Nigeria’s Richest Young Man? How BUA Heir Isyaku Rabiu Jr Controls ₦115 Billion in Assets
Nigeria’s Richest Young Man? How BUA Heir Isyaku Rabiu Jr Controls ₦115 Billion in Assets
Nigeria’s second-richest man, Abdulsamad Isyaku Rabiu, yesterday appointed his first son and the heir to his vast wealth, Isyaku Abdulsamad Rabiu jnr, to the BUA Foods management team.
The media-shy young man was appointed as Chief Officer, Global Procurement and Strategic Operations for BUA Food.
Here is one favourite fact about the young man.
Abdulsamadu Samad Rabiu (Jr) is the richest young Nigerian within the age bracket of 20’s and 30’s.
The young man is currently worth N115.41 billion as of the end of January 2022.
In just one month in January, the young man quietly added 43 billion naira to his wealth.
How then, did the young man who is a Wizkid fan become this rich at such a relatively young age?
His father, Nigeria’s second richest man, Rabiu Isyaku Abdulsamad, started a business group called the BUA Group in 1985 from scratch.
The group has a lot of investment in the country’s economy and business sectors, with a focus on sugar, cement, ports, real estate, agricultural produce, oil, and mills. He also imports rice, edible oil, flour, and iron and steel products.
For those that did not know, Samad’s dad is the owner of BUA Cement, the second-largest cement company in Nigeria after Dangote.
He also owns BUA foods.
Having grown the business from scratch to the global conglomerate that it is today, the founder listed two of his businesses, BUA Cement and BUA Foods, on the Nigerian stock exchange.
Because of his father’s generosity, Samad has 1.79 million direct stakes in BUA Foods, representing 9.96% of the company, courtesy of his father, who gifted the shares to him for free.
Together with his father, he owns a 99.8% controlling interest in BUA Cement.
So when you calculate the shares the young man has in their family business, BUA Foods and BUA Cement, it is currently worth 115 billion naira. (It should be more than this because of the astronomical rise in price of BUA foods over the years.)
At the moment, Rabiu Jnr is not allowing the enormous wealth he controls to influence him, as he is grounded (he is not even on Instagram) while doing his day job at the family business as the Executive Director of the food and agriculture arm of BUA Group, making him the youngest Executive Director in this part of the world before his recent promotion yesterday.
The Isyaku Naziru Rabiu Jr story reminds us again that you win the birth lottery when you are born into the right family and the right country.
Most importantly, talent is universal, but the opportunity to be a megabillionaire at this young age without lifting a finger is not available to everybody.
