Follow Us on Google
By Kehinde Aderemi
Recently, the University of Leicester, United Kingdom, held its 2026 Alumni Awards Dinner. The event took place at the National Space Centre, Exploration Drive, Leicester, United Kingdom.
Chairman of Caverton Offshore Support Group, Aderemi Makanjuola topped the list of the awardees. He was celebrated as one of the most successful businessmen in Nigeria.
Fifty years after exiting his Alma Mater, the prestigious institution recognised his sustained, transformative impact across multiple domains.
It was a defining moment in the life of this quiet architect of enduring legacies who silently built his empires first in the banking, and later dominated the shipping and aviation industries.
There is no grandiosity in this man’s presentation. And yet, the evidence of his life’s work is written in lecture theatres, diagnostic laboratories, trained pilots, healed patients, employed youth, and a publicly listed company that has fundamentally reshaped West Africa’s aviation and marine logistics landscape.
Speaking at the ceremony, Makanjuola went down the memory lane, as he shared the memories of his years at the institution.
“My connection to Leicester runs deep. My eldest son followed in my footsteps at that same institution. And the friendships I made there, 50 years ago, are still very much alive today.
“Some of those same friends are here in this room tonight. That is not coincidence. That is the measure of an institution, and the measure of what bonds forged in youth can endure,” he stated.
His foray in the banking sector was not accidental. It was a journey of discovery, morphed into silent determination to make positive impact in the sector.
That two decades in banking gave him something more valuable than a title- the ability to identify opportunity before it became obvious.
Therefore, when the Nigerian oil and gas sector began to demand serious logistics infrastructure in the late 1990s, he saw it before almost anyone else did.
So, in 1999, at the age of 51, this transformational leader made a pivotal decision that most seasoned bankers would consider reckless. He walked away from the security of executive banking to build something from the scratch.
Beginning with Le Global Oilfield Services and then Caverton Marine Limited, he entered the offshore logistics space with the conviction that Nigeria’s extractive economy would eventually demand world-class aviation and marine support, and that a Nigerian company could and should provide it.
He was right. Caverton Helicopters Limited followed in 2002, and in 2008, he formally consolidated his ventures into Caverton Offshore Support Group Plc.
By May 2014, Caverton achieved a milestone that few founder-led logistics companies in Africa had reached: a listing on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. It was not merely a financial event, but was also a statement that Nigerian enterprise, built with discipline and vision, could stand on the floor of a public market and invite the nation to share in what had been created.
Today, Caverton Offshore Support Group is recognised as one of West Africa’s most critical providers of integrated marine and aviation logistics.
Other News
Its helicopters transport personnel to offshore oil platforms. Its vessels supply rigs across the Atlantic. Its training facilities, including the first full-flight helicopter simulator in sub-Saharan Africa, have produced pilots and engineers who now power the entire sector and are sought after in Nigeria, West Africa and globally.
And through it all, Makanjuola invited his children to serve as directors and staff of the companies he founded. This was not nepotism; it was succession planning in the most honest sense, a deliberate transfer of knowledge, responsibility, and vision from one generation to the next. A family company, yes. But one with the governance architecture of a public institution.
Makanjuola’s most consequential contributions aren’t measured only in share prices or corporate milestones; some are measured in the number of crimes that did not happen.
For instance, in 2007, when former Governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Fashola was grappling with a city-wide security crisis and sought private sector collaboration, Aderemi Makanjuola became the pioneer Chairman of the Lagos State Security Trust Fund (LSSTF), a post he would hold for eight years, from 2007 to 2015.
The LSSTF was a genuinely innovative model: a public-private partnership, established by law, that would harness the resources and urgency of the private sector to fund and modernise security infrastructure across Nigeria’s most populous state. The work was patient, unglamorous, and often invisible, yet the infrastructure built and sustained under his chairmanship, the equipment procured, the personnel trained, the coordination frameworks established, would go on to save lives across Lagos for years after his tenure ended.
Makanjuola is a philanthropist. His philanthropy was noticeable also in the education sector. His belief that education is the most durable investment has remained a major litmus for his significant impact in the sector.
For instance, if you walk into a lecture theatre at the Federal University of Technology, Minna; or at Summit University, Offa; or at Lagos State University, and thousands of students are seated before a lecturer, absorbing knowledge that will shape their futures, you may not know that the building around them was made possible by one man’s conviction- that education is the most durable investment a human being can make in their country.
Between 2014 and 2018, Aderemi Makanjuola donated 500-seater lecture theatres to three Nigerian universities. Not plaques. Not endowments in name only. Actual structures, fully equipped, immediately functional, filling a gap that years of underfunding had left yawning across Nigeria’s higher education system.
In 2019 and 2020, he funded state-of-the-art Molecular Biology Diagnostic Laboratories at Lagos State University College of Medicine (LASUCOM) and at Edo State University, Uzairue, institutions that now have the capacity to diagnose diseases with precision that previously required referral to private facilities or trips abroad.
Makanjuola also donated dialysis machines to St. Nicholas Hospital. He funded scholarships. He quietly trained over 200 pilots and engineers through Caverton’s aviation infrastructure.
In 2019, the Caverton boss accepted the appointment as Chancellor of Edo State University, Uzairue, a role he approached not as an honorary title but as an active responsibility.
In a gesture that captured his entire philosophy in a single act, he pledged automatic employment to the university’s best-graduating student each year. Not a scholarship to study further. Not a certificate of commendation. Employment. The most practical gift a young person at the threshold of adult life can receive.
His approach reflects a lifelong belief that education should open doors, not only to knowledge, but to opportunity.
He has also given back directly to the institution that shaped him. The University of Leicester’s Student Support Fund has benefited from his generosity, completing a circle that began when a young man from Lagos arrived on an English campus in 1973, carrying ambition and a conviction that the world was larger than anyone had yet shown him.
So, on the evening of Thursday, May 14th, the National Space Centre in Leicester, one of the most extraordinary venues in the United Kingdom, a cathedral of human curiosity, was alive when Aderemi Makanjuola received the University of Leicester’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2026 Alumni Awards Dinner.
He was surrounded by his ex- classmates, friends and immediate family led by the matriarch, Alhaja Yoyinsola Makanjuola and his equally successful children, Olabode, Niyi and Rotimi. The jewel of the family, Lolade was unavoidably absent.
The award, judged by the Advancement Awards Sub-Committee and nominated by colleagues at the university is not given lightly. And in the case of Makanjuola, it could not have found a more deserving recipient.
In his speech, Makanjuola thanked the Alumni Relations team. He acknowledged his wife, and also remembered his friends, half a century of friendship, still intact. He also mentioned his eldest son, who had followed him to Leicester, even as he expressed gratitude and renewed commitment.
Meanwhile, the University’s official biography has described Aderemi Makanjuola as “widely regarded as a ‘silent achiever,’ whose influence is felt through the institutions he has strengthened and the countless lives uplifted by his generosity.
His over two decades in banking sector was not a waste. Today, his vision to build something entirely new is paying off.
He has built a brand – a publicly listed company- without losing his personal compass. He chose to chair a security trust fund when he could have spent those same years on leisure. He built lecture theatres at three universities when he could have simply written cheques to his alma mater. And he gladly trained 200 pilots and engineers when he could have imported the expertise.
At 77, Aderemi Muyinudeen Makanjuola is not a man looking backwards. The companies he founded are still active. The institutions he supported are still producing graduates. The pilots he trained are still flying. The diagnostic laboratories he built are still diagnosing. The security infrastructure he helped construct is still protecting lives. His legacy is not archived. It is operational.
In the case of Makanjuola, it is apt to say that the world has many loud leaders. But Nigeria has given the world a quiet architect. And the buildings he has raised, in steel, in human capital, in reformed institutions, in transformed lives, will outlast the noise of this particular era by generations.
