President Bola Ahmed Tinubu
How the Jagaban redrew Nigeria's political map.
The names that moved a continent
Every year we ask one question before we print a single name: who changed the conversation about Africa, and who will change it next? The 2026 Hall of Fame answers it in two registers. The first honours achievement already written into the record: a president who redrew Nigeria's political map, a lawmaker who made public finance his life's work, a Nobel laureate who never stopped writing back, a Ghanaian leader who carried the reparations case to the United Nations and won, and a prime minister whose speeches set the terms of the climate debate.
The second register looks forward. Our projections name the designer, the performer and the model our editors expect to define 2026. We also crown a book, because the story of how Africans bank, borrow and build is now one of the continent's great exports. These pages are a record and a forecast. Hold us to both.
Contents
Hall of Fame 2026- Political Strategist of the Year · CoverPresident Bola Ahmed Tinubu
- Man of the YearSolomon Olamilekan Adeola · Yayi
- Literary IconProfessor Wole Soyinka
- Reparations & Emancipation LeaderPresident John Dramani Mahama
- Women's Leadership & Public SpeakingPrime Minister Mia Amor Mottley
- African Football IconsLamine Yamal · Kylian Mbappé
- African Book of the YearIt's About Tyme
- Projections 2026
- African Designer of the YearNicole Nomsa Moyo
- Best Performing Artist in AfricaBurna Boy
- Best African ModelAnok Yai
- The Honour RollAll 2026 inductees
The Grand Strategist
Bola Ahmed Tinubu
Three decades of coalition-building made him the most formidable strategist in African politics.
Nigerian politics has a one-word title for him: Jagaban. Born in Lagos on 29 March 1952, Bola Ahmed Tinubu trained as an accountant in the United States and worked for Mobil Oil before entering politics as a senator in the short-lived Third Republic. As Governor of Lagos from 1999 to 2007 he rebuilt the state's revenue base and raised a generation of administrators who went on to lead in their own right.
Out of power, he kept an opposition machine alive, then in 2013 helped engineer the merger that created the All Progressives Congress, which in 2015 unseated a sitting president for the first time in Nigeria's history. In 2023 he claimed the prize himself. Since taking office on 29 May 2023 he has made the decisions his predecessors avoided: ending the petrol subsidy, unifying the exchange rate and overhauling the tax code. He is now campaigning for a second term.
The CitationFor reading Nigeria's political map better than anyone, and then redrawing it.
The Power Map 1999–2026
| 1999–2007 | Governor of Lagos State, two terms |
| 2013 | Co-architect of the APC merger |
| 2015 | APC unseats a sitting president, a first for Nigeria |
| 2023 | Elected President; sworn in 29 May |
| 2023 | Ends petrol subsidy; unifies the exchange rate |
| 2025 | Signs sweeping tax reform laws |
| 2026 | Campaigns for a second term |
The Keeper of the Ledger
Solomon Olamilekan Adeola learned public life the way an accountant learns a balance sheet: line by line, until every naira is accounted for.
Every budget tells a story, and few Nigerians have read more of them than Solomon Olamilekan Adeola. Born in Lagos on 10 August 1969 and raised in Alimosho, he trained as an accountant, became a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, spent twelve years in the finance office of The Guardian and built his own tax consultancy before politics found him.
The ledger never left him. In the Lagos State House of Assembly he helped pass the state's fiscal responsibility and procurement laws. As a first-term member of the House of Representatives he chaired the Public Accounts Committee. Two Senate terms for Lagos West followed, then Ogun West in 2023 and the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, the gate every federal naira must pass through. In 2026 the APC adopted Yayi as its consensus candidate for Governor of Ogun State.
The CitationFor turning the arithmetic of public finance into the language of public service.
The Career Ledger Dr · Cr
| 2003–2011 | Lagos State House of Assembly · Alimosho II |
| 2011–2015 | House of Representatives · Chair, Public Accounts |
| 2015–2023 | Senator, Lagos West |
| 2023– | Senator, Ogun West · Chair, Appropriations |
| 2022 | Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON) |
| 2026 | Adopted as APC governorship candidate, Ogun State, with Mrs Kudirat Abiodun Adegunwa-Balogun |
Literature
Wole Soyinka
The Lion of Abeokuta
Four decades after the Nobel, Africa's first laureate in literature still refuses to behave like a monument.
He was the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986, and he has spent every year since refusing to sit quietly on the pedestal. Born in Abeokuta on 13 July 1934, Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka wrote his way from the village comedy of The Lion and the Jewel to the tragic grandeur of Death and the King's Horseman.
His pen has always cost him. Twenty-two months in detention during the civil war produced the prison notes of The Man Died; decades of exile and dissent produced essays that still sting. In 2021, at eighty-seven, he returned to the novel with the savage satire of Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. At ninety-two the hair is whiter and the voice no softer. Africa's literature has a before and an after, and the line runs through Abeokuta.
The Shelf
John Dramani Mahama
Some presidents inherit a cause. Mahama chose one. Back in Ghana's presidency since January 2025, he took up the African Union's mandate as its Champion of Reparations and carried it from Accra to Addis Ababa to New York. Under his push the AU turned 2025's Year of Reparations into a Decade of Reparations, 2026 to 2036. On 25 March 2026 the UN General Assembly adopted Ghana's resolution recognising the transatlantic slave trade as the gravest crime against humanity. His argument never changes: justice for Africans and people of African descent will not be handed over. It must be claimed.
Mia Amor Mottley
When Mottley speaks, rooms used to ignoring small islands go quiet. Barbados' first woman Prime Minister, in office since 2018, she led her nation to become a republic in 2021 and, in February 2026, to a third straight term in which the Barbados Labour Party took all 30 seats. Abroad she authored the Bridgetown Initiative, a blueprint for how global finance should treat climate-vulnerable nations, and her address at COP26 became one of the most quoted speeches of the climate era. A Caribbean leader with an African heartbeat, she is the diaspora's most persuasive orator.
Africa's Global Game
Two sons of the African diaspora now rule the world game, from Barcelona to the Bernabéu.
The Heirs of the Continent
Barcelona · Spain · Moroccan & Equatoguinean rootsLamine Yamal
Born near Barcelona on 13 July 2007 to a Moroccan father and an Equatoguinean mother. European champion at sixteen, LaLiga's player of the 2025–26 season as Barcelona retained the title, and a world champion in the summer of 2026 when Spain lifted the World Cup in North America. Two Kopa Trophies already sit on his shelf. He is nineteen.
Real Madrid · France · Cameroonian & Algerian rootsKylian Mbappé
Born in Paris on 20 December 1998 to a Cameroonian father and an Algerian mother. A world champion at nineteen in 2018, Real Madrid's number ten finished 2025–26 as top scorer in LaLiga, the Champions League and the 2026 World Cup: a scoring treble that puts him among the most lethal finishers the game has known.
It's About Tyme
Banking Beyond Borders, by Adrian Saville & Bruce Whitfield
It began as an idea in a classroom in 2000. A quarter-century later TymeBank serves around twelve million customers in South Africa and has crossed into the Philippines and Indonesia. Economist Adrian Saville and broadcaster Bruce Whitfield tell how a digital bank built for the people traditional banks overlooked became one of Africa's most important fintech exports. Part business case, part adventure story, it is the clearest account yet of how African finance can be designed in Africa and sold to the world.
The Ones to Watch
Our editors' forecast for the designer, the performer and the model who will define Africa's creative year.
Nicole Nomsa Moyo
Moyo builds monuments to things most cities forget: beadwork, women, belonging. An architect, urban designer and public artist of South African Ndebele heritage, she works between Toronto and Miami, turning the geometry of Ndebele craft into public space. Her installation Pearl Jam reimagined traditional Ndebele earrings as floating, modular sculpture in the Miami Design District, and KORA brought her language to Toronto's Sankofa Square in 2025. Named Architectural Designer of the Year 2026 at the Africa International Design Awards, she is our pick to take the continent's design conversation global.
Burna Boy
The African Giant no longer needs the nickname. Born Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu in Port Harcourt on 2 July 1991, he won the Grammy for Best Global Music Album with Twice as Tall, became the first African artist to sell out a US stadium at New York's Citi Field in 2023, and by June 2026 had passed 46.8 million monthly Spotify listeners, the most for any African artist in the platform's history. Dai Dai, his duet with Shakira, was the anthem of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. In 2026 the continent is his stage.
Anok Yai
One photograph at a Howard University homecoming in 2017 changed everything. Within a year Anok Yai, born in Cairo to South Sudanese parents and raised in Manchester, New Hampshire, became the first model of Sudanese heritage, and only the second Black model ever, to open a Prada show. Chanel, Mugler, Saint Laurent and Fendi followed, along with campaigns and covers from Vogue to Allure. In 2025 the British Fashion Council named her Model of the Year. The runway's future already walks like her.
presentsThe Honour Roll
- Political Strategist of the YearPresident Bola Ahmed Tinubu
- Man of the YearSolomon Olamilekan Adeola
- Literary IconProfessor Wole Soyinka
- Reparations & Emancipation LeaderPresident John Dramani Mahama
- Women's Leadership & Public SpeakingPrime Minister Mia Amor Mottley
- African Football IconsLamine Yamal · Kylian Mbappé
- African Book of the YearIt's About Tyme
- African Designer of the YearNicole Nomsa Moyo
- Best Performing Artist in AfricaBurna Boy
- Best African ModelAnok Yai
