Ebele Enunwa: Unilorin alumni who built one of Nigeria’s largest supermarket chains

After ten years of building, Ebele Enunwa has contributed a quota of over 4,000 jobs to Nigeria’s labour sector through his supermarket chain business MarketSquare.

From a single outlet launched in 2015, the retail brand has expanded into what is now widely regarded as Nigeria’s largest modern supermarket network, reshaping how millions of consumers access groceries, household goods and everyday essentials across 16 cities.

As founder and chief executive of Sundry Markets Limited, he has spent the past decade building a retail system designed not just for sales, but for structure supply chains, logistics networks, pricing architecture and store formats that can function consistently across Nigeria’s fragmented consumer market.

But the scale of the business today is the outcome of a longer professional arc that began far from retail floors.

Early education and experience

Born on August 17, 1976, Ebele Emmanuel Enunwa is the first of three children born to an accountant father and a nurse mother. Though originally from Delta State, he was raised in Lagos, where early exposure to his parents’ professions shaped his worldview and his eventual decision to pursue accounting.

• His formal education began at MPPS, where he obtained his First School Leaving Certificate between 1979 and 1986, before proceeding to Airforce Military School, Jos, from 1986 to 1992, where he completed his secondary education.
• In 1992, he gained admission into the University of Ilorin, where he studied Accounting and graduated in 1997 with a Bachelor of Science degree. He would go on to complete his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme in Lagos between August 1998 and July 1999, serving at Deloitte as a Graduate Internship Associate in Business Assurance.
• That exposure to audit, compliance and advisory work marked…