Tony Elumelu Answers Question On If He Is Interested In Becoming Nigeria’s President

On March 22, 2024, extraordinary entrepreneur Tony Elumelu was a year older.

The chairman of the financial services group providing corporate, commercial, SME and consumer banking services to more than 35 million customers globally, United Bank for Africa (UBA) celebrated his 61st birthday by increasing his efforts to eradicate poverty in Africa.

The Tony Elumelu Foundation “TEF” which he founded in 2010, with his wife – Awele, announced 1,400 African entrepreneurs across 54 African countries as the beneficiaries of this year’s edition of its flagship Entrepreneurship Programme.

They join the league of 20,000 entrepreneurs across Africa who created over 400,000 jobs and generated more than $2.5 billion in revenue since funding started in 2015 who have benefited from Tony Elumelu Foundation as part of the bold resolve to make the continent better.

The Tony Elumelu Foundation has disbursed US$100,000,000 to empower young entrepreneurs since it started.

Part of the ceremony for unveiling of the 10th cohort was a question and session that threw up a poser whether the  Chairman of one of Nigeria’s largest quoted conglomerates, Transcorp Group, is interested in becoming the President of Nigeria.

“Do I want to run for President? All of us can not be president. That is why we support those in office sharing ideas on how we can make Africa a better place.” he explained.

A strong advocate of a better Nigeria – and Africa – and champion across different sectors of the economy, Elumeluf has been at the forefront of how to do things better.

The increasing success stories of Transcorp, whose subsidiaries include Transcorp Power, one of the leading producers of electricity in Nigeria and Transcorp Hotels Plc, Nigeria’s foremost hospitality brand, Heirs Oil & Gas, an upstream oil and gas company, whose assets include Nigerian oil block OML17, with a current production capacity of 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day and 2P reserves of 1.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent, the pan- African financial services group, which operates in 20 countries across Africa, the United Kingdom, France, the UAE, and is the only African bank with a commercial deposit taking presence in the United States – the United Bank for Africa (UBA), and others with his fingerprints all over them are a window into Elumelu’s economic philosophy of Africapitalism, which positions the private sector, and most importantly entrepreneurs, as the catalyst for the social and economic development of the African continent.