The story does not begin with Mike Adenuga. It begins with his daughters, who stride into boardrooms as if they were born there, carrying not just the weight of a fortune but the hum of a family empire.
Bella Disu, polished yet relentless, has become the public face of Globacom. Twenty-one years at her father’s side, she now serves as executive vice chairman, second only to the tycoon himself. She manages property ventures, sits on Julius Berger’s board, and still finds time to champion the arts at the Mike Adenuga Centre. France even pinned a medal on her lapel, recognising her as a custodian of culture.
Across the group’s corridors, another sister, Afolasade, threads law with commerce. A barrister by training, she climbed to group executive director, offering legal counsel and strategic guardrails to Globacom and Conoil. Her résumé reads like a hybrid of courtroom and corporate playbook, her education stretching from Reading to King’s Business School.
And then there is Abimbola, who shares her father’s birthday. At Conoil, she sits on the executive board, helping set the pace of an oil company that remains a pillar of Adenuga’s wealth. Finance, operations, capital expenditure: her daily vocabulary hums with the mechanics of petroleum.
It is easy to think of them only as heirs. But that would miss the quiet choreography of succession, a plan stitched over decades. Adenuga’s empire spans oil, telecoms, banking, construction, and aviation. His net worth hovers above six billion dollars, yet his greatest calculation may be how to parcel authority among eight children.
Observers sometimes ask: Can a fortune be passed like an heirloom without fraying at the edges? The Adenuga daughters offer a provisional answer. They are not only carrying a legacy; they are remaking it, with steady hands and a different cadence.
In Nigeria, dynasties in business are often fragile, undone by ego or entropy. Yet for now, the Adenuga daughters walk as if the ground beneath them is already paved in signal bars and oil wells. The wonder is not that they inherited the dial tone, but that they appear ready to change the music.
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