Guinness Nigerian has moved swiftly to fill a critical marketing vacancy but the appointment is already drawing scrutiny over what some industry watchers see as a troubling pattern of Nigerian executives being systematically eased out of senior roles.
Marketing and communications expert, Yinka Bakare has left the services of Guinness Nigeria where he served as Marketing Director effective 31 January 2026 to pursue opportunities outside the company, according to the company.
In his place, the company has appointed Ramanathan “Ram” Solayappan as its new Marketing & Innovations Director, Drinkabl Africa can exclusively reveal.
The announcement was made in an internal communication signed by Girish Sharma, Managing Director of Guinness Nigeria, and obtained exclusively by this publication. In the letter addressed to the full team, Sharma thanked Bakare for his contributions in strengthening the company’s marketing foundations and guiding the team through key milestones, while expressing confidence that the incoming director will accelerate the company’s growth agenda under its Building for More vision 2026 roadmap.
Ram Solayappan is a seasoned Sales and Marketing executive with over 15 years of experience spanning Nigeria and India. He brings deep expertise in brand management, route-to-market strategy, business intelligence, and digital transformation within the FMCG sector.
Since joining the Tolaram Group in 2015 after completing his MBA, Ram has held progressive roles across V Connect, Multipro, and Dufil. During this period, he made contributions to SME solutions, distribution optimisation, and the enterprise-wide rollout of Power BI. He later transitioned fully into Marketing, where he championed digitalisation initiatives and, most recently, led Marketing for Indomie Instant Noodles, Nigeria’s largest noodles brand.
In his new role, Ram will be responsible for driving marketing strategy, strengthening the brand portfolio, and accelerating innovation to unlock new growth opportunities. The expanded title of Marketing & Innovations Director, as opposed to simply Marketing Director, signals a deliberate broadening of mandate, with innovation now formally embedded in the brief, consistent with Diageo’s global emphasis on portfolio diversification in emerging markets.
The appointment of Ram Solayappan, however, has not occurred in isolation. Drinkabl understands that the transition sits against a broader backdrop of leadership changes at Guinness Nigeria that are beginning to raise uncomfortable questions about the company’s senior talent strategy.
In October 2025, barely months before this latest development, Guinness Nigeria’s Commercial Director, Adesanya Olusanya “Sanya” departed the company after a remarkable 12-year career that saw him rise from Sales Representative all the way to Commercial Director, a role he attained in 2023. Olusanya, a Nigerian, was the man responsible for driving Guinness Nigeria’s commercial strategy. He has since joined FrieslandCampina WAMCO as Group Director of Sales. The identity of his successor at Guinness Nigeria has, notably, not been made public at the time of this report.
⚠ INDUSTRY WATCHERS: A Deliberate Squeeze?
Multiple industry sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, have raised concerns about what they describe as a “systematic edging out” of Nigerian executives from the top rungs of Guinness Nigeria’s leadership structure. The concern is not merely about individual appointments but about an emerging directional pattern — one in which Nigerians who have built the company’s commercial and marketing engine over decades are progressively being moved aside from the most strategically influential roles in the business.
“When Sanya left after 12 years of exceptional service, and his replacement is not even announced publicly, and now the Marketing Director is also a Nigerian who has been replaced by a non-Nigerian, when it happens twice in the two most commercially facing directorates, it starts to look less like coincidence and more like a conscious recalibration,” one senior FMCG industry figure told this publication.
The debate about Nigerianisation of senior corporate leadership in multinational businesses is not new, but it has gained renewed urgency as more companies re-examine their talent pipelines in the wake of Nigeria’s volatile economic climate. For a company like Guinness Nigeria which is listed on the Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) and has a deep and loyal Nigerian consumer base the optics of having its two most commercially facing directorates held by non-Nigerians carries weight beyond mere optics.
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