By Ifeanyi Abraham
Femi Otedola isn’t just one in every of Nigeria’s most recognisable enterprise figures, he’s additionally a person with deep British ties. The oil and power magnate, lengthy a fixture on the Forbes record of Africa’s wealthiest, is a well-known face in London society. His daughters have studied within the UK, Florence “DJ Cuppy” Otedola at King’s Faculty London and later Oxford, and Tolani on the College of St Andrews, whereas he himself has made London a second house.
Now his memoir, Making It Huge: Classes from a Life in Enterprise, has stormed to worldwide consideration, turning into a three-time Amazon finest vendor. The e-book guarantees candour, controversy, and a uncommon inside take a look at how fortunes are inbuilt Africa’s largest financial system. Half confession, half celebration, and half cautionary story, it spans childhood hustles, billion-dollar oil gambits, devastating crashes, and eventual philanthropy.
However as readers in London and Lagos alike have found, Otedola’s memoir additionally raises an even bigger debate. What does “innovation” actually imply in an financial system the place political entry typically issues greater than product mastery? And the way does Otedola’s old-school playbook evaluate to the rise of fintech unicorns like Flutterwave and Moniepoint, whose fashions characterize the following wave of African entrepreneurship?
If you need to learn a model of the article with extra Nigerian context, I’ve written one for Techsoma Africa right here.
The Otedola Playbook: Scale, Entry, and Deregulation
Otedola’s empire really took off in 1999 with the founding of Zenon Petroleum and Gasoline. By 2004, he claimed to manage 93 % of Nigeria’s diesel market, a staggering dominance enabled by deregulation of diesel imports and, crucially, privileged entry to key infrastructure such because the Ibafon jetty in Lagos.
The place others noticed chaos, he imposed order. Zenon constructed fleets of ships, storage depots, and distribution networks that gave it a logistical edge. At its peak, the corporate was reportedly producing six million {dollars} a month, money that funded Otedola’s speedy enlargement into finance, telecoms, transport, and finally energy technology.
Critics, nonetheless, argue that this was much less about innovation and extra about being in the fitting place on the proper time with the fitting connections. Defenders counter that in Nigeria, the place infrastructure routinely collapses, creating dependable logistics is itself a type of innovation. As Nigerian commentator Agboola Sodiq noticed:
“Innovation isn’t solely people who take the world by the neck; it will also be native. OTE eliminated frictions in Nigeria’s oil logistics. That’s innovation too, for a special market.”
Corridors of Energy vs. Product Obsession
But reviewers have been sceptical. Writing below the headline The Billionaire’s Contradiction, essayist Feyi Fawehinmi concluded that Otedola’s story displays a Nigeria the place political entry is way extra worthwhile than product mastery:
“Within the quest to ‘make it large’ in Nigeria, understanding the product is non-compulsory. Understanding the corridors of energy is every thing.”
In contrast to Ray Kroc of McDonald’s, who famously obsessed over the right french fry, Otedola reveals little fascination with diesel as a product. It’s handled as a commodity, a vessel for arbitrage. His ardour lies within the deal, not the science. For international readers, this distinction underlines a key characteristic of Nigerian capitalism: wealth creation is usually much less about product innovation and extra about exploiting entry, coverage gaps, and monopoly alternatives.
One viral evaluate on Nigerian social media summarised it neatly:
“The true supply of Nigerian fortune isn’t innovation. It’s info asymmetry. It’s understanding somebody others don’t know.”
Adaptive, Not Technical, Innovation
Even so, it might be a mistake to dismiss Otedola as non-innovative. His success demonstrates one other sort of innovation, adaptive innovation.
Logistics Innovation: By locking accountable for depots, fleets, and jetties, Otedola eliminated bottlenecks in Nigeria’s chaotic power provide chain.
Monetary Innovation: He used capital as a weapon, paying 2.8 billion naira for a rival’s depot valued at lower than a 3rd of that, eliminating competitors by means of sheer monetary muscle.
Disaster Innovation: When the 2008 international oil crash left him with money owed of 200 billion naira, Otedola relied on Nigeria’s Asset Administration Company (AMCON) to purchase up his poisonous loans. He misplaced a lot of his prized property however survived to rebuild, first by means of Forte Oil and later Geregu Energy.
The comparability with the US monetary disaster is telling. Simply as Washington bailed out Wall Road’s “too large to fail” banks, Abuja rescued one in every of Nigeria’s most systemically vital businessmen. Otedola’s resilience is outstanding, but it surely additionally reveals how intently tied non-public fortunes in Nigeria stay to public intervention.
May He Have Proven Extra Product Mastery?
A recurring critique is Otedola’s lack of technical engagement with diesel, his core product. When he makes an attempt to sound technical, as together with his flawed calculation of tonnes to litres, it undermines his credibility.
The query is whether or not this was ignorance or intention. Did he genuinely lack product literacy, or did he assume readers cared extra about offers, energy, and audacity than about refining margins or sulphur content material? In presenting enterprise as spectacle, Otedola could have given Nigerians what they needed to listen to, however for international readers, it reveals how wealth in Nigeria typically grows by means of political entry slightly than mastery of product.
Making It Huge in 2025: The Moniepoint Instance
If Otedola’s playbook was about oil and privilege, Moniepoint represents a really totally different mannequin, one emblematic of Nigeria’s fast-rising expertise class.
The African fintech story has exploded previously decade. In 2021, Flutterwave turned the continent’s first fintech unicorn, drawing international headlines and funding from Silicon Valley. It confirmed that African startups might attain billion-dollar valuations not by cornering commodities however by fixing on a regular basis issues with expertise.
Moniepoint builds on that trajectory. Based in 2015 as TeamApt, it started by growing enterprise software program for Nigerian banks, using on deep relationships with incumbents like Zenith Financial institution. Over time it rebranded as Moniepoint and pivoted to consumer-facing companies, turning into a fintech powerhouse. Right this moment it processes thousands and thousands of transactions each day, serving small companies, rural brokers, and underserved communities as a lot as city elites.
In contrast to Zenon, Moniepoint’s energy lies in open rails and inclusion. Its infrastructure blends cloud-powered APIs and knowledge platforms with an unlimited community of bodily brokers, extending monetary entry into corners of Nigeria the place conventional banks might by no means attain.
From Banks to Rival Banks: As soon as a vendor, Moniepoint now competes straight with GTCO, Entry, and Zenith.
Innovation Mannequin: It reduces friction with automation and knowledge analytics, not authorities concessions.
Future Imaginative and prescient: Analysts recommend it might evolve right into a “Tremendous Financial institution,” able to rivalling Nigeria’s largest lenders in market cap and client belief.
This new wave of fintechs is bringing transparency, accessibility, and scalability to Nigeria’s financial system, qualities hardly ever related to the oil-driven empires of Otedola’s technology.
However the query stays: if Moniepoint have been to stumble, what would occur? Otedola had AMCON, a authorities backstop that saved each him and Nigeria’s banks. Would the Nigerian state intervene to rescue a fintech, or would Moniepoint must look to international buyers in London, New York, or Dubai for lifelines? Maybe that is what Otedola understands finest. In his period, the last word guarantor was the state. In fintech’s period, survival could rely on non-public capital and international belief.
Huge Males, Small Nation
In the long run, Making It Huge displays a paradox. In Nigeria, a person can change into very large whereas the nation itself stays small. Fortunes are constructed on non-public ascendancy slightly than nationwide prosperity. Otedola’s story is dazzling, however it is usually cautionary.
For the following technology, the problem is evident. Construct scale, take away frictions, and innovate, but additionally attempt to create enterprises that strengthen methods slightly than exploit their gaps.
Otedola has given us probably the most candid memoir but from a Nigerian billionaire. It’s as a lot about privilege and survival as it’s about ingenuity. Its Amazon best-seller standing reveals there’s starvation, even globally, for these tales. The true check shall be whether or not the following technology of African entrepreneurs, Flutterwave, Moniepoint, and others, can write books not solely about making it large, however about making it higher.
But like many self-written memoirs, what’s lacking right here is the concern. Femi Otedola is likely one of the strongest businessmen in Africa, and in addition one of the crucial ruthless. We now have heard the whispered tales of manoeuvrings that helped safe his dominance, however they don’t seem in these pages. We could have to attend for somebody nearer to him to inform us concerning the extra shadowed realities: his divorce, his rivalries and public clashes with Tony Elumelu (whom he has overtly accused of sharp practices), his relationships together with his kids past the rigorously curated picture of generosity and assist, his position as chairman of FBN Holdings, the boardroom battles that noticed senior executives eliminated, and the intricate net of performs throughout his totally different companies.
And but, all of these items, the candour, the omissions, the manoeuvres we all know of and people we don’t, are a part of what has made him who he’s. They contribute to the structure of his success. As a result of whether or not we prefer it or not, success isn’t a solo act. It’s a collective of selections, sacrifices, victories and wounds, all woven collectively right into a story that’s bigger than the person himself.
That absence is as telling as what Otedola selected to disclose. Making It Huge offers us candour, sure, but it surely additionally reminds us that the complete story of energy in Nigeria is all the time bigger, darker, and extra sophisticated than what makes it into print.
