Tinubu commends Emeka Offor for shipping medical books

President Bola Tinubu has publicly praised Nigerian oil billionaire Sir Emeka Offor after his foundation arranged the procurement and shipment of 10 forty-foot containers packed with medical and nursing books from the United States to Nigeria.

The books, sourced in response to a direct request from the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, are headed for tertiary medical institutions across all six geopolitical zones of the country. In a statement issued March 6, 2026, by his Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, Tinubu said the donation would strengthen healthcare education and improve academic capacity at the institutional level.

The President also thanked Offor, the chief executive of the Chrome Group, for his “consistent support of initiatives that promote education, health, and human capital development,” and urged him to keep at it.

The shipment came together through a partnership with Books For Africa, a U.S.-based nonprofit that has worked with Offor’s foundation for years. The 10 containers, carrying 181,233 books, departed from Books For Africa’s warehouse in Marietta, Georgia. The consignment also included 20 MSD tablets and two Thomson Reuters-ABA law libraries. Senior representatives from Nigeria’s Ministry of Health and the Nigerian consulate in Atlanta were present at the send-off.

The donation is part of a long track record of book giving that Offor has built up over decades. Through his foundation’s partnership with Books For Africa, he has directed more than $10 million worth of books, computers and educational materials to schools across Nigeria and roughly 19 other African countries. The Sir Emeka Offor Foundation was established in the early 1990s and formally registered in 2006.

Offor, who was born in Kafanchan, Kaduna State, and traces his roots to Oraifite in Anambra State, built his business empire from scratch. He started out as a transport clerk with Rivways Lines Nigeria Ltd in Warri, learning the bitumen trade under the mentorship of a family friend. Within two years he was supplying bitumen to some of Nigeria’s largest construction companies, including Julius Berger. He founded Chrome Oil Services Limited in 1985, which grew into the Chrome Group in 1994. The conglomerate now employs more than 800 people and operates across oil and gas, power, logistics, insurance, broadcasting and telecommunications, with offices in Nigeria, Switzerland, the United States and the United Kingdom. His net worth is estimated at around $2.9 billion.

Philanthropy has been woven into how Offor runs his business life. His foundation has established health centres offering free medical consultations, funded a glaucoma research grant at the University of Mainz in Germany, and partnered with the Carter Center to fight river blindness across several Nigerian states. He donated $250,000 to Rotary International in support of global polio eradication and received Rotary’s International Service Award in 2016. He was also decorated with the Officer of the Order of the Niger in 2012. In a past interview, Offor summed up his philosophy this way: “I want to make two marks. One is that I have been an excellent businessman who built a group of companies that will stand the test of time. Two, that I have been as good at giving as I was in turning a profit.”

The latest shipment marks one of the most direct interventions yet in Nigeria’s medical training sector, where outdated textbooks and under-resourced libraries have long been cited as a drag on healthcare education quality.