On Wednesday, April 26, the news broke that the proposed £115 million takeover of Sheffield United by Nigerian businessman, Dozy Mmobuosi, was in serious doubt, based on reports that his relationship with current owner, Prince Abdullah, had collapsed.
This came after Mmobuosi had paid about £9 million to the cash-strapped club since November, with the expectation that his buy-out would be completed early in 2023. However, a breakdown in his relationship with Prince Abdullah threw the entire deal into jeopardy.
Mmobuosi and Prince Abdullah had initially agreed on a deal worth £115m in November 2022, with Mmobuosi immediately transferring £1 million as proof of his intentions. However, there have been delays in the deal being ratified and the relationship between the two businessmen deteriorated over that period.
Consequently, Prince Abdullah was reported to be open to alternative offers for the club, which has since won promotion back into the English Premier League. With top-flight English football next season, the club’s value is likely to soar and it was not long before rumours began to spread that the Nigerian tech entrepreneur had withdrawn his bid to take the reins of the club from the hands of the Prince, believing that it was impossible to revive the deal on the good faith agreement between both men and the initial investments already made by Mmobuosi.
However, on Saturday, April 29, Mmobuosi quelled these rumours by insisting that the deal was still in place and that nothing could be farther from the truth in the stories making the rounds that he had pulled out.
In his Twitter post, Mmobuosi wrote: “I wish to state categorically that I have not withdrawn my bid to acquire Sheffield United Football Club. Beyond the £8.85M GBP paid to United World, I will continue to work with the experts and professionals I hired to buy the club. Earlier today I had positive and constructive conversations with the club’s chairman Yusuf Giansiracusa and Chief Executive Officer Stephen Bettis and I will continue to do so. This is my commitment to the fans of Sheffield United, and I look forward to reaching a positive outcome.”
With this assurance, it appears the world needs to get ready to witness the historic emergence of the first Black majority owner of an English Premier League club. It therefore bears asking, who is Mmobuosi, how did he come this far and what are the sources of his livelihood that provide him with the wherewithal to support himself, his business interests and a resource-guzzling EPL club? THEWILL supplies some answers to these queries.
The 43-year-old Mmobuosi made a name for himself as a tech innovator and investor with a mission to improve the lives of people in Africa. The billionaire, who has described himself as driven by a purpose to see the Africa he dreams of being realised within his lifetime, believes that every penny he invests should be utilised to improve the lives of Africans.
Based on this foundational set of principles, Mmobuosi has established several businesses, marked by strong financial performances, at the heart of which his business philosophy of creating products and solutions that solve issues remain entrenched. One of his businesses is Tingo Mobile, an Agri-Fintech company that aims to transform rural farming and provide solutions for financial inclusion.
Tingo Mobile offers mobile devices through a unique leasing programme that removes the upfront cost burden for lower-income, rural communities to access technology. Embedded within these devices is Nwassa Market, Africa’s leading digital agriculture ecosystem that empowers rural farmers and agri-businesses.
Tingo Mobile also offers a cashless payment solution called Tingo Pay, which is efficient and effective for individuals and SMEs.
The core of the Tingo business is innovative technology which Mmobuosi believes has the potential to transform every sector.
The thrust of his business direction however is that technology must be developed and implemented in a considered way that makes it accessible for those often outpriced by products that are developed to serve first world customers. As a result, he has targeted the agro-industry which can fulfil the entrepreneur’s objective to transform rural farming and provide solutions for financial inclusion with his Agri-Fintech company. However, according to him, some of the biggest challenges he has faced in Africa include corruption, high cost of securing capital, and poor regulations and government policies. However, he is determined to break barriers to ensure success for the customers he serves while maintaining reliability and delivering on promises.
In June last year, the Nigerian entrepreneur demonstrated the reach of his philanthropist side when he launched a $10 million initiative aimed at providing free mobile prostate cancer screening services across Nigeria.
The programme, which is being run through the Dozy Mmobuosi Foundation, seeks to address the high prevalence of prostate cancer in Nigeria, which is a leading cause of cancer deaths in men in the country and was responsible for the death of his father. The $10m fund was to build mobile screening infrastructure, including the procurement of luxury buses, which will be used for the mobility of the screenings across all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. The programme involves over 100 medical practitioners and 4,000 medical professional volunteers, targeting men aged 45 and over, who are at higher risk of developing prostate cancer.
The initiative, endorsed by the Nigerian Medical Association and Rotary Club, received support from a range of stakeholders, including a number of celebrities who attended the launch event in Lagos. The programme is being organised by his foundation, The Dozy Mmobuosi Foundation. It was founded by Mmobuosi in December 2021 with a noble mission of promoting the progress of Africa and creating an environment where Africans can thrive. Their core areas of focus are Healthcare, Education, Entrepreneurship, Information Technology development as well as building partnerships through sports and other philanthropic activities. As it considers equity to be of utmost importance, the foundation operates a rural-urban approach in the execution of all their projects while favouring long-term strategies that are both flexible and adaptive to new trends.
The foundation concentrates most of its work in rural areas where a lot of assistance in the identified areas above is needed and because it enables them to assist high numbers of people in hardship or poverty. One way it aims to tackle these problems is by categorising them with the following key areas of Entrepreneurship, Technology Skills, Health Care, Education and Partnership Development, which involves building partnerships through sports and other philanthropic activities, such as it did with the Pre-season Super Cup of the Nigeria Premier Football League NPFL at the beginning of this current abridged season.
For the inaugural edition, which involved the traditional four clubs of the NPFL namely Shooting Stars Sports Club, Enugu Rangers, Enyimba and the newly promoted Bendel Insurance, the foundation offered an unprecedented N100m prize money for the competition, which the Shooting Stars FC took home by winning the first edition.
As part of the tech entrepreneur it aims to completely revolutionise the NPFL, the foundation announced another expanded edition, which he called the Dozy Mmobuosi Super Cup Football Tournament. This time around, it will involve 12 top teams from the league. The total prize pool for the event is a record-breaking N1.2 billion, with the winning team expected to take home N1 billion and the runners-up receiving N200 million.
As before, he aims is to increase the level of football in Nigeria by allowing teams to invest more resources in players, facilities, and infrastructure. This, in turn, will attract top talent to the league, and enhance the overall standard of football in the country.
The difference between his ambitions for the NPFL and for Sheffield United is that he plans to finance the latter deal on his own and, as mentioned earlier, Mmobuosi has already put money down to demonstrate his seriousness. In an interview with the Cable News Network (CNN), Mmobuosi revealed that he had plans to involve fans on the board and introduce diversity to the club. He said that his goal was to bring in the best people to run the club and deliver results, but that diversity would be a key pillar for him. Part of the suspicions of Mmobuosi’s capacity to run the English club came from his inability to get his aviation company off the ground and it came up in the CNN programme.
Mmobuosi laughed off the concerns and explained that it was true that he had ambitions to invest in the aviation sector in Africa and established Tingo Airlines Ltd (UK) in 2019 to operate flights between Europe and Africa. However, due to COVID-19, which made it overly onerous to get operative, he redirected resources towards Tingo Mobile. Still desirous to get into aviation, in 2020, Mmobuosi entered into a Joint Venture and Mutual Cooperation Agreement (JVMC) with Omni-Blu Aviation Limited and incorporated a Joint Venture Company (JVCo) called Omni-Tingo Aviation Services Limited. The JVCo is funded by Mmobuosi’s family office and will operate flights under Omni-Blu Aviation licences. Despite the pandemic, the JVCo has made progress, including the purchase of a helicopter and the completion of a transaction for a Challenger 605 Business Jet. The JVCo is also negotiating leases for several regional jets to commence domestic and regional flight operations in Nigeria and across the region.
As Mmobuosi persists in his desire to take control of Sheffield, his drive and push to promote fintech, Africa’s agro-development, health philanthropy, growth of the NPFL and all the other concerns he is promoting, it is hoped that he will scale through the English Football League (EFL) owners’ and directors’ test to make him the first Black majority owner of an EPL club. His story points to the fact that he is an entrepreneur worthy of emulation based on many points of his background and mostly because he believes that Africa is a vast continent of innovators and entrepreneurs who understand the nuance and unique challenges facing the continent.
Jude Obafemi is a versatile senior Correspondent at THEWILL Newspapers, excelling in sourcing, researching, and delivering sports news stories for both print and digital publications.
