An African family of enterprises spanning advisory, homes, agriculture, media and a conservation city, rooted at home in Nigeria and reaching across West and East Africa. Cultivated over a generation, and held as one.
The Estate
A group is generic. A plantation is cultivated ground, from which things grow. We are a family of enterprises grown from one root: plant what will grow, tend it, and give from the harvest.
Makaya Group is a value-based family of companies working across development advisory, homes and real estate, agriculture and botanicals, media and story, and a conservation city, with giving at its centre. Rooted at home in Nigeria, our field is Sub-Saharan Africa: West and East Africa, where we know the ground and the people. Each company does honest, excellent work in its own field; together they are held as one.
We are ambitious, genuinely innovative in the solutions we build and inclined to lead the way rather than follow it, yet the ambition is always people-centred, and the offer is always authentic. From the farm to the shelf we grow it or we make it; we do not borrow substance we do not have. We measure the estate not only by what it earns, but by what it leaves behind: relationships that last, communities lifted, and a name kept clean for the next generation.
What we hold to
We build relationships that outlast any single transaction: with one another inside the companies, with our clients, and with the communities we touch. The relationship is the work.
We stay. Loyalty to the people who trust us, to the mandate we accept, and to the long view, through the difficult seasons as much as the good ones.
We are kind by disposition: considerate, generous of spirit, and decent in how we treat people. It is simply how we choose to do business, and it costs nothing to mean it.
What we offer is real. From the farm to the shelf, we grow it or we make it, and we bring the same honesty to our advice and our word. We do not trade on substance we do not have.
Our core is service: to understand a real need, and to bring the solution. We would rather solve the right problem well than sell the easy one.
We like to lead the way. First movers by temperament, we build the thing that reveals what a place is becoming, pioneering the right path rather than following a proven one. Impossible does not exist.
What we do
Six kinds of work, one disposition: service, cultivation, and care for the people at every end of it.
Owner-side financial and development advice for landmark real-estate and infrastructure: modelling the true cost, protecting the investment, and standing on the client’s side of the table. Fee-based, conflict-free.
Well-made homes and the communities around them: residential and mixed-use developments built to last, and to lift the places they stand in.
A working estate: cocoa taken all the way to bean-to-bar chocolate, pure honey, fish and produce, and a botanical & wellness line that carries the harvest to the shelf. Grown or made on our own ground.
Film, video and music: a catalogue of original songs and a quarter-century of gospel celebration that has gathered the nations. The music and the mission share the same soul.
Àràbà City, a carbon-neutral, conservation-led green city for South-West Nigeria: a new direction for rural living, where families do not merely live beside nature but co-own it.
Education, empowerment and community: the giving heart of the estate, and the reason every other part of it is asked to earn its keep. So that there is always something to give.
The Houses
The companies of the estate, each doing honest work in its own field, and held as one.
The cultivated estate: origination, operations, and the ground from which the houses grow.
makayaplantations.com →Independent development financial advisory. The people behind the delivery of Azuri Towers, now advising others, owner-side and fee-based.
makayaconsult.com →Residential and mixed-use development: well-made homes, and the communities around them.
makayaplantations.com →A working estate: cocoa taken to bean-to-bar chocolate, pure honey, produce and fish, all grown on our own ground.
makayafarms.com →Botanical and wellness, carried from the harvest to the shelf.
Site in preparationFilm, video and music: Awesome Praise, and the Makaya Plantation catalogue.
makayaplantations.com →A conservation-led green city: the Source of Lasting Legacy.
Explore →A pan-African actuarial platform, where Africa opens every direction.
findactuaries.com →Education, empowerment and community: the giving heart of the estate.
3efoundation.org →The flagship vision
The Source of Lasting Legacy.
A conservation-led green city on cultivated ground: golf, homes, a working farm and a protected forest reserve held in perpetuity. It is built capital-light and carbon-neutral, and it is designed to signpost a new direction for rural living across Africa: rural integration, stewardship owned rather than imposed, and the boundaries of the possible pushed a little further. If you build it, they will come.
The Foundation
For over two decades, a gospel-concert series across London, Washington and Lagos was turned into education and community across West and East Africa: support for students, and permanent things built in the community closest to home, classrooms, a school hall, playgrounds and clean water.
For the last four years, with no charity in place, Makaya Homes carried that commitment directly, building and donating school facilities at Onipe.
The 3E Foundation is now being incorporated in Nigeria, to hold this work in a charitable structure of its own. Until incorporation completes, it holds no funds.
The giving is the reason every part of the estate is asked to earn its keep, so that there is always something to give.
Standing & heritage
Delivery, not declaration. The estate is built on work that was finished, on time, and on the word given.
2013 to 2017 · Equatorial Guinea
In 2013 we went to a country the world had written off, and found the opposite of the narrative: some of the finest infrastructure, and competition-grade golf, in Sub-Saharan Africa. So we did what we do. We backed conviction with our own contacts and our own means, and we brought the world to it.
Across five self-funded editions we flew golfers in from thirty-four countries across Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia; every continent but Australia. Every expense was met, to play beside touring professionals. Women and men competed for the same prize, at its height US$250,000 each. Heads of state came to see it for themselves. By the final year, ninety golfers and two hundred crew travelled for a single week, with feeder rounds staged in Dubai and Ibadan.
We promised five years, and we kept to five: no personal ties, a time-bound act of conviction. What we were truly there for were the children and the young ones, who saw that the world would come for them. They were the point. They always are.
The founder brought the developer Gerald D. Hines to Nigeria: a belief in what a city could become, first articulated on Nigerian soil.
Fifteen years embedded in Eko Atlantic City: modelling, structuring and helping to raise the capital that built it.
The delivery of Azuri Towers, among Nigeria’s tallest residential towers, completed on schedule, through a global pandemic.
A quarter-century of Awesome Praise, from Barbican to Kennedy Centre to South Africa and Lagos, a celebration turned into education and community across West and East Africa.
Our people
We are led by conviction and held together by character. Trained in the discipline of risk and the long view, our founder’s four-word credo runs through everything the estate does: keep it simple and honest.
The people of Makaya Group are chosen the way we choose everything: for substance over show. We keep our circle deliberate, our word good, and our attention on the person in front of us, because in the end the estate is only ever as good as the way it treats people.
How the estate is held
The estate is founder-held at the centre. We state that plainly, because it is true, and because a group that rests on one person is not yet an institution.
So we govern by a simple rule. Where a house begins to hold what is not its own, other people’s money, other people’s land, other people’s trust, we seat people who can overrule the founder. Control follows risk. We size it the way an actuary sizes a reserve, to the liability it answers, not to the whole balance sheet.
Where the rule is already live
Makaya Consult advises others on their own money, and was given a board for that reason. On it the independent directors outnumber the family: Haruna Jalo-Waziri chairs it, Seye Kosoko is Vice Chairman, and Professor Erekpitan Ola-Adisa sits with them. The founder can be outvoted at his own table. That is what the table is for.
Where it applies next
The same rule reaches the houses still to cross that line. As Àràbà City takes families into shared ownership of a forest reserve, and as Makaya Homes takes buyers into commitments before a wall is built, each house earns its own governance the moment it begins to hold what is not ours. What is not yet governed is not yet holding.
What continues it
In 2003 the founder’s father led the way to Onipe and bought the first ground. The son paid for it. Direction given, cost carried.
What the estate is built from is not the buildings. It is a way of working: intelligence put to honest use, faith, an education, and the grace to think for oneself. It is carried now by the people who hold the houses.
The founder leads the estate. His son Ariyo runs Makaya Studios. Jennifer Ude, who is not of the family, runs the farm. The circle widens as the right people arrive, and not before.
The estate takes its name from the youngest of the line. Makaya is a child still. She is not a title, and not a seat. She is the reason the rest is asked to earn its keep, so that there is something worth handing her.
The invitation
Otun, Onipe · Oluyole LGA
Ibadan, Oyo State · Nigeria
L’impossible n’existe pas.