Billionaire Femi Otedola recounts how his struggle with academics pushed him out of the classroom and into the world of business, where he would eventually build his fortune.
He chairs one of Nigeria’s largest financial groups and has built a multi-billion-dollar business empire. But Femi Otedola has now revealed that his rise was achieved without a university degree — or even a complete high school education.
In the newly released 286-page memoir, Making It Big, which hit the shelves on Monday, the energy mogul details how his struggle with academics pushed him out of the classroom and into the world of business, where he would later make his fortune.
Mr Otedola, 62, writes that he began his education at the University of Lagos Staff School in 1968 but consistently performed poorly. “My parents enrolled me at the University of Lagos Staff School in 1968, at the age of six,” he says. “Kola Abiola — the first son of Chief Moshood Abiola, the future business magnate and presidential candidate who was at the time an accountant — sat beside me in class.
“But there was something about academia and me; we were not compatible. I finished primary school in 1974 because I repeated a class. Even when I was allowed to pass, I consistently anchored the bottom rungs of our end-of-term examination results. My interests were definitely not in academia.”
After finishing primary school, the young Mr Otedola proceeded to Methodist Boys’ High School, Lagos. His academic struggles continued there.
“The school had been founded almost a hundred years earlier, in 1878. Alumni include grand names in Nigerian history: Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe, Mobolaji Johnson, Ola Rotimi, Fola Adeola, Olusegun Osoba and Hezekiah Oladipo Davies. When I joined the student body in 1974 the principal was D. A. Famoroti, who’d taken up the post in 1963 and would leave in 1980,” he recalls. “I started Form 1 at age 12 and was there for three years.”
By 1977, after it became clear that his performance was not improving, his parents transferred him to Olivet Baptist High School, Oyo, a boarding school founded by Southern Baptist missionaries in 1945.
“My parents’ thinking was that all my siblings were boarders, and they seemed to be doing well,” Mr Otedola writes. “They thought this change would help turn around my attitude towards academia, but nothing changed.”
He continues: “I started in Form 3 at Olivet, and as I rounded off the first year of my A Levels, my father was establishing his printing company, Impact Press, in Surulere, a residential and commercial district in Lagos State. I grew fascinated with the machines and told myself that my future would be inextricably tied to them. I managed to remain in school until the Lower Sixth examination was over. And then, I was finished; I never returned for my Upper Sixth.
“All I wanted to do was get involved in business. My father kept watch over me and drew me close. My sister taught me shorthand. I knew how to type and began typing letters for my dad. I prepared all his business correspondence. I was fascinated by the way printing machines treat paper. The white paper is placed on one end, the ink and plates are fixed, and the printed material comes out of the other end. It was captivating.”
Despite his mother’s protests and tears, Mr Otedola abandoned school to work full-time in his father’s printing business. He rose quickly, becoming managing director of Impact Press in 1987 at the age of 25.
“However, I soon became restless. I had immersed myself in all aspects of the business and learned the ropes at my dad’s right hand. I certainly enjoyed the job more than grappling with the Pythagoras theorem and struggling through homework at Olivet. As time went by, though, I also thought it was time for a measure of independence from my dad.
“I still wanted to work for him — I really enjoyed hearing the rumbling of machines and savouring the smell of freshly printed material — but I also wanted to do things differently. I told him I wanted to become a sales consultant for the press, and he agreed. He said he would pay me a commission of 10–15% on any work I brought in.
“That was a significant break for me. I invested my money in buying cars for sales and marketing outreach and moved on to the next phase in my nascent professional life.”
With his new role, Mr Otedola began bringing in jobs from major companies and advertising agencies, particularly in calendars and diaries.
“We could hardly keep up with the demand. Our unique selling point was quality, thanks to the state-of-the-art machines we owned. We were also always on time with job delivery. We were engaged in healthy competition with Academy Press, a company located in the Ilupeju area of Lagos.
“I served as my dad’s sales exec up until 1991, when he started his Lagos State gubernatorial campaign. It was a run for office — ultimately successful — that I had initiated.”
That break in the family business gave Mr Otedola the confidence and foundation to strike out on his own. In 1994, he founded Centre Force Ltd. with ₦10 million in starting capital. From those beginnings, he built a vast business empire in oil and gas, shipping, real estate, finance and philanthropy. He went on to chair Forte Oil, invested in power through Geregu Power Plc, and today chairs the board of FirstHoldco Plc, one of Nigeria’s largest financial groups.
The businessman’s disclosure of his educational history may come as a surprise to many who long believed he was a university graduate. At one point, his Wikipedia page even suggested he studied at the University of Lagos.
But in “Making It Big”, Mr Otedola insists his true classroom was not a lecture hall but the business floor. His lessons, he says, came from watching his father, trusting his instincts, and learning from both failures and triumphs.
“I never returned for my Upper Sixth. All I wanted was to get involved in business,” he writes. That decision, once a source of his mother’s tears, would lay the foundation for a career that has made him one of Africa’s most influential businesspersons.
In the end, Mr Otedola’s memoir delivers a striking message: formal education may have eluded him, but discipline, persistence, and the hunger to build made him — in his own words — “make it big.”
