Billionaire businessman Femi Otedola has revealed that his journey to building a multi-billion-dollar empire began without a university degree—or even a completed high school education.
In his newly released memoir, Making It Big, the 62-year-old energy mogul reflects on his early struggles with academics and how they ultimately pushed him toward business, where he discovered his true calling.
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“Academia and I were not compatible,” Otedola writes, recalling his early years at the University of Lagos Staff School, where he began his education at age six in 1968. Despite sharing classrooms with the likes of Kola Abiola, son of the late Chief Moshood Abiola, he admits that he consistently ranked at the bottom of his class. “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 completing primary school, he proceeded to Methodist Boys’ High School, Lagos, and later Olivet Baptist High School in Oyo. His parents, hoping a change of environment would spark improvement, sent him to boarding school. But his struggles persisted. “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,” he recalls.
It was during his teenage years that he began to feel a strong pull toward business. By the time his father established Impact Press, a printing company in Surulere, Lagos, Otedola was already spending more time around machines than textbooks. “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.”
Despite his mother’s tears, he abandoned school to work full-time in his father’s printing press. At just 25, he rose to become the managing director. But soon, he longed for independence. “I still wanted to work for my father, I enjoyed hearing the rumbling of machines and 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, paying me a commission of 10–15% on any work I brought in. That was a significant break for me.”
Investing his earnings in cars for marketing, Otedola quickly began attracting jobs from major companies and advertising agencies. “We could hardly keep up with the demand. Our unique selling point was quality and timeliness, and we soon became strong competitors with Academy Press in Lagos,” he noted.
That experience laid the foundation for his next leap. In 1994, with ₦10 million in capital, he established Centre Force Ltd., and from there, he expanded into oil and gas, shipping, real estate, finance, and later philanthropy. He went on to chair Forte Oil, invested in power through Geregu Power Plc, and today serves as chairman of FirstHoldco Plc, one of Nigeria’s largest financial groups.
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His disclosure may surprise many who long assumed he was a university graduate. For years, even his Wikipedia page suggested he studied at the University of Lagos. But in his memoir, Otedola insists his classroom was not a lecture hall—it was the business floor. “I never returned for my Upper Sixth. All I wanted was to get involved in business. That decision, once a source of my mother’s tears, laid the foundation for my future.”
The billionaire’s story delivers a powerful message: while formal education may have eluded him, discipline, persistence, and an unyielding hunger to succeed gave him, in his words, the chance to “make it big.”
