Billionaire businessman, Femi Otedola, has revealed how he once owed Nigerian banks a staggering ₦222 billion and how former Access Bank chiefs, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede and the late Herbert Wigwe, pursued him relentlessly for repayment.
In his new memoir, ‘Making It Big: Lessons from a Life in Business’, Otedola detailed the scale of his indebtedness at the time: Access Bank ₦25 billion, Zenith ₦75 billion, GTB ₦38 billion, UBA ₦33 billion, FCMB ₦26 billion, Intercontinental ₦14 billion, Union ₦5 billion, and Bank PHB ₦6 billion.
According to him, the banks did not take it lightly. “Aig-Imoukhuede and Wigwe don’t play when it comes to collecting money owed to the bank,” he wrote. “I thought we had become friends, but the amounts at stake were huge, and my debt was a fraction of the Nigerian banks’ total exposure.”
Advertisement
To order your copy, send a WhatsApp message to +1 317 665 2180
He recalled how “hefty men” arrived at his Ikoyi residence at dawn to press him. “They told me I had to shed weight. I thought they were talking about my size, but they meant I had to start selling my assets immediately.”
Otedola said the experience taught him that in business, even close relationships are tested when money is involved. “I learned that there are no permanent friends or enemies when billions are on the line,” he said.
The memoir also goes back to his earliest days as an entrepreneur, when he sold diesel door-to-door from a pick-up van.
“In the beginning, I went around pushing diesel, riding in the van beside Samson, the driver. I always wore jeans and a polo shirt as we went from door to door, to market or deliver the product,” he wrote.
At nightclubs, his friends taunted him, asking: “Where’s your truck? Are you here to sell diesel?” But Otedola said he took the jokes in stride. “I didn’t feel that selling diesel was beneath me. I had my wife and children to look after; there were school fees to pay.”
That hustle soon opened his eyes to the scale of Nigeria’s energy crisis. “I came to realise that the entire country was running on diesel—homes, offices, factories, trucks and trawlers. The energy situation was dire, with constant blackouts and shortages, and the demand was enormous.”
He expanded aggressively, hiring 14 young female sales executives, each with a new car, to pitch major clients like Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Flour Mills of Nigeria and the Dangote Group. From bulk buying, he progressed to storage tanks, then a tank farm, and finally vessel imports. At its peak, his company Zenon Oil was grossing $6 million a month before the 2009 global oil crash hit.
Despite losing much and facing crushing debt, Otedola rebuilt his fortune and today chairs Geregu Power and FirstHoldCo PLC.
“To prosper, accept that nothing is beneath you,” he wrote. “That philosophy—whether riding in a van selling diesel or dealing with bankers demanding billions—kept me going.”0
