Guests in the upholstered seating of the Glover Memorial Hall auditorium during a performance.

The people behind the Group.

Lufodo Group was founded in 1985 by Olu Jacobs and Joke Silva. These are the people who run it, the board that oversees it, and the firm that keeps its records.

Institutional track record Leadership

Leadership

The people running the Group

Executive Chairman & Co-Founder

Olu Jacobs MFR

Olu Jacobs co-founded Lufodo Group in 1985 and serves as its Executive Chairman. His body of work spans five decades across stage, film, television and radio in Nigeria, Britain and the United States — including productions with Universal Pictures, MGM, Walt Disney, the BBC, the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Pinewood Studios, alongside more than 300 Nigerian films.

An alumnus of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, he returned to Nigeria to help raise the standard of the domestic industry — the founding purpose that Lufodo Group still operates against. His awards include Best Actor in a Lead Role at the Africa Movie Academy Awards, the Five Continent Best Actor Award, and Lifetime Achievement honours in Cameroon and Ghana. He was conferred with the national honour of Member of the Order of the Federal Republic (MFR).

Co-Founder & Creative Director

Joke Silva MFR

Joke Silva co-founded Lufodo Group with Olu Jacobs and leads its creative direction. She has worked across theatre, film, television and radio since 1981, trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art, and holds a degree in English from the University of Lagos.

She established the Lufodo Academy of Performing Arts in 2009 and continues to shape its curriculum and standards. She is the only Nigerian performer to have won five Africa Movie Academy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. She serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, and as a board member of the Lagos State Theatre Festival, and holds the national honour of Member of the Order of the Federal Republic (MFR).

Head of Business Development & Project Management

Soji Jacobs

Soji Jacobs leads business development and project management across the Group, with more than fifteen years at Lufodo and over forty completed projects spanning film, television, radio, curatorial work and theatre.

He was lead producer for Nigeria's cultural programme at the London Olympics (2012) and for the Nigerian Creative Arts Exchange in Paris (2018), lead producer of the Heartbeat musical across its 40-performance run, and co-producer of the feature film Potato Potahto. He holds direct responsibility for the Glover Memorial Hall PPP concession and for the Group's institutional partnerships. He holds a BA in Business Administration from Cameron University, Oklahoma.

Governance

Advisory Board

The board established on the award of the Glover Memorial Hall concession, bringing law, finance, real estate, operations and social impact expertise to the Group's oversight.

Board Chairman

MFR Gbenga Oyebode

Founder and Chairman of Aluko & Oyebode, one of Nigeria's leading corporate law firms, with more than thirty-five years in corporate and commercial practice across energy, infrastructure finance, privatisation and telecommunications. He chairs the Lufodo board, bringing governance and transaction expertise to the Group's institutional partnerships and concession structures.

Board Member

Chukwuka Monye

A social innovator who has spent twenty years working to make lives better in Nigeria, and an innovation strategist trained at the University of Oxford. He is the founder of Ciuci Consulting — Lufodo's operations partner on the Glover Memorial Hall concession — which he led from a strategy consultancy into operations management, on the premise that African institutions need support executing strategy as well as forming it. Ciuci is now recognised as a leading operations management firm, named Best Business Operations Management Consultancy — Africa in the 2020 Corporate Vision awards. He has built businesses, mentored leaders and transformed private and public institutions across the continent.

Board Member · Strategy & Operations

Ifeoma Monye

A management consultant and operations specialist with over eighteen years advising businesses on systems, process and performance across media, education, real estate, financial services and healthcare in the UK, US and Nigeria. A partner at Ciuci Consulting — Lufodo's operations partner on the Glover Memorial Hall concession — she is a certified PRINCE2 and MSP practitioner and completed executive programmes at Harvard Business School.

Board Member

Chief (Mrs) Taiwo Taiwo

Chairman of Lexham Investment and a property developer with more than forty-five years in Nigerian and international real estate. She is founding Chairman of Atlantic Hall and of the Lagos Millennium Group on the Environment, and brings deep experience in the financing and stewardship of major Lagos assets to the Group's infrastructure work.

Board Member

Dr Tony Rapu

A medical doctor, filmmaker and social entrepreneur who chairs the board of trustees of the Freedom Foundation, working on urban poverty, addiction and community development in Lagos. He has produced and edited documentary work including the My Lagos Diaries series, and brings a social-impact and documentary perspective to the Group's advocacy commissions.

Company Secretary

L&A Legal Consultants

Company secretarial services to Lufodo Group.

Forty years of track record.

See the partners, programmes and outcomes behind the institution — government, development finance, banking, multilateral and corporate.

Institutional track record Production catalogue