Written By Eyikojoka Diboku
“The Woman Rewiring Africa's Energy Value Chain”
Folake Soetan began her career answering phones for an airline. Twenty-six years later, she leads one of Africa's boldest experiments in integrated energy leadership, bridging oilfields and power grids under one vision.
Her appointment as founding Managing Director of Arahas Global Oilfield Services arrives as Africa's energy transition demands leaders fluent across sectors, her story asks what happens when one woman refuses to stay in a single lane.
A New Desk, A Wider Mandate
On July 1, 2026, Folake Soetan walked into a new office in Lagos carrying a mandate that stretched further than any she had held before, Managing Director of Arahas Global Oilfield Services, with an expanded reach into Sahara Power Group.
It was not a debut so much as an inheritance of momentum, the latest turn in a career that has quietly rewritten what leadership looks like across Africa's energy sector.
She did not begin in a boardroom. In July 2000, Soetan started as a telesales agent at British Airways in Lagos, a first job that seems almost incidental until you trace the twenty-six years that followed, through aviation, downstream oil, and ultimately the helm of Sub-Saharan Africa's largest electricity distribution company.
What makes her story land is not the titles but the texture beneath them: a woman who rose from answering calls to steering a workforce of over 3,200 people, and who now carries that same discipline into an industry many still consider closed to newcomers.
The Moment That Defines Her Legacy
"Our focus is on building future-ready platforms anchored on strong leadership, clear strategy, and disciplined execution," said Adedeji Odunsi, Executive Director at Sahara Group, explaining why Soetan was chosen to lead Arahas at this inflection point.
The line captures something larger than one appointment; it signals a bet that Africa's energy future belongs to leaders who can move fluidly between oilfields and electricity grids, rather than staying confined to one silo.
"Her mandate reflects a broader strategic intent to strengthen Arahas as a globally competitive platform rooted in African expertise, engineering excellence, and operational reliability."
That sentence, issued in Sahara's own statement on the appointment, doubles as a description of Soetan herself, an executive whose credibility was built, not inherited.
The Long Road From Telesales To CEO
Soetan's path through Sahara Group began in 2009 at SO Aviation, before she was named Vice President for Downstream West Africa in 2012, based in Accra, where she helped grow two subsidiary companies into an $86.7 million turnover business.
In 2015, she joined Ikeja Electric as Deputy Chief Commercial Officer, rising to Chief Commercial Officer within a year, then Chief Operating Officer in 2019, before being named Acting Chief Executive Officer in March 2020 and confirmed CEO shortly after.
Along the way, she earned a degree in Banking and Finance from the University of Lagos and completed the Advanced Management Programme at Harvard Business School, credentials that anchored her instinct for operational discipline in formal training.
Nigeria's power sector, notoriously difficult to reform, gave her a five-year proving ground in which losses had to be reduced, and customer trust rebuilt block by block, franchise by franchise.
What Changed When She Took Charge
Under Soetan, Ikeja Electric, serving over one million customers as Sub-Saharan Africa's largest electricity distributor, transitioned a period of sustained operational transformation, with strengthened customer-facing initiatives and tighter performance frameworks.
The scale of that responsibility, translated into everyday terms, meant that millions of households and businesses across Lagos depended on decisions made under her watch.
Her elevation to the NISO board, appointed by the President to strengthen national grid reliability, extended her influence beyond a single company into the architecture of Nigeria's electricity system itself.
Building Africa's Next Energy Powerhouse Now
At Arahas, Soetan inherits a founding mandate: to redefine the delivery of oilfield services activities across Africa's upstream value chain, emphasising innovation, efficiency, and sustainability from day one.
Her brief now spans two worlds, strengthening Arahas as an engineering-driven platform while simultaneously reinforcing operational linkages within Sahara Power Group, an integration Sahara believes will unlock synergies across the entire energy lifecycle.
This is the invitation embedded in her new role: for engineers, investors, and policymakers to see oilfield services and power distribution not as separate industries competing for attention, but as one interconnected system that Africa cannot afford to keep fragmented.
A Legacy That Is Still Written
Soetan's story is not a closing chapter but an open one, tracing a longer arc in which African leadership increasingly means crossing sectors rather than staying within them.
If her tenure at Arahas mirrors her years at Ikeja Electric, the measure of success will be by reliability, resilience, and the quiet trust of communities that the lights will stay on.
What began with a telesales headset has become a mandate to help rewire a continent's energy future, one still very much being drafted.
