Becoming Folorunsho Alakija at 70
Africa’s Richest Woman, and Founder, FAMFA Oil, Apostle Folorunsho Alakija, who clocked 70 on Thursday, July 15, in this exclusive interview with SUNDAY EHIGIATOR, shared snippets of her journey from trials to fame and affluence
Tell us about your upbringing and shareable infant memories?
The meaning of my name is ‘God Protecter’ (Folorunso).And he has been doing that right from when I was in my mother’s womb. If it wasn’t for God, my mother wouldn’t have given birth to me. I thank God. I come from a polygamous home, from a family consisting of eight wives and 52 children. I am child number eight child to the glory of God.
Growing up, we learnt so much. At an early age of seven, my parents decided to send me and one of my siblings, who was six-year-old at the time, to boarding school in England. And that was a big change in my life. The weather wasn’t kind of course, for a little girl who has been in the sun for all her life and now had to wear winter coats and socks up to her knees. I did notot like the cold and still don’t like the cold. Then, you have to have your bath only once a week, which was the rule in boarding school.
Then coming back four years later as an 11-year-old, I remember one day, my mum sent me a letter to my dad who was having his siesta at home. She was in her shop, and I was in her shop. I had come back to Nigeria like six-months after, and she gave me this letter to go and give to my father. I got there, and he was sleeping. The mosquito net was down, and I woke him up. I said I had this letter for you and my mum wanted me to give it to you.
And he said; okay, why don’t you stick it in my mouth. And I lifted up the mosquito net and I stuck the letter in his mouth. Suddenly he got up. He was in a rage. He took his clothes brush, and he started to spank me with it. And I felt so bad. I felt that life had dealt a bad one on me, because I didn’t know what I did wrong.
He told me to put it in his mouth, and I put it in his mouth. I didn’t realise that he was only being sarcastic. And I cried all the way to my mum’s store and I told my mum what happened. She burst into laughter when I told her what happened. She called all the other retailers around and told them what happened, and they all burst out laughing, and I cried the most, because I didn’t know why they were all laughing. And I started saying, I want to go back to England, I am not staying here anymore. It took me a long time to realise what I did wrong.
What was your parent’s occupation?
My parents were textile retailers, and my father used to order textiles from Austria. He was a textile retailer. He would design them. He was a wholesaler, and my mum was one of his customers.
Tell me about your life as a fashion designer?
I studied fashion design in school. I went through school in England at the age of 11, came back to school here in Nigeria, started my A Levels in Nigeria, and went back to England. By that time that I went back I had been married and I went back to study fashion design.
I have had all my children. My youngest was two-year-old at the time. I took him with me. The third one was in boarding school. His older brothers, number one and two were also in boarding school in England, so I went to England to study fashion designing.
I came back after some crash courses in fashion design and millenary to set up my fashion label here. Within three weeks of setting up, I had entered into a fashion competition. I had won the cup and it was a national competition.
I won the competition and that immediately threw me into the limelight. This history as we look back today was what launched me into the public limelight. I stopped designing when I was 50-year-old, that’s 20-year ago. And I transitioned from the fashion industry into the oil and industry.
What made you give up fashion and how did you get into the oil and gas industry?
First and foremost let me say, fashion is my passion. Sometime in 1991, I met a family friend of mine on the plane, and she said, “there is something I’ll like to talk to you about when we get back to Nigeria. If the person I asked to help me out with it hasn’t done it, I’ll ask you to help me out.”
So, we got back to Nigeria and she came knocking on my door, and gave me some big documents. She is a Lawyer, and then said she had some clients, and “we are looking to lift crude oil from Nigeria.”
She wanted to know whether I might be able to speak to some of my clients, one of whom was the late Mrs. Babangida. And I agreed to go and see her, and see if she can help.
I got there and she said, “Okay, I can book an appointment for you to see the Petroleum Minister.” And I went to see the Petroleum Minister, and what they wanted was to lift crude, but the Minister said, the current administration at that time really wanted to move away from that, and preferred to get more Nigerians involved in that, rather than giving that out to foreigners.
So he said if they want to invest in Nigeria, rather than come and lift Nigeria’s crude, then they will be willing to do that. I took it back to my friend and she took it back to her clients, and they said, “No we don’t want to invest in Nigeria, we only wanted to lift.”
So we parted ways. And I said to myself, now that I have an enroot to that place, why don’t I go find something I can do. All I wanted was a contract to boost my pocket. Though I still wanted to carry on with my fashion, I love it.
So, I asked Mrs. Babangida to please help me book another appointment. So I went back to see the minister, and I told him I was interested in finding something to do with NNPC.
He said okay; “why don’t you go and do your homework, and let’s see what we can do.” I went back, and went to see some friends who work with NNPC at that time, and I asked them “what can I possibly do or think I can do within NNPC.”
I was given all sorts of different options that are possibilities; catering for offshore workers, then maybe transporting crude from one location to another etc. So, I would sit down, write my letter, take it there, and ask Mrs. Babangida to help me meet the minister. Sometimes I have to wait for six months to get an appointment with the Minister. Sometimes, I have to wait for like four months.
And I would go back, but the minister would point holes in what I had come to offer. And I would return home dejected. And I would go back to do some more work, and I would get Mrs. Babangida to get another appointment for me. So that went on. They were all no’s, which is one of the reasons I have made it one of my mantras to “never accept a no for an answer.”
Eventually, at the end of it all, the last thing the minister said to me was, “why don’t you think of exploration and production?”
And I thought, okay, I get it. He is trying to say no in a nice way. And he was like this is it, which means I can’t come back to this office to ask for anything else. Me! Exploration and production! We know the kind of people that are involved in that; little did I know that it was a move of God.
So, I came back home and I cried my eyes out. My husband comforted me. And I call Mrs. Babangida and told her what I came back with. And she said, well, all she knew was that that kind of thing takes years.” And we left it at that. And I carried on licking my wounds.
And then I woke up one day and said, no! I am not accepting that no. I am not going to allow that to just filter away. I said to myself, “Folorunso, what’s the matter with you. I thought you like challenges. Come on, do something about this. What’s there to lose?”
We were comfortable; we had a block of eight flats at the back of the house and our own individual house in front. Our children all abroad, we were comfortable. We were okay, I was running my fashion business and I loved it.
So I decided that I was going to go back. So I called Mrs. Babangida and I said, “Please, I would like to ask you to please book me one more appointment with the minister.” And she did. She was very kind.
But that was all that Mrs. Babangida did concerning this oil license matter. She kept on getting me those appointments. And the rest was what God wanted to do.
What he wanted to do at first by giving me that opening through my friend because I wouldn’t have looked towards the oil industry. And that’s how God works. He doesn’t come down, he uses people. So I went back and I said to the minister that I wanted to see if I could do this, and I really want to apply for it.
And she said okay, “You go and do your homework, because its Nigerians that the government of the day wants to encourage now.
We have had a lot of multinationals over the years, we want to encourage Nigerians, and we want our resources and wealth to be retained in our own land rather than have it carted away by foreigners all the time.”
So, I applied for the license three times. And that took three years. The Ministers changed hands twice within the process. And it was during the time of the last minister that I eventually got it.
I remembered I was abroad and I was watching General Babangida on CNN, when he was saying that he was stepping down. I remember that, each time the ministers changed hands, I burst into tears again. Because, it was like snakes and ladders. It was like starting all over again.
It was a case of discretionary allocation at the time. The President, through the NNPC, was the one that would decide who gets it. I think I was one of the first women to get the license. It’s very painful when you listen to people say that “oh! It’s because she makes blouses for Mrs. Babangida or Oh! It’s because she was one of them.”
How about all the others who got the license, and weren’t in the oil industry at the time that they got the license? So because they are men, they have two heads? Is it fair on womanhood? Why relegate us to the background. Why say we can’t when we can? When all the prerequisites, the boxes could be ticked?
Everything that I needed to do, to supply before I could qualify to apply for a license or get one, I made them all available; our technical partners etc. I went here and there, I got everything, and I supplied everything.
I did my homework. I learnt on the job, went for courses as well to help me to be able to sit in board rooms, and face others, and be where I am today, to His glory. Now we got that license and when it came, I went to find out about it, and I realised that it was an oil block that nobody wanted. Nobody in the industry wanted it. It was deep offshore. It was 5,000 feet deep, and technology had not reached that water depth. It was too expensive to explore.
And nobody knew what was deep under. Only God knew the blessings therein, and he closed the eyes of every human being on earth to it. And as I always say, that the stone the builders rejected, became the chief cornerstone.
So it took another three years, after getting the license, before I was able to get technical partners, because nobody wanted it.
The first door I knocked on was a multinational company that was right next to us on the plan. I said, would you like to partner with us please, and they said, “No! We were allocated that block, and we returned it, because it was just not going to happen. There was no point, where do you start from? We returned it.” And they said no, we don’t want to partner with you.
Three years down the line, Texaco came knocking. There was maybe a bit more technology improvement, and they were willing to look into that block and invited us for a meeting. We had meetings for three months before we eventually signed.
Before we signed however, those neighbours who had said no came back running saying, “we are interested!” And we told them no! Sorry, it’s too late.
Because we had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Texaco who had said, “If anything happens while we are still negotiating, we want to hear.”
So we were obliged to tell them that Statoil had come knocking on our door, and they said “no, no, no! Don’t talk to them.” So Statoil said to us, we will do this and that for you; you know what we did with that? We were armed with all the promises they made, and we used that against Texaco to negotiate for more. It was God.
So you got the license, but it was for an oil block that nobody wanted, how did you feel at that moment?
I cried my eyes out again. But I knew that we had nothing to lose. Because what we could pay for at the time was the smaller amount that we were obliged to pay to the government. We could afford to pay those as a family.
But the bigger amount that we needed to pay the government, we were waiting until we got technical partners. When we got technical partners, they did pay. Shortly after that, we found oil in commercial quantities, and the rest is history today.
Forbes 2020 recognised you as the richest woman in Africa, what does this mean to you?
I don’t say that I am, it’s people that say that. I don’t know what’s in other people’s pockets. There may be others who have more, you never know, because they aren’t saying or doing anything. But I thank God who has brought me this far. How does it make you feel? It gives you some more comfort, but it doesn’t do everything that you want in life.
Money comes and goes; you have to look after it. That’s how my parents brought us up. One of the values that they instilled in us is that you have to look after money. If you look after it, then it will look after you, and it will stay with you, otherwise it will flee from you.
It’s good to have, and it’s good to be able to use it to help others who don’t have it, because our fingers are not equal. God did say that we will always have the poor with us, and it’s because of the poor that he also created rooms for those who have more, so we can always be our brother’s keeper.