Adewale Tinubu, who founded what has grown into Nigeria’s “largest
downstream petroleum marketing company”, Oando PLC., with a seed
capital of N5,000. This corporate profile was triggered by Wale’s latest
move, the agreement entered by Oando’s subsidiary, Oando Energy
Resources, to acquire the entire business of ConocoPhillips in Nigeria for
a sum of $1.79 billion.
When this deal is completed – and Wale’s group had already made initial
deposit of over $400 million with complicated financial engineering in top
gear to pay up the outstanding -Oando’s daily oil exploration would
skyrocket from 4,500 mbpd to 50,000 mbpd, establishing it as the largest
indigenous oil exploration company.
But this is not just happening by chance. Rather, Wale is well on his way
to actualising his long held strategy of building “Africa’s first indigenous
world-class energy company.”
With a market capitalisation of $2 billion and over a thousand staff,
Oando is the first Nigerian company that is quoted not only in the
Nigerian Stock Exchange but also on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
With about 500 retail outlets in the country and about 120 km gas pipeline
to aid its distribution, the small partnership set up in 1994 and that moved
from his father’s garage to an office in a law chamber to become the
nation’s leading indigenous energy company is certainly a study in
entrepreneurial ingenuity.
But how did a young man in his 40s come to this outstanding wealth and
achievements in so short a time? In Nigeria where corporate success
stories are vilified and often tainted with, at times, sour-grape tales of
underhand deals, or sarcastic sneers of proxy interests, weighty corrupt
official leverage and so forth, it is easy to obscure the corporate ingenuity
of local entrepreneurs, which our people can learn from. As Wale himself
told Moky Makura in a profile, “There is a skepticism that borders on
paranoia that you can’t actually have an African success story in
business.” But the fear of bad currencies should not stop us from using the
genuine ones!
While Wale studied law, his father, Alhaji Kafaru O. Tinubu’s fondest
desire was that he had a son to take over his own law chambers, K. O.
Tinubu and Co. Alhaji Tinubu – yes, an uncle to Asiwaju Bola Ahmed
Tinubu – was a retired Police Commissioner in the old Western Region,
encompassing the six states of the Western Region. But he was also a
lawyer, who retired to run his own chambers, play the godfather to many
in politics, public and private sector. So influential was he that even the
current Oba of Lagos was counted among his protégés.
However, when Wale graduated with LLB from the University of
Liverpool and LLM from London School of Economics in 1990, he came
under the tutelage of one Babatunde Raji Fashola, a crack litigator, who
was later, in one of those intricate tales of the century, to emerge the
governor of Lagos State and now arguably, Nigeria’s most successful
governor and a visionary public sector manager of our time – a story for
another day captured in our forthcoming book! By Wale’s confession,
Fashola taught him everything he knew about law practice while they were
together at the famous Sofunde, Osakwe, Ogundipe and Belgore chambers.
But while Alhaji Tinubu wanted his son to inherit his chambers, Wale
instead lured Fashola into forming an independent chambers franchised
from his father’s name, K. O. Tinubu and Co. Unknown to many people,
there were two K. O. Tinubu chambers – one, belonging to Alhaji Tinubu,
located at 2A, Anthony Road, Ilupeju, and another, fully owned by
Fashola and Wale, leveraging on his father’s name, located at Igbosere
Road. It took the future oil tycoon to come up with such a bizarre notion
in the first place and a most indulgent father to accept it.
Fashola wanted a modest office the two young partners could afford but
Wale had his sight on an expensive and prestigious office in a strategic
location even though, for the meantime, the two partners operated from
Wale’s dining table at Dolphin Estate. But the three-year-rent demanded
was far beyond their meager resources. “How would we ever pay for
this?” Fashola the realist demanded. But Wale the dreamer and daring
risk-taker was undeterred, waving off Fashola’s concern. “Don’t worry,”
he said.
Wale, instead, entered into a shrewd negotiation of a staggered payment
spread over a year and then negotiated another long credit deal with a
neighbouring vendor for office furniture. It was a measure of his
negotiating skills even then that the property developer acceded to such a
deal even when he could have given out the place to people, who could
afford the cost. Courage, derring-do and such negotiating skills were to
become the defining elements of Wale’s inherent strategic business
alchemy. Even as a student in England, for instance, he traded on cars with
his school fees first in cross-country runs in Europe, netting profits.
But Wale’s restive mind was not on law. He combined
law with exploring deep interest in oil business. “I have
always been ambitious,” he told us in an interview. “I
had always been somebody that whenever we were
advising clients, I would be more interested in the
moves the client was making on the corporate side than
in giving the client the advice. Having given clients
advice once or twice, I suddenly realised that I’d rather
be the one making the moves myself than giving others
advice.”
Meanwhile, his dissonance with legal practice got even more accentuated
by a particularly jarring incident. Fashola had spent a night, preparing
Wale for an appeal case for an armed robbery gang, who had been wrongly
convicted for a robbery by another gang. The following morning, Wale
was in the Appeal Court, arguing his appeal for the robbers when the
prosecutor interrupted him to inform the court that the robbers had already
been executed early that morning! For a man, who loves to shape events
rather than being merely reactive, that finally was the snapping point.
Wale’s interest in oil business became an obsession. At a point, he had
two or three-man team permanently inside his office, plotting oil deals.
“You oil merchants, leave our chambers,” Fashola would fire back.
“Why don’t you just leave this law and join us in this oil business?” Wale
would plead with Fashola.
“No, no, no, no. Law is what I am interested in, I am not interested in oil
business.”
As Wale would rationalise it later, if Fashola had joined the oil business,
Nigeria would have lost the great governor he turned out to be. From
shuttling between law practice and supplying petroleum products to
clients, “eventually, it was clear to me that I would concentrate on the oil
side.”
Wale’s oil business took off with a contract from Unipetrol PLC. to
transport diesel from Port Harcourt Refinery to service fishing trawlers.
The contract was introduced by a friend, Jite Okoloko, who had no vessel
to execute the job. Another friend, Mofe Boyo, a lawyer, who worked for
an American oil services company that had shipping vessels, introduced
them to a boat named, The Carolina. Wale and his friends took an open
boat to the Bonny sea to inspect the vessel. With no life jacket, their
voyage turned highly risky, as the weather turned stormy and the sea
turbulent. “What am I doing here?” Wale kept asking himself.
But his anxiety turned into Eureka when he saw the ship. “The day I went
to Bonny anchorage in that storm,” Wale told us, “I saw The Carolina
bobbing up and down and I knew it was our destiny. And I told my
partners we were going to buy that ship.”
From then, a new partnership, Ocean and Oil, was birthed in 1994 with his
two friends, as partners.
They rented the ship for $10,000 dollars a month, a sum of money Wale
borrowed from his parents to make the first payments. But because
payments from Unipetrol were not coming on time, Wale and his partners
fell behind on payments, learning his first lesson on cash flow while
playing hide and seek with his creditors until finally, Wale came up with a
deal to buy The Carolina despite having no money to pay. The ship owners
were in financial difficulty and Wale’s deal was simple: Since his
payments were falling behind, why not sell the ship to Ocean and Oil and
thereby transfer the outstanding liabilities?
But where would the money come from? To finance the purchase, the
partners borrowed $100,000 from a finance house at whopping 10 per cent
interest rate monthly (meaning, 120 per cent interest per annum!) and
thought themselves very lucky to get the deal. From shipping diesel to
fishing trawlers, Wale found they were making even more profits,
supplying diesel to oil servicing companies, which were ready to pay at a
premium for somebody, who attended to their needs promptly.
Their efficient delivery on time was such a novelty at the time that many
of the largely expatriate oil servicing companies were passing his numbers
around. Efficiency, quick delivery and integrity became their critical
success factor. From one shipping vessel, Wale acquired more until he had
seven ships of different capacities, ranging from 1,000 to 30,000 tons.
Wale and his partners had arrived – small time.
In those days, Unipetrol PLC. was one of the top 10 quoted companies,
with the Federal Government, holding 60 per cent of the shares. That
typically meant an over-bloated company, reeling under bureaucracy.
In 2000, against all odds and expectation, Ocean and Oil won the bid for
30 per cent of Unipetrol, which the Federal Government offered for
private core investors. It was the corporate equivalent of a rat, swallowing
an elephant. Wale recalled how Unipetrol’s MD, Yusuf Alli, burst out
laughing when Wale informed him he wanted to buy Unipetrol.
He was
not alone. The General Manager of First Bank whom Wale approached to
discuss his bid could not control his own laughter either. “You, buy
Unipetrol?” he asked with undisguised skepticism. When the young
corporate Vikings won the bid, there was a national outrage, with the
union up in arms against a takeover of the corporate institution by “Eaglet
managers” yet in their 30s.
P
How were they able to leverage on their $3 million cash to raise $16
million cost within two weeks? How were they able to tackle the powerful
unions, who picketed the Eaglet managers, refusing them access to the
company they just acquired? How were they able to deliver a stunning
turnaround that had held the key to the success of Oando PLC., the new
company formed out of the future merger of Ocean and Oil and Unipetrol
when the corporate eaglets ultimately acquired all the federal government
stakes in Unipetrol?
All these and more are part of Wale’s growing legend in courage, risk
taking and negotiating dexterity that should come in his full corporate
profile. Suffice it to say Ocean and Oil transformed into Oando PLC.,
which subsequently swallowed the corporate behemoth, Unipetrol, giving
birth to more corporate exploits that today hoist the young Adewale
Tinubu, as the oil czar of Nigeria.
Source: Sun Newspaper
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