FACTFILE with Lanre Alfred
…truth behind the headlines, conspiracies, cover-ups, trials and triumphs
There are women who command a room and there are women who become the room. Oyin Adeyemi, Executive Chairman and CEO of Still Earth Holdings and Tirex Petroleum, belongs to the latter. I have met enough titans of industry and aristocrats to know when I am in the presence of something rare.
With Oyin, it is not about the shimmer of her diamonds or the grace in her posture; it is about the still energy she exudes, that poised composure that makes noise irrelevant. She doesn’t compete with the room; she defines it.
I have followed her journey quietly, and almost reverently, as one follows the arc of a star that never burns out. She doesn’t court attention, yet the world turns to look. Oyin, unlike too many of her peers, does not proclaim genius through spectacle, she inhabits it and gives it life.
She has mastered the subtle art of modesty in acclaim, and that, I believe, is where her true power lies.
When I began conceiving the book, ‘Genius of Still Earth,’ I knew she would not merely feature in it, she would be it.
I write in the quiet, reflective voice that seems appropriate for a chronicler of lives lived large, and now lived richly in liturgical prose. In the unfolding ledger of my authorship I have sought to honour Nigerian figures whose trajectories leap beyond the ordinary, book after book. For example, with creative care I completed The Man Who Carried a City, a labour of love on Babajide Sanwo Olu, Governor of Lagos State, published in his 60th year.
Then, I wrote The Big Kahuna: Triumphs of Abdulsamad Rabiu at 65, a literary sculpture of the life of Abdulsamad Rabiu, whose industrial and philanthropic imprint demanded a form worthy of its subject.
And further back still, I turned my attention to the governance of Dapo Abiodun with the coffee-table volume Dapo Abiodun: The State House As His Pulpit, tracing his leadership of Ogun State.
Of all the books I have written, though, it is the latest—about Oyin Adeyemi—that stands out in my own mind as both breathtaking and a fantastic page-turner. I endeavoured to reflect the cadences of her journey, the tectonics of her ambitions, the intimate interstices of public and private self all woven into one luminous tome. It is a story told with the clamour of human stakes and the hush of spiritual longing. I say, quite simply, that the Oyin Adeyemi volume is one of the volumes in which I poured most of my heart. Written in about 300 pages, its glow will linger in the memory of the reader long after the physical leaves have been turned.
And, of course, she is deserving of such special publication; because, if there was a living metaphor for grace in form and brilliance in restraint, it is Oyin.
She represents everything I find compelling about modern African sophistication: deliberate, elegant, fiercely intelligent, and utterly unbothered by the noise of competition. Oyin doesn’t chase applause; she creates awe. Every space she designs, every object she curates, and every word she speaks feels measured, balanced, and purposeful. There’s an unmistakable discipline about her: that rare kind of intelligence that marries taste with intent.
To watch Oyin work is to see a kind of quiet rebellion unfold. She operates in a field long dominated by men who built reputations on concrete and bravado. Yet here she stands, effortlessly rewriting the rules, introducing poetry into architecture and meaning into modernism. She is proof that femininity, when armed with intellect, is not ornamental, it is game-changing.
I’ve walked through her spaces, and I use the word “walked” deliberately, because you don’t just enter an Oyin Adeyemi creation; you journey through it. Each room feels like a paragraph in a novel of light and geometry. Every texture tells a story; every wall holds a conversation. There is rhythm, silence, and soul in her designs, as though she chants to the earth and the earth listens.
She reminds me of Zaha Hadid, yes, but with a distinctly African voice. There’s a warmth, a rootedness in her aesthetic creations that defies imitation. She fuses ancestral energy with global form; she translates tradition into timeless design. Where others see space, she sees spirit. That is her genius.
And it isn’t just about buildings. It’s about philosophy. Oyin approaches life the way she approaches design, with proportion. In her presence, there’s no clutter, no chaos, no need for verbosity. Everything fits where it should. She wears her jewelry the way she wears her achievements, subtly, precisely, as punctuation, never as paragraphs.
Beyond her adventure in construction, her recent foray into the oil industry has been quite instructive. There is something poetic about Oyin, and its characteristic of women who build; the ones who do not simply inherit the world as it is, but insist on drafting their own blueprints, brick by trembling brick, or in this case, rig by relentless rig. Oyin is one such woman.
When Tirex Petroleum & Energy began its ascent, it did so like a scholar cracking open an ancient text, gently, reverently, as if afraid to wake the gods that slumber beneath the sea. To Oyin, the ocean was never an adversary. It was a dialogue partner. And what a conversation it has been. Every platform she’s commissioned, every well Tirex has drilled, feels like a stanza in some secret poem between humankind and the elements.
Where others see pipes, she sees prayers. Where some see crude, she sees courage distilled into form. She speaks of pressure readings the way architects speak of light, as something that reveals character. I’ve heard men in hard hats call her “the quiet storm.” They mean it as praise, I think.
Take the Saturn-1 well for Chevron Nigeria Limited, completed in April 2022, ninety days of sheer precision. Most people saw a contract closed and a timeline met. I saw a quiet revolution. For the first time, an indigenous firm matched the tempo of the multinationals, line for line, drill for drill. Engineers who once fetched coffee on offshore rigs now called the shots. It was, in many ways, Nigeria’s coming-of-age story, told not in boardrooms or press briefings but in saltwater and flame.
And that’s the thing about Oyin. She never performs her power. She practices it. Every project feels less like extraction and more like exorcism, a deliberate cleansing of the national psyche. She seems to be saying, “Look, we can do this competently, honestly, and beautifully.”
When Tirex undertook the Platform Installation and Six Wells Project for First E&P, in collaboration with Shelf Drilling, it wasn’t surpassed production, offering civics lesson in the form of quality engineering. Three hundred and fifteen days at sea, hundreds of Nigerian engineers, technicians, and local vendors working in rhythmic coordination. The kind that redeems a country’s name.
It’s easy to romanticize this woman, but I find her most impressive when she’s utterly practical. She talks about oil the way priests talk about sacraments; as something sacred that must be handled with clean hands. She insists that every well Tirex drills is an “altar of intention.” It’s the kind of phrase that could sound pretentious in another mouth, but from Oyin it sounds like principle.
And what’s fascinating is how her leadership turns industry into pedagogy. Under her, Tirex functions like a classroom disguised as a company. Local engineers get trained; host communities get infrastructure; small vendors find stability. The rigs become miniature societies at sea, humming to a rhythm of efficiency and quiet pride.
Now, I’m no stranger to Nigeria’s oil narrative: the plunder, the politics, the performative outrage. We’ve told the same story for sixty years: black gold, red greed, white papers. But Tirex rewrites the script. It reframes oil not as curse, but as catalyst. It’s not that Oyin denies the industry’s sins; she simply refuses to be complicit in them. In her world, every barrel of crude is also a barrel of evidence, that Nigerians can extract value without extracting their soul.
And perhaps that’s her most subversive act, running an oil company with a conscience. It shouldn’t sound radical, but it does. She’s that rare CEO who talks about inclusion without a PowerPoint deck, who measures success not just by production output but by the number of local contractors she’s elevated along the way.
In Port Harcourt, Warri, and Bonny, testimonies trail her projects like perfume. Vendors speak of contracts paid on time. Young engineers say her mentorship programs changed their lives. The cynics — and there are many — call it corporate theatre. But even theatre, when well-staged, restores faith in the possible.
Her fiscal prudence is legendary. Tirex doesn’t chase the boom-and-bust hysteria of the sector. Oyin reinvests. She modernizes equipment. She pays her people well. In a country where executives treat company accounts like personal inheritance, that restraint is revolutionary.
What intrigues me most, however, is not the success but the symbolism. Tirex has become a mirror in which Nigeria might glimpse the version of itself it claims to be: disciplined, ethical, and competent. Every time I watch one of those rigs flare against the horizon, I imagine her chanting a small prayer: Let the country catch up to its potential.
Of course, she would never say that out loud. Oyin isn’t the type to grandstand. She builds, she leads, she corrects quietly. She embodies that old-fashioned virtue that has gone out of style in our political and corporate culture, integrity that doesn’t need an audience.
Still, I find myself wondering: what happens when a woman like her begins to redefine an industry? When oil ceases to be a symbol of greed and becomes an emblem of grace? Nigeria has a way of breaking its best minds, but Oyin seems unbothered by that possibility. She moves through the noise with monk-like focus, as if to prove that the real revolution will not be televised; it will be engineered.
And so, each time I hear the hum of Tirex’s operations, I think not of profit margins or production quotas. I think of architecture. Of grace built in steel. Of a woman who decided that to build Nigeria, one must first believe it is still worth building. I find her commitment and subtlety refreshing in an era of overstatement. Oyin is the counterpoint to a culture addicted to noise. While others are busy announcing relevance on social media, she’s busy constructing legacies in silence. That’s why I call her the genius of still earth. Because stillness, in her case, is not inertia; it is command.
There’s something magnetic about women like her; women who have mastered the art of soft power. Nigeria doesn’t produce many of them, not because it can’t, but because our culture often mistakes loudness for leadership. Yet Oyin has proven that refinement is a force, that one can lead without shouting. She has turned elegance into authority.
Her projects are less about construction and more about curation. They feel like living essays written in concrete, steel, oil, and serenity. That, to me, is the essence of genius: the ability to empower, establish value and create continuity in a plethora of meanings. In every facet of her life, Oyin Adeyemi achieves that synthesis. She is, at once, artist and architect, curator and creator, thinker and doer. Her mind, like her spaces, is structured yet fluid. Her success, like her design, feels inevitable.
When I look at Oyin, I see a masterclass in modern womanhood. She is proof that one can be both fierce and feminine, commanding and compassionate. She doesn’t apologise for her taste or her talent. She has carved her niche in granite and integrity and that, in today’s world, is no small feat.
So yes, I will say it plainly: she deserves every pedestal she stands on. In industries that often measure genius by gender, she has made her gender less the conversation and her brilliance and femininity, the fine print of celebratory headlines.
Genius of Still Earth exists because Oyin Adeyemi exists. Tirex Petroleum thrives because Oyin thrives. She reminds us that creation can be contemplative, genius can be gentle, while enterprise can offer both power and peace.
I chose to celebrate her not because she is successful, but because she is significant. Because she represents something rare and necessary; a vision of African excellence that is subtle, enduring, and profoundly intelligent.
That, to me, is genius. The genius of still earth.
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