Femi Otedola’s new memoir, Making It Big: Lessons from a Life in Business, has landed at a peculiar moment when millions are hustling harder as prices rise faster, when “blowing” feels like a strategy and “connections” are a currency. Otedola knows the terrain intimately. He has won big, lost bigger, rebuilt, and parlayed a lifetime of proximity to power. His memoir is pitched as a manual for ambition and a mirror held up to the political economy that makes and unmakes fortunes in Nigeria.
The book is positioned as a masterclass on mindset and resilience and a masterclass in how the Nigerian system works if you are inside the right rooms. If you are reading to learn “how to make it,” it offers both inspiration and an uncomfortable truth: grit matters, but networks move mountains.
Otedola doesn’t shy away from the valley. He writes about the years when crude prices fell, the naira devalued, interest costs ballooned, and he watched a fortune evaporate. Accounts around the book launch detail a staggering loss figure and the asset sales and humiliations that followed. The lesson he leans into is stoic: assess, cut losses, pay your dues, and rebuild with no self-pity. In that sense, the book is a gift to a generation raised on “overnight success” clips. Real business cycles are brutal.
But there’s a second current running through his narrative: the scale of capital and credit available to him when things were good and the speed with which the system turned hostile when the tide receded. He describes banks that courted him when the charts were up, then sent “hefty” enforcers when the music stopped. For young founders, this is a sober reminder that leverage magnifies both upside and downside.
Privilege and Proximity
Some of the most revealing pages involve the intersection of business and the state. Otedola recounts a midnight call from then-President Olusegun Obasanjo, furious over a diesel scarcity after deregulation. The vignette is gripping, but its value is analytical: it shows how proximity to decision-makers can both unlock opportunities and attract political heat.
Simply put, deregulation created fortunes because it opened gates that had been locked and created bottlenecks because entrenched interests, including elements within state enterprises, did not go quietly. There is a lesson here for reformers and for dreamers: markets don’t emerge by decree; they are negotiated with rules, incentives, and, yes, power.
We cannot discuss Otedola without acknowledging his surname. His late father, Sir Michael Otedola, served as Governor of Lagos State in the early 1990s. That family history mattered not as a guarantee of success, but as social positioning that offers early access to circles where information, introductions, and credibility compound. The memoir doesn’t pretend he started from a street kiosk. The honest, useful conversation is about how privilege operates in Nigeria and how to broaden access without demonising those who have it.
For the hustler, this is the uncomfortable takeaway: talent and effort are necessary but rarely sufficient. The “right” networks, mentors who can co-sign, bankers who will pick your call, customs officers who won’t choke your cargo, remain decisive. That’s not cynicism; it’s institutional diagnosis. And this, more than any single “rule of success,” is where Otedola’s story becomes a civic text.
Home Truths For The Hustlers
Otedola’s insistence on auditing mistakes, paying what you owe, and starting again is old-fashioned and refreshing. In a culture that sometimes prizes vibes over value, it re-centres discipline: know your unit economics, read your facilities, hedge your exposures, keep your word. If all a reader learns is to measure risk in naira and in dollars, that alone can save a business in a year like 2025.
Commodity booms seduce. Currency slides punish. Interest accrues even when Twitter is praising you. His account is a live-fire case study in why entrepreneurs should stress-test for 30–40% currency moves, spike-then-slump commodity prices, and sudden policy pivots. Any business model that only works in the up cycle is a hobby with investors’ money.
A memoir can model habits and ethics; it cannot gift you a godfather. Otedola’s rooms were open to him in part because of lineage and the credibility he built inside those circles. For readers outside those rings, women, people from “non-elite” states, first-generation professionals, the task is heavier: build lateral coalitions, not just vertical patronage. Professional associations, angel syndicates, diaspora alumni networks, and industry cooperatives can substitute (imperfectly) for elite ties. Nigeria’s next wave of success stories will be those who learn to construct networks rather than inherit them.
The book shows how one person navigated a system where rules bend around relationships. Replicating that at scale is impossible without deepening the rule of law. Until port processes are transparent, land registries digitised, and courts predictable, the “how to” of making it big will remain a bespoke path for the connected. If policymakers are paying attention, Making It Big is not just a business memoir; it is a policy audit with three critical messages.
One, lower the cost of failing. In vibrant economies, failure is feedback, not a death sentence. Nigeria needs insolvency regimes that allow honest entrepreneurs to restructure quickly, credit registries that reward clean exits, and banking supervision that discourages reckless lending while protecting productive risk-taking.
Two, deregulation by decree and personality invites drama. Clear, transparent rules on pricing, importation, and competition would have spared both Obasanjo’s temper and Otedola’s midnight firefighting. The presidency should set direction; independent regulators should implement. Market price rules, not relationships.
Three, Lagos and Abuja boardrooms are not the nation. Government can widen the on-ramps: open procurement with public dashboards; SME-friendly export windows; reliable power for industrial clusters; logistics reforms that slash clearance times for everyone, not just those who “know somebody.” When the base of the pyramid can plug in, you don’t need a surname to scale.
The Story Behind The Story
Treat Making It Big like a multi-layered text. Read for tactics. Note how Otedola built distribution in diesel, control storage, fleet, and supply contracts, then later pivoted into power generation with Geregu.
Read for risk. He survived because he could liquidate assets, negotiate with banks, and retain reputational credit. You may not have those cushions. So, build smaller shock absorbers: dollar-cost hedging, conservative leverage, multiple supplier relationships, and a cash runway that assumes the worst-case.
Read between the lines. Observe when the phone rings, who is in the room, and how much context matters. You may not have a president on speed dial, but you can cultivate “weak ties” that often matter more than godfathers. These are the human seams where Nigerian business is stitched.
Otedola’s memoir is a field manual for operating in an economy where policy, politics and profit are braided together and where character and connections, in the end, are a competitive advantage. Yet we should resist turning the billionaire’s journey into a national template. If an economy only produces success at the scale of surnames, it will keep wasting talent.
The right lesson is to widen the aperture: make it possible for more people with no famous lineage to accumulate reputational capital, access credit on fair terms, and compete under rules that don’t change mid-game. Then the next bestseller won’t need a foreword by power; it will be a handbook written by a first-generation founder from Kano or Aba who built something enduring because the system finally kept its promises.
