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man. They include cement, sugar and flour. Through the group’s subsidiaries it does business in real estate, steel, port concessions, manufacturing, oil, gas and shipping.
The group also owns the ship BUA Cement 1, a 200-meter long vessel designed for heavy loads. It is Nigeria’s first floating terminal.
In addition to his assets in the BUA Group, Rabiu owns property in Britain, worth $62 million, and in South Africa, worth $19 million. Among his properties is a house in Gloucester Square in London worth nearly $16 million and a penthouse at The One &amp; Only Hotel, in Cape Town, worth $12.6 million. Rabiu’s taste for good living is plain to see; he has bought homes from Eaton Square to Avenue Road, also known as Millionaires’ Row.
Rabiu jets around the world on an eight-seater Gulfstream G550 worth $44.9 million, powered by a Rolls-Royce BR710 turbofan engine, as well as an $18-million Legacy 600 aircraft.
<h4>Meet Africa’s Newest Billionaire</h4>
On a chilly autumn night in London, a chauffeured Bentley glides into the courtyard of a quiet and affluent home. Seconds later, at the entrance of the grand two-storey house, the doors swing open and out walks one of Africa’s richest men in a T-shirt, jeans and black overcoat. Hardly how one imagines the publicity-shy chairman and CEO of BUA Group, a privately-owned conglomerate with annual revenues estimated at $2 billion.
The look may be modest; his ambitions are anything but, as revealed by his plans to invest more than $500 million in Nigeria’s economy over the next few years. This is Abdulsamad Rabiu, the unassuming Nigerian business tycoon, full of life, with a keen ear and a great business story.
Born in Nigeria’s northern state of Kano, Rabiu is the son of renowned businessman, Isyaku Rabiu, who made a fortune in trade and industry in the decades after Nigeria’s independence. By the 1970s, Isyaku’s wealth and influence had grown considerably. He emerged as a key sponsor of the National Party of Nigeria, which became the ruling political party after the country returned to civilian rule, following the elections of 1979. A military coup, in 1983, toppled the government and led to the arrest of the president Shehu Shagari and many of his close associates, including Isyaku.
Around this time, the younger Rabiu earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, in the United States. He returned home to find his father’s business in a precarious state following the incarceration. Barely 24 years old, with little business experience, Rabiu had to lead his father’s business empire during dark days.
“It was very difficult. When we started, our dad was not there. There was this huge vacuum, because of his personality. He grew the business, he did everything, everybody reported to him, and then he wasn’t there anymore. So at a very tender age, I was saddled with so many things; I had to make a lot of important decisions, and don’t forget that this happened suddenly,” says Rabiu.
“At the time, there were three ships being discharged, rice and sugar ships. The government agencies tried to seize the goods; so we were discharging, they were taking, we were taking back. It was a big, big issue. Those kinds of things were really challenging.”
“The biggest challenge was that there were restrictions on confirming letters of credit because of the coup. Then there was the issue of the planes; there were two private jets and we didn’t know what to do with them. We couldn’t fly them. They actually grounded the jets. We were able to get the big one out and we decided we didn’t need it. I just got rid of it.”
“[My father] was in detention, so who was going to be flying a private jet at that time with the major-general Muhammadu Buhari around. They grounded the small plane for two years but it was released after [my father] was released from detention.”
In 1988, Rabiu set up his own business, BUA International, with the blessing of his father. He  imported rice, sugar and edible oils, as well as iron and steel rods. His big break came in 1990 when a friend informed him of an opportunity to do a deal with a government-owned steel company.
Production at the Delta Steel Company had been beggared by the Nigerian government’s decision to reduce grants. The company was considering approaching private business to finance the procurement of raw materials and Rabiu saw the opportunity. The deal needed approval from the government. After approaching the minister of steel, who hailed from Rabiu’s home state, he was asked to finance the project.
“They only wanted three serious companies to participate because they did not want to shut down Delta Steel. He went to the president and managed to get a special allocation to Delta Steel, but it wasn’t enough. So, he asked if we would be able to get counter funding, and I said ‘of course’. We approached First Bank and we showed them the proposal at the time and they said they would need us to put in our equity.”
“We were able to get the business which was worth almost $20 million at the time, but the idea was that we were importing their raw materials to the tune of 25,000 to 30,000 tons per month, and instead of them paying us back in cash, they gave us the processed products. We didn’t want to collect money because at the time you would sometimes never get it.”
The payment method was favorable for Rabiu and his company because the price of the products was government controlled.
“I think it was around $6.3 from the company, but around $90 in the open market. So it was quite a good opportunity for us and we made quite a bit of money.”
By 1992, a regime change came and the honeymoon was over. With the substantial profits he had made from the steel venture, Rabiu invested in Tropic Commercial Bank, which operated in Nigeria. He became the chairman of the bank after buying a majority shareholding.
In 1995, BUA acquired Nigeria Oil Mills, which was a peanut processing company in Kano, for more than $20 million. The previous owners had offered BUA the business based on their status as a player in the edible oils business. Two years later, BUA Flour Mills’ first factory was established in Lagos. The Kano flour factory was launched in 1998. Thereafter, BUA set up its sugar refinery in Lagos. The 2,000 metric ton (MT) per day capacity plant is the second largest refinery in West Africa, after the Dangote Sugar refinery, which produces an estimated 2,400MT per day.
It’s a hot morning in Port Harcourt, on the coast of Nigeria when FORBES AFRICA visits one of Rabiu’s biggest projects, the BUA Mixed Development, which includes: a sugar refinery with a production capacity of 2,000 tons per day and a 65,000MT storage; a flour mill; a pasta, semolina and rice mill. In the capital, Abuja, Rabiu’s BUA Group has a huge housing project of 200 homes to be completed by early next year.
“He is very analytical, balanced and always calm under stressful situations. In spite of being experienced, he is always willing to learn more,” says Engr Olumo, BUA Group’s project co-ordinator in the eastern region.
“It has been wonderful seeing the company grow and prosper. Mr Rabiu is very approachable and reasonable. We have a team of 14 people working in the London office and we all feel as if we are a family. We are treated with the utmost respect. All employees approach Mr Rabiu on a first name basis,” says Rajan Sharma, the trade finance manager at Rabiu’s equipment and material procurement company, NOM UK.
Rabiu has often been compared to Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, due to the fact that most of their businesses operate in the same sectors. He dismisses talk of any competition between himself and Dangote, pointing out that their mutual interests in certain sectors derives from the inclinations of the patriarchs of their families.
“We are both from Kano and our parents were doing more or less the same kind of business, so we grew up in the trading environment. My dad had been doing rice, sugar and edible oil for a very long time. Aliko’s granduncle, Sanusi Dantata, at one time was the biggest trader in terms of imports in Kano State,” he says.
“We’ve known each other since childhood. Although people seem to think that we are doing the sort of business that Aliko is doing, I keep telling them that this is a business that my family has been involved in before Aliko even started.”
BUA’s sugar venture was a cash cow. The company was able to reap huge margins due to the difference in duties for imports of raw sugar, which was 5%, and that of finished, or white, sugar, which is 50%. With the money he made from this business, the amount of which he declines to reveal, Rabiu cast his eye further.
His research revealed that the cement business would offer good returns on investment. The first step was to secure a license to import cement. The market for cement in the country was characterized by high price through scarcity, which was due to the fact that few companies held licences to import. Conditions for obtaining the license included that the interested company must have a terminal where the raw cement would be processed and bagged, as well as have a plant in Nigeria where production is taking place, or be in the process of building one.
BUA set out to meet the requirements, starting with the acquisition of the Cement Company of Northern Nigeria (CCNN) for nearly $100 million from Scancem International in 2007. The next goal was to procure the terminal. Since it would have taken over a year to build one, Rabiu made the smart move to acquire a floating terminal. He approached the then president, Umaru Musa Yar’adua, to secure the approval. The terminal secured the import license.
Production on this platform was carried out until last year when the government restricted imports following the launch of Dangote’s $1 billion cement plant in Ibese, Nigeria. Although Rabiu disagrees with the government’s decision, he says he was prepared for it.
“When the Ibese plant was commissioned, the government decided that that there was enough production capacity in Nigeria and there will be no need for imports. I still do not agree with that.”
“We knew it was coming, so we decided to put up our own plant. Part of what we acquired from Scancem was a small grinding plant in Edo State, which is called Edo Cement, but then with a large limestone deposit. The plant is being built as we speak and will be delivered next year. It is a 3-million ton plant and costs a little over $500 million. At the same time, we are also looking at Ilaro, west Nigeria; in fact I am going to China next week for a meeting with CDMI, a Chinese cement plant manufacturer, to put up another plant in Ilaro. We want to capture part of the south western market, because that is the biggest market in Nigeria today.”
Rabiu believes that Nigerian demand is greater than estimated. He points out that when the additional supply is added and the price is adjusted further, latent demand will be unlocked.
“Nigeria has around 170 million people and the production capacity that the country has is about 20 million, maybe 22 million tons. So that gives us about 117 kilograms per head. Nigeria is so low in relation to other African countries, in terms of consumption per head. It has to go up and I am looking at a minimum of 250 kilograms per head in the next three to four years. I think it will happen and we are looking at least at a minimum of 35 to 40 million tons capacity,” he says.
“The price of cement in Nigeria is probably the highest anywhere in the world, apart from possibly Zambia, at $8.80 per bag, which is $173 per ton. It’s around $40 anywhere else in the world; why should it be $170? It doesn’t make sense at all.”
“Everybody says we have issues with infrastructure and power; it’s nonsense. Power is cheap in Nigeria. Gas is cheap. We had to put up a power plant at Edo Cement, which is about $60 to $70 million. Capital expenditure is there, and it’s quite a bit of money. But, it costs you no more than $20 million a year for gas and it is your biggest cost in a cement plant,” he says.
Rabiu wants to see the price of products decrease so that demand will increase.
“The moment we have a price that is more affordable, demand is going to shoot up. Today cement is around $8 per bag. If we are able to sell it at $6.20, you will see demand shooting up by at least 20% every year. In five years, production will more than double.”
While cement has been a key focus of the group’s activities in recent years, Rabiu also has his eyes on the steel industry.
“In sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria is the largest importer of steel and steel products, especially pipes, flat sheets and reinforcements, yet we do not have an integrated steel plant in the country.”
Plans are also being made to invest more in expanding the sugar business to exploit opportunities that have been created by the federal government’s implementation of a national sugar master plan.
“We want to ensure that we have at least 30,000 hectares cultivated for sugar plantation in the next three years. We have the Lafiaji sugar plantation, which we bought from the government around four years ago, but it is only around 15,000 hectares, so we are trying to develop another 30,000 hectares.”
“We believe the demand for sugar will go up simply because of the price. Sugar is still around $400. The cost of production, if you have a plantation, is probably around $150 per ton to produce locally. Imagine the demand if that happens. We should be able to supply the entire region with sugar, we will look to take the West African market,” he says.
For a man who can easily afford the best in life—he has a Bentley and Aston Martin parked in his courtyard—Rabiu’s simplicity is remarkable. He speaks excitedly about going to see American jazz singer Stacey Kent play whenever she performs in London. The man is also a movie buff and is always on the lookout for blockbuster releases. With a whiff of triumph, he declares that he just saw the new biographical drama Diana, which captures the last two years of the life of the late Princess of Wales.
Rabiu exudes an aura of a fulfilment. He gives the impression of one who values his achievements and success, but does not wear it on his sleeve. From being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Rabiu—Africa’s newest billionaire—has carved out his own place in the continent’s business history.

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How mogul Abdulsamad Rabiu has become a billionaire again

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