MIKE BENEDI

 
Ndaba Allan Ntsele (b. October 6, 1952) ,the South African king of high finance
He is the South African Chief Executive Officer, Pamodzi Investment Holdings (Proprietary) Limited.

Mr Ntsele's roles come as part of his rapidly expanding portfolio which began with his co-founding of Pamodzi Property Development in 1979. In 1996 he co-founded Pamodzi Investment Holdings ) and holds numerous senior board positions mostly in Pamodzi's portfolio companies.

Notably, he is chairman of Foodcorp, Pamodzi Gold, Pamodzi Resources Fund Advisors, Pamodzi Resources, Sodexho Southern Africa, Wesbank First Auto, Indwe Risk Services, South African Agricultural Processors Association and a soon-to-benamed new uranium company valued at US$460 million in which the Pamodzi Resources Fund Advisors holds a 60-percent equity interest.

He is also a director on the boards of Pamodzi Leisure Solutions, Marine Products and NamITech Altech Data, and is deputy chairman of Education Africa, a non-profit organization. In 1993, Mr. Ntsele and his partners were awarded the Nike license for Southern Africa, and he served as the licensee's executive director until 1997 when they sold the business back to Nike Group in the United States.

Amongst his many achievements Ndaba is also the South African winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year Award for 2008.


Source:http://www.africansuccess.org/visuFiche.php?id=587&lang=en

.
 
Mr Wale Tinubu, the Nigerian head of the Oando oil and gas giant; 
He is the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Oando Plc
He assumed this position in July 2001.

Prior, he was Executive Director Finance and Administration at Oando Plc.

Upon graduation, Tinubu started his career with the family's law firm, K.O. Tinubu where he worked on corporate and petroleum law assignments.

In 1994, Tinubu became one of the founding partners of Ocean and Oil Group. Whilst at Ocean and Oil, Tinubu was mainly responsible for the strategic expansion of the business.

Tinubu has a Bachelor's of Law Degree from the University of Liverpool, England and received his LLM from the London School of Economics where he specialised in International Finance and Shipping. He is also a member of the Nigerian Bar Association.

He is the Chairman of Gaslink Nigeria Ltd and Tilca Nigeria and also serves on the Board of Stallion Properties, Oando Plc Sierra Leone, Oando Plc Togo, Oando Plc Ghana, West African Refinery Company (WARCO) Sierra Leone, Ocean and Oil Services, and Econet Wireless Nigeria. He is also a member of the Institute of Directors.

Source:http://www.bideconig.com/html/ceo_md_s_profile.html

Richard John Maponya (b. December 24,1926), is a one of the richest businessmen in South Africa. He is a highly successful self-made black businessmen and didn't benefit from Black Economic Empowerment consortia which deter them from taking risks on their own.

Richard Maponya, who started his professional life as a teacher, is regarded in many circles as the father of black retail in SA. He established a thriving business empire in the 1950s when apartheid made it almost impossible for black people to enter the formal business arena.

He is one of the founding members of the National African Federated Chamber of Commerce (Nafcoc) and was also founder and chairman of the Johannesburg African Chamber of Commerce, a position he held for 14 years. In the past he also served on the board of the former Lebowa Development Corporation. He was actively involved in the politics of the former Bantustan, Lebowa, where he contributed in the establishment of the Lebowa People's Party.

The politician in Maponya saw him serving in the Urban Bantu Council - a predecessor of the apartheid-era Soweto City Council - between 1965 and 1976. In this council he also served as the chairman of the trade & transport committee.

Maponya qualified as a teacher at Kagiso Training College and began working as an administration clerk. He then decided to venture into his own business, starting with small, township-style grocery shops. This came after he struggled with the authorities to gain a general dealer's licence. He eventually got it with the help of the law firm run by Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela.

In 1952 he and his wife opened Soweto's first dairy products shop, which ultimately employed more than 100 people, including bicycle delivery men. He left that business when established players discovered Soweto.

He then ventured into bigger schemes, including a motor dealership, petrol stations, a bus service and a funeral parlour. He brought a motor vehicle sales franchise business into Soweto called Mountain Motor and has operated a BMW franchise. When the initial Coca-Cola SA operation disinvested from SA, Maponya saw an opportunity. He formed part of a group of businessmen called Kilimanjaro Holdings, which acquired Coca-Cola's bottling plant in East London.

Maponya made a 50/50 joint venture with property group Zenprop to develop the first regional shopping centre in Soweto, to be called Maponya Mall. In September 2007 his 26 years old dream came true, the Maponya Mall has opened in Soweto, one of the biggest malls in South Africa. Former President Nelson Mandela opened the shopping center.


Source:http://www.africansuccess.org/visuFiche.php?id=431&lang=en

Mr Kagiso Mmusi, the Botswana transport millionaire
WHAT WERE THE EARLY DAYS LIKE?

KM: My working life started when I was 19, and it started at the bottom. I was lucky enough to get a job with the Motor Centre Group, where I spent three years. I gave it everything I had, every day. I volunteered a lot. I did a lot of extra hours and took on extra responsibilities. When the opportunity came up to buy Western Filling Station (it was a lot smaller then), I didn't have any of the collateral that the banks wanted. But, what I did have was my reputation in the community as an honest, hard worker. I was the collateral. So when I was lucky enough to get the loan that would transform my life forever, I know it had a lot to do with the fact that I had made such an effort to invest in my reputation from the beginning.

Source:http://theafricanmillionaire.blogspot.com/2009/12/african-millionaire-kagiso-mmusi.html

 

Dr Assani: Benin born, French educated Idris Assani studies Ergodic Theory and Dynamics. Assani has written very strong papers; read, for example, the 1997 Strong laws for weighted sums of independent identically distributed random variables. (which extends with new methods results obtained jointly by (1994 Fields medalist) J. Bourgain, H. Furstenberg, Y. Katznelson and D. Ornstein. Another one is the 1998 Multiple recurrence and almost sure convergence of weakly mixing dynamical systems. gives the best possible result to date on H. Furstenberg famous conjecture on a.e. multiple recurrence for dynamical systems. Fern Hunt also says Assani is her candidate for the greatest Black Mathematician.

Source:http://tech.rogers.com/

 
Dr James Adedayo Oguntuase
Currently in Italy, Nigerian born and soley Nigerian trained, James Adedayo Oguntuase earned his Ph.D. in 2001, but has published 18 papers in mathematics since 1998. This promises to be a stelar career.

Source:http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/madgreatest.html

Dr Gumel: Born in Nigeria, Ph.D. in England. Abba Gumel is an extremely prolific in the areas Mathematical Biology, Non-linear Dynamical Systems, and Computational Mathematics. Currently he is a Full Professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada