MUKTAR BAKARE - Descasio

Mr. Muhtar Bakare attended Kings College, Lagos, and then went on to obtain a B.Sc. (1988) and an M.Sc. (1991) in Architecture, from Obafemi Awolowo University. He completed the Senior Executive Program for Africa (SEPA) at Harvard University Business School and Wits University Business School in 2003. His professional career span 28 years with over 20 years in executive and senior leadership roles.

He started out in the banking industry at Citibank Nigeria in 1991 as a Management Associate, during which he completed an 18-month Executive Training program.
He then went on to manage the import and export processing of the bank in the Trade Services Department and later joined the Commercial Banking Group where he rose to the level of Assistant General Manager, leading the Expanded Target Market Unit. In this role, he supervised the origination, sale, and management of credit, through product programs, to small, growing businesses. He left Citibank in 2002, to serve as an Executive Director at Trust Bank of Africa (Now Sterling Bank) where he led the Sales and Marketing Groups and helped to attract fresh capital, new talent and provided strategic executive leadership that put the bank on a path to transformation.

In 2004, he founded the independent publishing company, Kachifo Limited, and its flagship imprint Farafina. Kachifo has since published some of the leading voices in contemporary African literature. He was one of the Executive Producers of the movie Half of A Yellow Sun which was released in 2013. Farafina Educational’s Social Studies for Primary Schools is used in over 250 leading private schools across the country.

Between 2007 and 2008, Mr. Bakare assisted in the creation of the editorial department of trailblazing Nigerian Newspaper 234NEXT. He was Editorial Director responsible for the recruitment, training, and development of all the journalists employed at inception. He was responsible for setting, benchmarking, and maintaining the minimum standard of quality required for the contents of the newspaper. He was also the Editor of the Editorial Pages, at some point, responsible for the commissioning and production of all the opinion and editorial content of the newspaper.

Between 2012 and 2016, he was Managing Director of Pearson Education Publishing Limited, the Nigerian operations of the leading education services provider in the world.
In this role, he canvassed passionately for investment in the direct delivery of basic, vocational, and tertiary education in Nigeria. Pearson has since divested from Nigeria.

Mr. Bakare currently sits on the board of emerging businesses in publishing, financial services, technology, real estate, and educational services. Mr. Bakare is particularly interested in businesses operating at the intersection of Financial Services, Technology, and Education.

He has been married for 20 years and has 2 children.