By Stephen Okpo

Dr. Michael Adeniyi Adenuga Jr, chairman of Nigeria’s national telephone carrier, Globacom, turned 71 years on April 29. Expectedly, he was heavily celebrated by all and sundry for the enormous personal and business accomplishments.

Adenuga is reputed for his gut and sheer determination. Close friends and family members recall how, as a teenager, he braced freezing New York weather doing odd jobs to train himself in the university in spite of the fact that his parents could afford to take care of him. The conditions were so tough that 6 of his fellow Nigerian compatriots had given up their jobs due to what they termed life-threatening weather and work-conditions. But the young Adenuga kept on working in spite of the adversities. He reaped bountifully from his tenacity.
After graduating from Northwestern University, United States, Adenuga returned to Nigeria to work in his parents’ saw mill rather than go for the white collar jobs, which were available at that time. He showed his business acumen early in life by transforming the mill through the installation of state of art equipment.
Then he diversified into commodity brokerage and merchandising and traded in petroleum products, fuel oil, Automotive Gas Oil (AGO) and motor spirits and later expanded into real estate and particularly food processing and manufacturing.He later founded Devcom Bank and Equatorial Trust Bank which later merged under the latter’s name. In the post-consolidation era, it merged with NAL Bank to become Sterling Bank.
Adenuga then established Consolidated Oil, which carries out crude oil drilling, refining and marketing. His foray into the oil business was a typically audacious one. In the 1980s when he acquired oil blocs through his Consolidated Oil company as part of the Babangida administration’s step to break the monopoly of foreigners in the production of crude oil in the country, Adenuga refused to toe his peers’ path of selling off the oil blocs to foreign companies. He chose to embark on drilling against monumental pressure and the risk of failure. Tales are told of how his beloved mother came in tears, begging and asking him to change his mind about going into oil exploration. Her reason was that the business was still the exclusive preserve of multinational oil companies and not individual businessmen. The mother preferred that her son be in the manufacturing business where he had made his mark and where Nigerians had succeeded greatly.
But the audacious and achieving spirit in Mike Adenuga would not budge. He plunged headlong into oil drilling with the firm hope and belief in a better tomorrow. That step proved a huge success as he soon made history as the first Nigerian company to strike oil and produce it in commercial quantity.
He later bought over National Oil and Marketing Company, NOLCHEM, for a huge amount of N7.4 billion, when nobody wanted to touch the company because it was going down the drain. Again, the audacious move paid off as the company now called Conoil Plc is today one of the most profitable oil marketing companies in Nigeria.
What perhaps shot him into the consciousness of Nigerians was his bold entry into the telecommunications sector, considered by many as his most audacious move yet. With his Communications Investment Company, CIL, he was issued a conditional licence in 1999 to operate the Global System of Mobile telecommunications, GSM. The licence was later revoked by the Obasanjo administration, which faulted the entire process. Again, when in 2002, the government through, the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, organised a new auction for the GSM licence,the CIL participated and was one of the four that won the bid. He paid the $20 million mandatory deposit.
However, in the process of resolving the controversy over the frequency allocated to CIL, the licence elapsed and CIL lost both the licence and $20 million deposit. It was a colossal loss but Adenuga was undeterred. He later went on to bid for the Second National Operator (SNO) license, and deposited another $20 million. This time, he was lucky. He won the bid in Augsut 2002 and Globacom was granted the licence to operate as a national carrier, operate digital mobile lines, serve as international gateway for telecommunications in the country, and operate fixed wireless access phones.
Many argued that the telecom sector was for the well established foreign telecom companies and that Adenuga did not have the requisite experience in that field. And when he announced that Globacom would launch with Per Second Billing (PSB), the industry scoffed at him. But the Guru went on to prove sceptics wrong. Globacom not only launched on PSB, it went on to crash SIM costs from N20,000 to N200 and call charges from N50 to as low as N10 per minute. The company in less than two years of business became the telecoms innovator in Nigeria. Globacom has also made history as the fastest growing GSM network in Africa and the Middles East.
It also established a reputation for being the most innovative operator. Prominent among the innovations Glo pioneered in Nigeria are Blackberry Services, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), Magic Plus, Glo Direct, International MMS, Inflight Roaming, Prepaid Roaming, Glo Mobile Internet, GloFleetmanager, M-Banking, Glo Mobile Office, Glo TV, Glo Cloud, Glo Always On, and Glo Berekete.

The company is the only operator with a wholly owned submarine cable, Glo 1, which connects West Africa directly to the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. It also connects 12 nations in the West Africa sub-region, including some of them that are landlocked. This ensures the availability of bandwidth to Wholesale, Enterprise & SME customers in West Africa. The undersea cable delivers a much faster and robust connectivity for voice, data and video with some of the lowest latencies between Africa and its gateway in London. It unleashes limitless opportunities for global and other African carriers, global content and digital media providers, government and corporate bodies in Nigeria and West Africa.

Adenuga is indeed a blessing to Nigeria, and will forever be remembered for opening up the telecommunications space and making telephone accessible at all Nigerians. Here is wishing the Great Guru a happy 71st birthday.