Nigerian billionaire Femi Otedola completes London Business School programme

Femi Otedola left school sometime around 1979 without completing his A-Levels. He was 17. His parents were disappointed. His mother cried. He went to work at his father's printing press in Surulere, Lagos, and never looked back. Forty-four years later, the 63-year-old chairman of First HoldCo Plc and one of Nigeria's wealthiest men has completed an executive leadership programme at London Business School.

Otedola shared the achievement on his social media pages last week, saying the experience reminded him that learning never stops and that humility is important in gaining knowledge. "No knowledge is wasted," he wrote.

The programme, titled Leading Businesses for the Future, is designed for senior business executives and leaders seeking to develop strategic thinking, leadership capabilities and organisational transformation skills. It is one of several executive education offerings that London Business School runs for senior practitioners across global industries.

The achievement carries personal weight that goes beyond a certificate. In his 2025 memoir, Making It Big, Otedola revealed for the first time publicly that he had never attended university, and that his secondary school record was defined by academic struggle rather than achievement. He began his education at the University of Lagos Staff School in 1968, moved through Methodist Boys' High School in Lagos and then to Olivet Baptist High School in Oyo, where he abandoned his studies during the Lower Sixth year.

"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," he wrote in the memoir. The book, published in August 2025, corrected a long-standing public misconception, including information that had appeared on his own Wikipedia page, that he was a graduate of the University of Lagos.

The business he wanted to get involved in eventually became a multi-sector empire spanning oil and gas, shipping, real estate, power generation and financial services. He made his first major fortune in petroleum products trading through Zenon Petroleum and Gas Limited in the 1990s, becoming one of the dominant fuel importers in Nigeria during a period when the country's downstream petroleum sector was fragmented and deeply profitable for those with the commercial networks to navigate it.

His subsequent moves took him through Forte Oil, formerly African Petroleum, where he built a controlling stake and transformed the company before selling out. He built Geregu Power Plc from a privatised asset into Nigeria's most commercially successful listed power generation company, listing it on the Nigerian Exchange Group in October 2022 in what was the most successful IPO in NGX history at the time. He sold the majority of his Geregu stake to Abdulaziz Yari's consortium late last year for N1.08 trillion ($793 million). He chairs First HoldCo Plc, formerly FBN Holdings, the parent company of First Bank of Nigeria, one of the country's oldest and largest commercial banks.

He committed $100 million to Dangote Refinery's private placement in May 2026, funding the investment from the proceeds of the Geregu sale and describing the stake as one he intends to hold through the refinery's planned pan-African IPO.

The London Business School programme completion sits alongside all of that. A man who built a billion-dollar business empire without a secondary school certificate or a university degree chose, at 63, to walk into a classroom in London and sit alongside other senior executives to think about what leading a business means in 2026. He has described the experience as humbling.

Nigeria's $4 billion beverage market, its power sector, its financial services industry and its oil and gas downstream have all had Otedola's fingerprints on them at various points across four decades. The only institution that did not is the one whose name is now on his wall in London.