There was a time when becoming a chartered accountant was not simply a matter of passing examinations. For a Nigerian woman in the early 1960s, it meant entering a professional world overwhelmingly controlled by men and proving that she belonged there.
Olutoyin Olusola Olakunri did exactly that.
In February 1963, the Lagos born accountant qualified as a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, becoming the first female chartered accountant from sub Saharan Africa. Two years later, she became a foundation member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, ICAN.
But the remarkable part of Olakunri’s story is not simply that she was the first.
She kept walking through doors after opening them.
A Lagos childhood that led to Britain
Olutoyin Olusola Adesigbin was born in Lagos on November 4, 1937, to Akinola Adio Adesigbin and Esther Ibidunni Adesigbin, née Doherty.
She grew up in a family connected to Lagos’s professional and commercial circles. Her father was a lawyer, while her mother came from the family of Lagos merchant J. H. Doherty.
Her early education took place in Nigeria. She attended Government School in Aba and later CMS Girls School in Lagos. She also spent a period at St Anne’s School in Ibadan.
At about 13 years old, she left Nigeria for Britain to continue her education. She attended Hawthorne School in Frinton on Sea, Essex, and later Bournemouth College of Commerce before studying at the University of Birmingham.
Britain was still at the centre of the professional system through which many Nigerians seeking elite qualifications had to pass.
For Olakunri, however, Britain was not the destination of her story. It became the place where she acquired the professional training that she would eventually bring back to Nigeria.
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The qualification that changed the course of her career
In February 1963, Olakunri qualified as a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales.
The achievement was extraordinary for its time.
Accountancy was one of the professions through which the expanding commercial economy was organised, yet senior positions in the profession were overwhelmingly occupied by men. Olakunri’s qualification placed a Nigerian woman within an elite professional community at a time when women were still fighting for space in many areas of public and economic life.
She became the first female chartered accountant in sub Saharan Africa.
After qualifying, she returned to Nigeria and worked with Peat, Marwick, Casselton Elliot and Company, an accounting firm whose lineage was later associated with KPMG.
Her professional journey, however, would soon move beyond auditing and accounting.
From accountancy to Nigeria’s emerging financial world
In 1965, Olakunri became one of the foundation members of the newly established Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria.
She subsequently joined the Nigerian Industrial Development Bank, NIDB, an institution created to support industrial development in the country.
Her work there took her into investment and the capital market. She became associated with ICON Stockbrokers, an affiliate of NIDB, and later became managing director of CTB Stockbrokers.
This transition was important.
Accountancy gave Olakunri a command of financial records and corporate numbers. Her subsequent work in investment and stockbroking brought her closer to the movement of capital itself.
Nigeria was developing its own indigenous business institutions, and Olakunri was moving into the centre of that transformation.
She did not stop at professional success
Olakunri’s career eventually moved from managing other people’s finances to running businesses herself.
In 1972, she acquired a plastics manufacturing business in Apapa that had been established by an Italian expatriate. The business became Diamond Plastics, which she subsequently managed.
She also attempted to enter the prefabricated housing business, although the venture was not successful.
That part of her story is rarely given much attention, but it reveals something important about her career.
Olakunri was prepared to take commercial risks.
Her professional life was not a straight line of appointments and honours. It included entrepreneurship, investment and ventures that did not all succeed.
She later became deeply involved in organised business and manufacturing and served in positions connected with the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria and the Chemical and Non Metallic Employers Federation.
She also became chairman of Famad Plc, formerly Bata Nigeria, a position she held for more than two decades.
The woman who had started her career working with financial accounts had become an industrialist and corporate director.
When an accountant entered Nigeria’s constitutional debate
Olakunri’s influence was not restricted to business.
In 1977, Nigeria was preparing for a return to civilian government after years of military rule. General Olusegun Obasanjo’s military administration convened a Constituent Assembly to deliberate on a new constitution.
Olakunri was selected to participate in the assembly.
She used the platform to address an issue that remained deeply relevant to Nigerian women: equality before the law.
During the constitutional debates, she challenged provisions that allowed customary and Islamic law to remain outside the reach of certain constitutional protections relating to equality.
Her intervention reflected a wider concern about the position of women within Nigerian society.
For Olakunri, professional advancement had already demonstrated that women could succeed in fields dominated by men. Constitutional equality was another part of the same struggle.
The issue was not merely whether women could enter professions.
It was whether the legal and social structures of the country would give them equal standing.
Building a network for women accountants
In 1978, Olakunri and other female members of ICAN helped establish the Society of Women Accountants in Nigeria, SWAN.
The organisation provided a professional platform for women working in accountancy and encouraged greater participation by women in the profession.
Olakunri served as its chairman for many years and later became a life patron.
The significance of SWAN went beyond its membership.
A pioneer can become an isolated exception. An institution can create a pathway for many more people.
By helping create a professional network for female accountants, Olakunri contributed to a structure through which women could support one another, develop professionally and occupy more visible positions within accountancy.
The organisation’s influence eventually extended beyond Nigeria, with the World Body for Women Accountants launched in Paris in 1997.
Breaking another barrier at the stock exchange
Olakunri’s growing influence also took her into Nigeria’s capital market.
She became the first woman appointed to the board of the Nigerian Stock Exchange and served on its council for five years.
The Nigerian Stock Exchange was an important institution in the country’s emerging financial system. Its boardroom was therefore not simply another corporate office. It was part of the machinery through which companies raised capital and investors participated in the economy.
Olakunri’s appointment represented another breach in a professional barrier.
She was no longer simply a woman who had succeeded in accountancy.
She was now participating in the institutions that shaped Nigerian finance.
The first woman to lead the Institute of Directors Nigeria
Her involvement in corporate governance continued to grow.
Olakunri had become a fellow of the Institute of Directors in Britain in 1969 and later became a foundation member of the Nigerian branch.
In 1983, she was among those involved in the establishment of the Nigerian chapter.
She eventually became the first woman to serve as president of the Institute of Directors Nigeria.
The position placed her at the heart of discussions about corporate leadership, accountability and governance.
For a woman who had entered the profession when senior business positions were overwhelmingly male, it was another remarkable milestone.
From foundation member to president of ICAN
Perhaps the most fitting achievement of Olakunri’s professional life came when she eventually returned to the institution she had helped establish.
In 1965, she had been one of ICAN’s foundation members.
Nearly three decades later, she became its president for the 1994 and 1995 period, becoming the first woman to occupy the position.
The significance was difficult to miss.
She had entered the accountancy profession when women were still a rarity at its highest levels. She had participated in the development of the Nigerian profession from its formative years and eventually rose to lead the country’s principal professional accounting institution.
The journey from foundation member to president captured the remarkable length of her career.
From corporate leadership to public service
Olakunri’s later career increasingly brought her into public institutions.
She served on the board of Nigeria LNG for eight years and participated in several national committees and public bodies.
One of her most important public appointments came in education.
She served as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Education Trust Fund, now known as the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFund, from 1999 to 2007.
The fund was established to provide additional resources for Nigeria’s public tertiary institutions. During Olakunri’s tenure, her responsibilities therefore extended into one of the country’s major development challenges, improving the resources available to universities, polytechnics and colleges of education.
Her experience in finance and corporate management was now being applied to a national educational institution.
She also served on governing councils and boards associated with several Nigerian universities and educational institutions.
Her later career showed how far her influence had travelled from accountancy.
She had moved through business, finance and corporate governance into the administration of public institutions.
A life of professional and community service
Olakunri’s public life was not confined to corporate offices.
She was a mother of seven and an active Anglican Christian.
At St Paul’s Church, Breadfruit, Lagos, she participated in church organisations and served in practical areas of church life, including the Altar Guild.
She also became involved in charitable and community organisations.
For more than 15 years, she chaired the Bloom Cancer Care and Support Centre, an organisation involved in supporting people affected by cancer.
These activities added another dimension to a career that was already crowded with professional responsibilities.
For all the attention given to her achievements in accountancy and business, a substantial part of her later life was also devoted to institutional, religious and community service.
The honours that followed
Over the course of her life, Olakunri received numerous professional and public recognitions.
In 1988, the Ogun State Government recognised her as a Distinguished Citizen of the state.
In 2002, President Olusegun Obasanjo conferred on her the national honour of Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic, OFR.
She also received honorary doctorate degrees from Nigerian universities, including the University of Ado Ekiti, Lagos State University and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
Traditional titles and other honours followed from different communities and organisations.
But the most enduring evidence of her influence was not the number of titles attached to her name.
It was the number of institutions in which she left a mark.
The final chapter
Olutoyin Olusola Olakunri died in Lagos on June 3, 2018, at the age of 80.
Her death brought tributes from political leaders, professional organisations, business figures and others who had encountered her throughout her long public career.
She was buried following a funeral service at St Paul’s Church, Breadfruit, Lagos.
Those who remembered her spoke of a woman whose influence stretched across professional accountancy, business, education and public service.
Yet her historical importance had been established long before those final tributes.
More than the woman who came first
It is easy to remember Toyin Olakunri simply as the first female chartered accountant in sub Saharan Africa.
But that description tells only the beginning of the story.
She qualified in Britain in 1963, returned to Nigeria and became one of the foundation members of ICAN. She moved into investment and stockbroking, entered manufacturing and corporate leadership, participated in constitutional deliberations, helped establish a professional organisation for women accountants, broke barriers at the Nigerian Stock Exchange and became the first woman to lead both ICAN and the Nigerian Institute of Directors.
Later, she served the country through education and other public institutions.
Her life therefore represents more than an individual professional breakthrough.
It is a story about what happened when a pioneer refused to remain confined to the significance of being a pioneer.
Olakunri entered accountancy at a time when the profession offered women far fewer visible paths to leadership. She did not simply occupy one of those paths. She moved from one institution to another, carrying her experience with her and creating opportunities for participation along the way.
Her story also belongs to the larger history of Nigeria’s post independence development.
As the country built its own professional institutions, financial markets, indigenous businesses and public organisations, people like Olakunri helped shape those structures from within.
She belonged to a generation that witnessed colonial rule give way to independence, military governments interrupt civilian politics, indigenous enterprise expand and Nigerian professional institutions mature.
By the time she died in 2018, the professional landscape she had entered as a young woman had changed considerably.
Women were no longer extraordinary sights in Nigerian accountancy, corporate governance, banking, finance and public administration.
That transformation cannot be attributed to one person.
But pioneers such as Toyin Olakunri made it harder for the next generation to be told that certain rooms were not meant for them.
And that may ultimately be the most enduring measure of her life.
She was not remembered only because she arrived first.
She was remembered because she stayed, led, built institutions and helped make the path wider for those who came after her.
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Author’s Note: Toyin Olakunri’s life was a journey from becoming the first female chartered accountant in sub Saharan Africa to helping shape Nigeria’s accounting profession, financial sector, business community, constitutional debates, education system and opportunities for women. Her greatest legacy was not simply breaking barriers for herself, but using the positions she attained to create space for others to follow.
References
The Guardian Nigeria, “Olutoyin Olusola Olakunri, 1937 to 2018,” June 24, 2018.
The Guardian Nigeria, “Life and times of first lady of accounting, Olutoyin Olakunri,” June 30, 2018.
The Guardian Nigeria, “Toyin Olakunri in her own words,” November 14, 2018.
Tertiary Education Trust Fund, publication on former Chairmen of the Board of Trustees.
Biographical Legacy and Research Foundation, biographical record of Olutoyin Olusola Olakunri.
Hallmarks of Labour Foundation, biographical profile of Chief Mrs Olutoyin Olusola Olakunri.
DAWN Commission, profile of Chief Mrs Olutoyin Olusola Olakunri.
Musliu O. Anibaba, A Short History of the Accountancy Profession in Nigeria, 1990.
Tom G. Forrest, The Advance of African Capital: The Growth of Nigerian Private Enterprise, 1994.
