How Chris Iyovwaye built a $20 million Nigerian oil services firm

Chris Iyovwaye started his working life changing dressings and taking temperatures as an auxiliary nurse at a private hospital in Warri, in Nigeria’s oil-producing Delta State. Three decades later, his company moves some of the heaviest industrial structures ever built in West Africa, and he is running to become the state’s governor.

Iyovwaye is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Wellmann Group, a Warri-based company that transports oversized equipment by land and sea for oil, gas and industrial projects. It has worked on offshore developments for Shell, Chevron, TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil, and on the construction of Aliko Dangote’s refinery in Lagos, the largest of its kind in the world.

Wellmann says on its website that it has annual turnover of more than $20 million and employs 75 people. Iyovwaye is not among Nigeria’s billionaires, and the company does not publish audited accounts. What he has built is something rarer: a Nigerian-owned company in a corner of the oil industry long dominated by European specialists.

From Warri to the factory floor

Iyovwaye was born in Warri on Feb. 24, 1964. His father, James Iyovwaye, came from Aghalokpe in Okpe Local Government Area, and his mother, Josephine, had family ties to Ekpan in Uvwie and Ewu town in Ughelli South. Both are Urhobo communities, and Iyovwaye still describes himself publicly as a proud Urhobo son.

He went to RCM School 1 in Warri and then to Urhobo College in Effurun, one of the region’s best-known secondary schools. He later studied international studies and diplomacy at the University of Benin, graduating with second-class honors.

His early jobs had nothing to do with shipping. He worked as an auxiliary nurse at Avenue Specialist Hospital in Warri, then as a quality control inspector at Delta Glass Company in Ughelli. A 2022 profile in Vanguard says he also worked as a librarian at Dulwich Library in London, for the borough of Southwark, from 1991 to 1994.

The quality control job at the glass factory gave him his first exposure to industrial work, where precision and inspection mattered more than speed.

Starting with nothing

Iyovwaye started the business in the mid-1990s. Profiles of him date its founding to 1995, and he has repeatedly said he started it with no capital, a phrase that has become central to how he tells his story. Wellmann Group of Companies Limited was incorporated in 2004, according to the company.

He built the business around a narrow and technically demanding niche. Wellmann specializes in heavy lifting, modular weighing and jacking systems, and marine and land transportation. In practice, that means moving huge pieces of equipment, such as platform modules, reactors and refinery columns, from the yards where they are built to the barges and jetties that carry them on.

The company now describes its services more broadly. They include marine transportation, offshore barges, offshore support services, heavy lifting, supply chain management, dredging, land reclamation and creek improvement. It says it can also take on front-end engineering design and civil and mechanical construction, and it offers ship agency services, which it bundles with logistics and heavy transport so that a single contractor handles a project from end to end.

Wellmann sits at the center of a small group of companies. Its website lists the other members as Wellmann Marine, Brazerville International, Pritod Construction and Lime-Light Entrepreneurs. The company has not published a breakdown of revenue between them.

Its client list covers most of the major oil companies operating in Nigeria. Wellmann says it handled the loadout of three modules for Shell’s Bonga floating production vessel, shipped from Ekpan, near Warri, to Newcastle in England, and moved Chevron’s Agbami vessel modules from Lagos to South Korea. It also lists work on Chevron’s Escravos gas projects, TotalEnergies’ Ofon field and Usan floating production vessel, the towing of a Shell concrete barge and an ExxonMobil satellite field development.

Built on Nigerian Content

Wellmann’s rise is closely tied to Nigeria’s local content policy. The Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act of 2010 requires oil companies to give Nigerian firms priority for contracts and to build up local capacity. Iyovwaye has positioned himself as one of the clearest beneficiaries of the law, and he describes himself as a “Nigerian Content ambassador.”

The regulator has said as much. At a long-service award ceremony Wellmann held in Warri around 2015, an official of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board said the board had stepped in on one occasion to ensure that jobs were placed with Wellmann. The official described the company as a good representative of Nigerian content and said the board was proud of its growth.

At the same event, Wellmann gave stakes in the company to four long-serving employees, an unusual step for a privately held Nigerian services firm.

Iyovwaye used the occasion to describe the company’s equipment. It included self-propelled modular trailers able to lift and move more than 4,000 tons in a single operation, modular jacking and weighing systems, offshore barges, ballast and mooring equipment, and cranes.

The Chevron move

The job that made Wellmann’s reputation came on a Chevron project. Wellmann moved what trade publication Oil Review Africa described as the heaviest oil and gas structure ever manufactured in Nigeria: a 3,340-ton platform topside built by the fabrication yard Nigerdock for Chevron.

The operation took precise coordination. Wellmann’s team positioned four groups of synchronized modular trailers beneath the topside, lifted it from its fabrication foundations and drove it toward the jetty. When the tide allowed, the trailers rolled the structure across a ramp onto a ballasted barge, with the barge’s ballast adjusted as each axle crossed onto its deck.

Iyovwaye’s own account puts the figure higher. In a 2022 profile, he described Wellmann as having moved a 3,800-ton cargo for Chevron, the largest single structure ever transported in Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea, and tied the feat to Chevron’s Meren project.

The Dangote refinery

Wellmann’s second landmark job was on the Dangote refinery in Lekki, Lagos, the 650,000-barrel-a-day plant that Aliko Dangote built at a cost of about $20 billion.

The project required some of the largest pieces of equipment ever shipped to Africa. Heavy-lift vessels delivered reactors and columns weighing hundreds of tons each directly to Dangote’s own jetty, including a 696-ton reactor 86.3 meters long and an 822-ton naphtha splitter column.

Iyovwaye said Wellmann was the only homegrown company among the firms providing logistics for key machinery on the project. “In the Dangote Refinery project, we competitively participated in offering logistical services for key machinery … we were the only homegrown company, the rest were expats,” he told bird story agency.

The company’s equipment includes hydraulic jacks with a capacity of up to 500 tons each, which it used to move large parts of the plant to their final positions. In an earlier profile, Iyovwaye put the company’s annual turnover at more than $5 million. Wellmann’s website now puts it at more than $20 million.

Wellmann now presents itself, in a sponsored 2025 feature in The Guardian, as having moved the largest industrial structures ever lifted and transported on the African continent. That claim has not been independently verified.

Faith and politics

Outside business, Iyovwaye is a deacon at Living Faith Church, the Pentecostal denomination better known as Winners Chapel. He has spoken about business mentoring and community projects run through the church, and he has written books on business and leadership. He is married to Leri Irerhime Iyovwaye, and the couple has children.

He has collected a long list of awards, many of them from organizations that also run paid recognition programs. In 2025, he was named in The Guardian’s list of the top 100 strategic CEOs of Nigeria’s most transformative companies, published in the newspaper’s sponsored section.

His public profile changed in 2022, when he entered politics and declared that he wanted to succeed Ifeanyi Okowa as governor of Delta State. He was little known in political circles at the time. At his declaration, he told party officials that he had more than 22,000 Delta residents in his database of supporters who belonged to no party. He did not emerge as a candidate in the 2023 race, which was won by Sheriff Oborevwori.

He has come back with a stronger platform. In June 2026, he emerged as the consensus governorship candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress, the party whose presidential candidate is Peter Obi, the runner-up in the 2023 presidential election. His campaign is built around a plan it calls Delta Vision 2035, and he has framed his bid around discipline and execution. “I am offering Delta not promises, but a disciplined plan, and the experience to deliver it,” his campaign says.

The race for Delta

The 2027 contest will be difficult. Oborevwori, the incumbent, has moved from the Peoples Democratic Party to the governing All Progressives Congress, saying the switch would align Delta with the federal government. He has called President Bola Tinubu’s re-election his “number one political project.”

Iyovwaye has gone on the attack. Last month, he rejected an endorsement of Oborevwori by Urhobo traditional rulers, saying no traditional institution could decide who governs Delta State. He also questioned what the state had gained from the governor’s defection, and said the 2027 election should be a chance for voters to judge the government’s record.

Running a governorship campaign in Nigeria is expensive, and Iyovwaye’s business will be tested by the demands of his political career. Wellmann’s fortunes have long depended on oil and gas spending in the Niger Delta, and on large one-off projects like the Dangote refinery and the offshore developments of the major oil companies. Its next large contracts may depend on a new wave of investment, such as Dangote’s planned refinery expansion and the gas projects the federal government is promoting.

Iyovwaye has shown no sign of stepping back from the business, and he is still listed as Wellmann’s managing director in his campaign materials. Whether he can turn a career built on moving heavy loads into a winning political campaign will be decided by Delta voters in 2027.