muganda wrote:
* I value relationships. I have three daughters whom I love dearly, and five grandchildren. My close friends have known me and been with me for over 30 years. I also have a very close relationship with my 76-year-old mother.”
Aliko Dangote has 15 children even though three from his current marriage (Halima, Fatima and Sadia) are officially listed.
Alhaji Aliko Dangote has been married and divorced three times before his current marriage. He was not engaged in polygamy at any point but took one wife at a time. In May 1977, his family selected his first wife for him and the union was consummated without delay. Aliko had just turned 20. Fast forward to 2009, Dangote fell in love with the young daughter of the late Nigerian President, Nafisat Yar’adua (now the wife of the Bauchi State Governor, Alhaji Isa Yuguda). Nafisat turned down Dangote’s advances for one reason: she was friends with Halima, Dangote’s daughter. Nafisat, at the age of 21, became Governor Yuguda’s fourth wife in 2009.
Like any other man, his ego was hurt. You will get a better picture of the scenario when you realize the fact that one of the former wives of Dangote (Hajia Mariya A.D Rufai, see below) was married to Governor Yuguda (although he later divorced her in June 2010 after 10 years of marriage over irreconcilable differences but some of the reasons alluded to was that she was absent at President Yar’adua’s (Yuguda’s in-law) burial, allegedly leaking sensitive state secrets to Alhaji Yayale Ahmed, then Secretary to the Federal Government and the final straw that enraged the Governor was the fact that she congratulated Alhaji Bala Mohammed, the new minister of the Federal Capital Territory, who was a bitter enemy of the Governor who was desperate to get a second term and felt he could spoil his chances). But calmly and gracefully, Dangote took all life threw at him and when you see his charming and disarming smiles, you’d never guess he was once heartbroken.
After he divorced his first wife that his family got for him, he married Mariya A. D Muhammad Rufai, a Senator’s daughter and former Bauchi State Commissioner for Women Affairs and Human Services (see pictures). After he divorced her, he married two other women but the marriages collapsed.
Some other women have also been romantically linked to the billionaire. These include the Director and Secretary of his United Kingdom subsidiary, Dangote Global Services, Miss Oluwatosin Coker while another is the late Ondo-born business executive, sugar merchant and reverend with the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Rev. Chief (Mrs.) Josephine Oluwadamilola Kuteyi, with whom he dragged the purchase of the Bacita Sugar Factory. A divorcee mother of four sons (Saheed, Ganiyu, Ahmed and Rasaq), she died in a helicopter crash in Osun State in 2011 while on her way to her Bacita sugar company in Kwara State. The helicopter plunged from a height of 2,500 feet, killing all the occupants.
It took Dangote three decades to amass one billion US dollars.
While working with his uncle in Lagos, ‘squatting in his office’, he learnt a lot. He said of those times: ‘I started with the business of cement, which was giving us a lot of money because at that time, Nigeria was making so much money and we were doing a lot of constructions. On a vehicle which I normally get from my uncle, I was making about N1,350 to N1,400 per day, and I had an allocation of about 3-4 trucks including Saturdays and Sundays. Later , I realized I was making a lot of money though then I didn’t have a lot of ideas of what to do. It was only cement business that I knew and I was stuck to it up till 1980, when I started knowing Lagos, becoming a Lagosian, understanding where to go and finding people to buy import licenses from. Within three months, I paid my grandfather back because I had no further need of his money.’
‘I don’t like to boast, but let me tell you something. I was born into money. Both my father’s -from my mother’s side and also from father’s side -they have always had money. So, it’s not that I just came and picked up something from this thing. But it does not mean also in the family that everybody would be rich. I don’t know any of my family members -both from my mother’s side and my father’s side -that has ever had a deal with anybody in the government.’
http://www.abiyamo.com/aliko-mo...te-worlds-richest-black/
lovely