Oyo state’s Agba Oye, Chief Dr. Harry Ayoade Akande, is from Ibadan. Prior to ALHAJI Aliko Dangote, one of the richest men in Nigeria and Africa and a former presidential candidate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ibadan was the birthplace of businessman Harry Akande in 1943. Harry shown his brilliance in both athletics and academics as a young child. Ayoade Akande, a devoted follower of the well-known American vocalist Harry Belafonte, adopted the moniker “Harry” and is still affectionately called that.
Harry completed his secondary school at Olivet Heights in Ibadan before traveling to the United States to complete his MBA at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and his BSc in Accounts & Finance at Hampton University in 1967. Harry left his job as a financial consultant at KPMG Peat Marwick and Standard Oil Corporation to return to Nigeria in 1970. Young Harry was restless, so in 1971 he founded his own business, Akande International Corporation. Later, he oversaw significant gas turbine projects at Ughelli and Ijora while serving as the head of General Electric’s representative firm in Nigeria.
In 1982, Harry’s company collaborated with Costain International on several massive projects, including the Osogbo-Ede Water Scheme, which at the time was the largest water project in Africa with a 35 million gallon capacity. The irrigation studies, which covered roughly 47,000 hectares of land in Bauchi, was another. Though Akande was a politician who twice lost presidential campaigns, he was formerly the head of Nigeria’s second-largest party, which is now defunct. He got into a fight with the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) in 2013 over a plot of land near the international airport terminal building that his company had allegedly been given to build a hotel.
According to the top page of The Punch (2001), Chef Akande made $533 million a month. After a brief illness, Chief Harry Ayodele Akande passed away in the early hours of Saturday, December 5, 2020.
