Billionaire Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote has fallen from being the 51st richest person in the world to the 105th, according to the 2017 Forbes Rich List.
Forbes magazine reports that Mr Dangote’s wealth dropped from $15.4bn (£11.8bn) in 2016 to $12.2bn this year, due to Nigeria’s currency being devalued.
Mr Dangote, who made his fortune in the production of cement, sugar and flour, made international headlines in 2016 when he said he wanted to buy Arsenal Football Club within the next four years.
Yesterday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos briefly overtook Bill Gates as the world’s richest man on Forbes’ real-time ranking, but later dropped back to second place.
There are 21 African billionaires living in Africa worth a combined $70 billion. The next African on the is South African diamond magnate Nicky Oppenheimer who ranks 199th with $7 billion, followed by another South African, luxury goods tycoon Johann Rupert who ranks 237th with $6.1 billion.
Nigerian telecom tycoon Mike Adenuga ranked 250th with a net worth of $5.8 billion, followed by Egypt’s richest billionaire Nassef Sawiris ranked 269th and worth $5.6 billion.
Retail magnate South African Christoffel Wiese ranked 269th with a worth of $5.6 billion. South Africa retains its dominance on the Africa list and is tied with Egypt for the largest number of individual billionaires. Only two female billionaires in Africa made it on the list including daughter of Angola’s president Isabel dos Santos – who is Africa’s richest woman – and Nigeria’s Folorunsho Alakija, vice chair of Nigerian oil exploration company, Famfa Oil.
Tanzanian Mohammed Dewji is Africa’s youngest billionaire at age 41. He is CEO of conglomerate METL, which his father founded in the 1970s. Onsi Sawiris of Egypt is the continent’s oldest billionaire at age 86 and the father of two other African billionaires — Nassef and Naguib Sawiris.
Thirteen out of Africa’s 21 billionaires have self-made fortunes, while the other eight inherited their fortunes. They hail from 7 countries: South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Morocco, Algeria, Angola, and Tanzania.
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