Mike Adenuga struck oil when he ventured into oil and gas with the founding in 1990 of Consolidated Oil Plc, popular as ConOil, an oil dredging and marketing company. ConOil went on to become the first indigenous company to discover oil in commercial quantity in the shallow waters of Ondo State in 1991 and he has never looked back.
From humble beginnings, Adenuga was born 65 years ago in Ibadan, Oyo State, on April 29, 1953, but many consider him the hero of Nigerian telecommunications when he led his company Globacom Ltd to unravel the per second billing system the other GSM companies had said was light years away.
Globacom, Glo for short, had come with competition bursting strategies when it launched in the Nigerian market including selling for the first time a SIM card for just one naira! Who can even forget the dawn of the long television advertisements the company introduced or the many celebrities it recruited as ambassadors. Finally, Nigerians longsuffering from the days of NITEL could sigh with relief that a company by one of their own had come along to alleviate their communication pains. Glo had entered the GSM market rather belatedly but had grown phenomenally and got people talking, taught them to rule their world. It was a new world painstakingly crafted by Adenuga himself from the board rooms of the Glo Edifice on Adeola Odeku in Lagos. It is no wonder the founder of Glo, chairman of ConOil, and part owner of Sterling Bank Plc, has many awards to his name. The future is not just bright for him and Africa but also unlimited. For this, he is a Lagos Big Boy.
Bet you didn’t know that he paid his way through school doing menial jobs in the USA including driving a cab.