- TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people list for 2020 includes five eminent African personalities.
- The TIME100, now in its 17th year, celebrates the activism, innovation, and achievement of the world’s most influential individuals.
TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people list for 2020 includes five eminent African personalities. Nigeria’s multimillionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist Tony Elumelu, physician Tunji Funsho and Nigerian-American author Tomi Adeyemi, as well as Gambian lawyer and politician Abubacarr Tambadou, Congolese microbiologist Dr Jean-Jacques Muyembe Tamfum are the Africans who made it to the list. The TIME100, now in its 17th year, celebrates the activism, innovation, and achievement of the world’s most influential individuals.
Tony Elumelu is the Founder and Chairman of Heirs Holdings, is recognised for his track record of business turnaround and value creation, and economic empowerment of young Africans. His businesses embrace critical sectors including financial services, hospitality, power, energy, and healthcare. He has made a mark as the most prominent champion of entrepreneurship in Africa.
The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), set up in 2010, empowers African start-ups and entrepreneurs, catalysing economic growth, driving poverty eradication and ensuring job creation across all 54 African countries. During its ten years of existence, the Foundation has supported almost 10,000 entrepreneurs and created a digital ecosystem of over one million, with a commitment of US$100 million through the TEF Entrepreneurship Programme. Mr Elumelu’s economic philosophy of Africapitalism, positions the private sector, and most importantly entrepreneurs, as the catalyst for the social and economic progress of the continent.
Abubacarr Tambadou the 47-year-old Gambian lawyer and politician is the current registrar of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, an international court founded by the UN Security Council. He served as the attorney general and minister of justice in The Gambia from 2017 to 2020.In 2019, Tambadou and his government brought to the International Court of Justice, the UN’s judicial organ, the alleged crimes against the Rohingya ethnic group. He brought Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s state counsellor to defend the allegations in the court. In January 2020, the court made an extraordinary initial ruling against Myanmar and its state counsellor and ordered the country to take measures to stop the violent attacks against the Rohingya.
Tomi Adeyemi the 27-year-old Nigerian-American novelist’s first book, “Children of Blood and Bone,” remained in the New York Times bestseller list for almost two years and also won the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Debut Novel. Fox 2000 has bought the film adaptation rights to the book. Her other novel ‘The Book’, also won the 2018 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Jean-Jacques Muyembe a Congolese microbiologist is the director of the National Institute of Biomedical Research in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has devoted more than four decades to do research in the Ebola virus since its first known outbreak in 1976. In 1995, he actively supported the World Health Organization team in the detection and control measures in the first documented outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Tunji Funsho made his mark as a cardiologist and chair of Rotary International’s polio eradication program in Nigeria. Under the leadership of Dr. Funsho and duly supported by the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, millions of Nigerian children get vaccinated against Polio. His efforts saw last four years without a single case of wild polio in the country.
