Andy Elerewe didn’t start out building estates. He started out writing about them – and that, he says, changed everything.
Long before he was managing director and chief executive officer of AIBEN Properties Limited, Elerewe was a young journalist in Lagos, running an independent community newspaper with a handful of colleagues, dependent on adverts from small businesses to keep it printing.
It is, on the surface, an unlikely origin story for the man now overseeing what AIBEN describes as Nigeria’s largest private residential development. But Elerewe traces a direct line from that first newsroom to HUTU Prestige, the sprawling mixed-use development rising outside Abuja.
“I didn’t study journalism – my dad was a journalist, so I grew up in a home of journalists,” he said. “Even though I studied management and accounting, I delved into journalism very early. That was how I started.”
From the newsroom to the housing beat
