Some time last year, Businessfront Inc., the parent company behind this publication and Techpoint Africa, set out to celebrate Nigerian indigenous firms that have lasted fifty years or more. The idea, quite novel in an African context, offers an insight into how businesses operate not only in Nigeria, but across the continent as whole.
The first challenge for Businessfront team was compiling a complete list of companies older than five decades that are strictly Nigerian-owned, in a country where the average firm survives ten years or less.
The team got to work, and it was no easy task. Checking and verifying the list of names took months. The team lead eventually compiled about twenty firms, most of them conglomerates that had evolved and expanded into ventures far removed from what they originally started as.
Consider an industrialist like Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, who started out importing sugar, cement, and salt before transforming into a home-grown manufacturer of the same products. Dangote’s trajectory isn’t isolated from Nigeria’s broader business landscape.
It’s difficult to run a business in a country such as this, and almost impossible to sustain a single-product venture over a long period. The “Businessfront Over 50” project was a Herculean task, because Nigeria’s business landscape rarely allows an enterprise to outlive its founder. The idea is still in the pipeline, and efforts continue toward bringing it to fruition, in celebration of Africa’s entrepreneurial resilience. You can check for more details here.
In the US today, it isn’t unusual to find household names McDonald’s, Walmart, the Rockefeller enterprises, that have outlived a generation or two of their original owners. Family-controlled companies remain a significant force in America.
Family firms generate more than half of US GDP, and by some estimates roughly a third of Fortune 500 companies are still family-controlled, decades after the death of their founders.
The same pattern holds across Europe, particularly among fashion powerhouses like France, Italy, and Belgium. German automakers like Volkswagen have continued under successive generations of leadership long after their founders departed.
Globally, family-owned businesses are known to be more durable than is often assumed, with some estimates suggesting they account for a majority of global GDP and employment.
However, the picture in much of Africa looks different. Businesses here are disproportionately still run by their founding generation, decades after launch, rather than having passed into professionally managed or family-succeeded hands. This is unsurprising for a continent whose industrial and capital base developed relatively late.
Much of the previous generation of African enterprise was built or controlled by foreign and multinational interests, a legacy of colonial rule under which indigenous ownership was, in many cases, only permitted years after the colonial powers departed.
Take South Africa as an example. A 2026 report by the economist, Duma Gqubule, found that Black South Africans hold just 6.9% of the assets of the country’s 60 largest listed companies. The gap, the report argues, comes from how BEE scorecards count passive pension fund holdings and shareholders who have long since sold out.
South Africa’s BEE programme was designed to reverse the economic legacy of apartheid, but it has been mired in political malpractice and corrupt lobbying, undermining its original purpose.
Nigeria has no apartheid in its own history, but its business culture has a succession problem much like its other African peers. Nigerian indigenous firms are too often run on a “whatever happens, happens” basis. Most businesses close within their first five years, and those that last a decade are looked upon as outliers.
A study by Onuoha (2013) found that 94.2% of Nigerian businesses have no succession strategy in place at all, and more recent surveys of Nigerian family firms put the share with an actual written succession plan at barely one in five.
Most Nigerian firms are still run on a strict founder as sole decision maker basis, and even where a board of directors exists on paper, it tends to be decorative rather than a genuine part of how the business survives its founder. As one 2019 study of business discontinuity among indigenous firms in south west Nigeria put it, “the way family members of the deceased founder responded to the continuity of the enterprise” was often what decided whether the business lived or died, not the strength of the underlying business itself.
In most cases, the death of a founder still spells the death of the business.
A well-known example is the business empire built by Chief Moshood Abiola, once African richest man. His flagship company, Concord Group, spanned publishing, aviation, banking, and oil services.
It began winding down steadily after his death in 1998, unable to hold together without the man who had built and personally driven it. It is a pattern that has repeated itself across Nigerian commerce for decades.
Abiola’s story isn’t an isolated one either. Henry Fajemirokun’s, another notable business mogul in the 70s in the beverages industry, faded in much the same way after his death in 1978. His signature beverage, Olympic Drinks, once a household name, became extinct few months after his decease.
Hajj Air, the northern Nigerian carrier founded by Alhaji Haruna Kassim, also fizzling out once Kassim left the scene.
Learning from past mistakes
Meanwhile, some Nigerian owners, watching the fate of businesses like Abiola’s, appear to be taking a different approach altogether, bringing their children into the business years before any handover is imminent.
Aliko Dangote is the clearest recent example here. In February 2026, Dangote Group elevated his three daughters, Mariya, Halima, and Fatima, into expanded executive roles spanning cement and food operations, the group’s international offices in Dubai and London, and commercial leadership of its oil and gas division. The Africa Report described the appointment as the billionaire tycoon “stepping back” as his daughters took on growing leadership roles within the conglomerate.
What is notable about the Dangote appointments is that they are operating roles, not ceremonial ones. Mariya Dangote had already spent years inside the business, joining Dangote Industries Limited in 2016, becoming before her February 2026 promotion.
Similarly, Otunba Subomi Balogun founded First City Merchant Bank in 1982 and spent roughly two decades grooming his son, Ladi Balogun, inside the business before formally handing over group leadership. When Otunba Balogun died in 2023, City People reported that the family empire passed smoothly to Bolaji, his eldest son, alongside three brothers, in a transition the patriarch had “carefully planned” to be free of rancour.
It would be a mistake, though, to read every founder-to-child appointment as evidence that Nigerian business has solved its succession problem.
A 2025 report from the Lagos Business School found that only 22.8% of Nigerian family-owned enterprises have completed a formal succession plan, while a further 20.2% have not even begun the process.
“The absence of structured succession planning endangers the legacy and sustainability of family businesses,” the report warned.
In other words, only 24.6% of business leaders surveyed believe their own children are actually interested in continuing the family business.
PwC’s earlier Nigeria Family Business Survey also found similar pattern, noting that the share of firms with a well documented and communicated succession plan is only 25% as of 2021.
A title conferred at the last minute, on someone who has never run a division or answered to a board, is not succession planning; it is a gamble dressed up as one, said a senior business analyst, Dare Oladipupo, who spoke to Businessfront.
“The businesses most likely to survive their founders are the ones treating the next generation’s readiness as something to be built over years, not decided in the weeks after a diagnosis or a birthday,” Oladipupo added.
Businesses do not have to die because their founders die
A founder’s death or exit does not have to be fatal to the business, provided the structure to survive him was built long before he was gone.
The Rothschild banking family offers one of the oldest illustrations of this. Mayer Amschel Rothschild sent his five sons to five different cities, but what actually held the enterprise together across generations was not family sentiment; it was paper. A series of formal partnership deeds, renegotiated across decades, fixed how much capital each branch held, how disputes were resolved, and how much profit had to stay in the business rather than being drawn out. Two centuries later, a Rothschild firm still advises governments and corporations.
Nigeria also has its own quieter version of Rothschild. Chief Michael Ade-Ojo incorporated Elizade in 1971 and built it into the anchor of Toyota’s Nigerian franchise. More than half a century later, the group still functions, with professional management layered over family ownership, and its founder’s wealth has since been recycled into a university that trains the next generation of Nigerian professionals.
Indeed, not every attempt to build that kind of structure succeeds.
Nigeria, for what it is worth, no longer stands in the way of founders who want to build the Rothschild model rather than the Abiola one.
The precedent, in short, already exists. What is missing is the habit.
A founder, while he is still healthy and his family is still on speaking terms, has to be willing to put his succession in writing, build a real board, and separate the company’s money from his own. The Rothschilds, the Morgans, and Nigeria’s own Balogun and Ade-Ojo families all eventually did exactly this.
The difference between a family business that dies with its founder and one that continues paying salaries 50 years later, the kind of legacy Businessfront set out to celebrate, has never been luck.
