From Academic Failure to Business Magnate: The Story of Nigerian Billionaire Femi Otedola
- Billionaire Femi Otedola has shared his journey of academic struggles and how they led him to leave school and pursue a career in business
- Despite repeated poor performance in school, including a transfer to multiple schools, Otedola became fascinated by his father's printing business, which set him on a path to success
- By immersing himself in the business world, he quickly rose to managing director at the age of 25, eventually becoming one of Nigeria's most successful oil magnates
Legit.ng journalist Zainab Iwayemi has 5-year-experience covering the Economy, Technology, and Capital Market.
Billionaire Femi Otedola has opened up on how his academic struggles made him dump high school to pursue a business career.
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The 62-year-old Otedola described how he began his studies at the University of Lagos Staff School in 1968 in his recently published 286-page biography, Making It Big.
The oil tycoon disclosed that his school years were marked by consistently poor performance, Daily Sun reported.
“My parents enrolled me in the University of Lagos Staff School in 1968, at the age of six. 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 at the bottom rungs of our end-of-term examination results. My interests were definitely not in academia,” Otedola said.
According to him, the difficulties persisted in Methodist Boys' High School in Lagos after he finished primary school.
“The school had been founded almost a century 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 had 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.”
Otedola's parents had him transferred to Olivet Baptist High School in Oyo, a boarding school established by Southern Baptist missionaries in 1945, when it became clear that his performance was not improving.
“My parents’ thinking was that all my siblings were boarders, and they seemed to be doing well. They thought this change would help turn around my attitude towards academia, but nothing changed. I started in Form 3 at Olivet, and as I completed 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.”
Source: Getty Images
Ignoring his mother's protests, Otedola left school to work full-time in his father’s printing business. His rise was astronomical as he became the 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 rumble 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,” Otedola wrote.
Femi Otedola, Obasanjo clash over diesel shortage
Legit.ng earlier reported that in his biography, Otedola disclosed that he and former President Olusegun Obasanjo argued bitterly about the 2004 liberalisation of diesel imports.
He said Obasanjo was so furious that the ex-president accused him of tricking him into approving the product's importation.
In the excerpts from the book published by TheCable, the oil magnate explained how Obasanjo grew enraged when he saw that deregulation had resulted in a statewide diesel shortage.
Proofreading by James Ojo, copy editor at Legit.ng.
Source: Legit.ng
