Tony Elumelu at 61: Marking another milestone

The unit of life is time. Life is like a leaf of plain white paper you decide what to write on it. This philosophy defined Tony Elumelu’s teenage years. Then young Tony set out to discover not only what the future held for him but to design it, which exemplifies Abraham Lincoln’s postulation that the best way to predict the future is to create it. He did not wait for life to happen to him—he happened to life!

Sixty-one years on the voyage of life, riding tides in the turbulent ocean of the universe, like the great Michelangelo, Tony Elumelu has not only carved and painted his “tomorrow” but has become a paragon of a success story for young entrepreneurs to copy. His impact in modelling young entrepreneurs has reverberated across Africa via the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF).

He is a private sector leader cum shrewd investor with investments in key sectors of the African economy through Heirs Holdings, Transcorp Group, UBA Group, etcetera. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created by this entrepreneurial maven. At an early stage, with an eagle-eyed focus, he was poised to achieve greatness in life.

He could not allow any perceived disadvantage to weaken his resolve to rise from the nadir of obscurity to the Olympian cliff of fame. As Arthur C. Clarke said: “The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible”.

Tony Elumelu, as a pacesetter, believes that impossible is just a word. At 34, he was already chief executive officer of the defunct Standard Trust Bank and one of the youngest bank CEOs in Nigeria. Stories of reforms and revolution of the African banking industry cannot be complete without outlining his sterling efforts towards positioning the African banking industry to compete with the rest of the world.

His indelible footprints of success as chief executive of United Bank of Africa (UBA), will remain a revered point of reference for ages to come. Tony Elumelu’s 10-year visionary leadership at UBA positioned the bank as a leading 21st-century megabank in the continent, with over 20 million active customers, 30,000 employees, and 1,000 branches across 20 countries in Africa.

When Americans brag with behemoths like JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America and Europeans pride themselves in leviathans like Barclays, and Deutsche Bank AG, Africans glow in the UBA Group—all thanks to Tony O. Elumelu, CFR. The man who created his “tomorrow”.

In 2010, he retired as chief executive officer of the UBA Group and founded Heirs Holdings and The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF). Beyond the banking industry, Tony Elumelu has straddled the divide of the hospitality industry. His spirit of excellence can be seen in Transcorp Hilton, Abuja, a five-star hotel located at the heart of Nigeria’s capital, where he has a controlling interest.

As the billionaire entrepreneur is graciously celebrating his 61st birthday, the life of Tony O. Elumelu has become another proof that repeated excellence heralds greatness. It exudes a purpose-driven life anchored on the eternal philosophy that life is not an accident, which implies that for anyone to be great you have to set out for it with laser-focused vision and purpose-driven passion.

Tony O. Elumelu is the father of Africapiltalism—an economic philosophy hedged on optimising the power of capitalism via entrepreneurship to liberate Africa from the shackles and hackles of multidimensional poverty and crass underdevelopment.

Being one of Forbes’ recognised richest people in Africa, In 2020, he was honoured amongst Times Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Despite achieving giant strides and reaching lofty milestones in life, the Delta-born business guru has never downplayed the place of grace in his meteoric rise to stardom.

On several platforms, with a sense of humility and humour, he has narrated how luck—or what can be called favour, mixed with dint of hard work, contributed immensely to his projectile growth from being just a corp member at Union Bank to emerging as one of the youngest CEOs of commercial banks to chairing one of the largest banking conglomerates in Africa.

He has asked this philosophical but rhetorical question in one of his public outings: “Am I blessed or am I lucky?”. I will try to answer it. Tony O. Elumelu is both blessed and lucky. Everything about him bespeaks blessings. His body language acknowledges the biblical expository that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong but to him, God shows mercy.

It takes unparalleled humility and a deep understanding of the role of the supernatural in the affairs of men, for a billionaire who has attained the height of success to openly acknowledge the place of luck in his success story. This is one of the great attributes that stands out Tony O. Elumelu.

Despite his hard work and sacrifices to get to his enviable status today, he has always acknowledged that he is a blessed and lucky person. His philanthropic strides and gestures are driven by this belief that he is just a custodian of wealth meant to better humanity.

A school of thought says: “What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains, and is immortal”. This is the ideology that gave birth to the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) and transformed Onyemaechi—the founder, from being just a human to a humanitarian.

Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), in the last decade, has done marvellously well to empower over 16,000 young entrepreneurs across 54 countries in Africa, through training, mentoring and funding them with start-up capital of $5,000 each. In 2015, the Foundation launched an “Entrepreneurship Programme”, a $100 million intervention to empower 10,000 African entrepreneurs over the next 10 years. Elumelu’s passion for young entrepreneurs is not only unequalled but contagious. Global bodies like UNDP, UNCDF, AfDB, Red Cross, etc., have all identified with the foundation via partnership.

Tony O. Elumelu, CFR, as an advocate of Africapitalism, and who is fondly called the king of soft life, admonishes that the next frontier of Africa’s wealth will be in the entrepreneurial quest of her youths. We cannot keep watching African youths risk and waste their lives trying to cross the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean Sea to search for greener pastures in the developed world.

As he marks another birthday milestone, I choose to celebrate his impactful journey so far in the lives of African youth. There is a school of thought that encourages us to celebrate the lives of those who have become exemplary to get others in society to emulate such virtues.