Why I Dropped Out Of High School, Shunned Varsity Education – Femi Otedola

Billionaire businessman, Femi Otedola, has revealed that his struggles with academics forced him to drop out of high school and ultimately abandon university education, steering him instead into the world of business.

In his newly released 286-page memoir, Making It Big, the 62-year-old energy mogul traced his early education to the University of Lagos Staff School, which he joined in 1968 at the age of six.

“My parents enrolled me at the University of Lagos Staff School in 1968. Kola Abiola — the first son of Chief Moshood Abiola, the future business magnate and presidential candidate who was at the time an accountant — sat beside me in class. But there was something about academia and me; we were not compatible,” Otedola recounted.

He admitted that from primary school, his performance was consistently poor, often ranking at the bottom of his class despite several opportunities to progress.

After completing primary education in 1974, he proceeded to Methodist Boys’ High School, Lagos, but the academic struggles persisted.

“The school had been founded almost a hundred years earlier, in 1878. Alumni include grand names in Nigerian history: Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe, Mobolaji Johnson, Ola Rotimi, Fola Adeola, Olusegun Osoba and Hezekiah Oladipo Davies. When I joined the student body in 1974, the principal was D. A. Famoroti. I started Form 1 at age 12 and was there for three years,” he recalled.

When improvement seemed elusive, his parents transferred him to Olivet Baptist High School, Oyo, a boarding school established by Southern Baptist missionaries in 1945. However, the new environment did little to alter his academic trajectory.

“I started in Form 3 at Olivet, and as I rounded off the first year of my A Levels, my father was establishing his printing company, Impact Press, in Surulere. I grew fascinated with the machines and told myself that my future would be inextricably tied to them,” Otedola wrote.

His passion soon overtook any remaining interest in formal education. After completing his Lower Sixth examination, he walked away from school altogether, choosing instead to join his father’s printing business full-time despite his mother’s disapproval.

By 1987, at the age of 25, Otedola had risen to become the Managing Director of Impact Press. “I certainly enjoyed the job more than grappling with the Pythagoras theorem and struggling through homework at Olivet,” he noted.

However, the young entrepreneur soon craved independence. He struck an arrangement with his father to work as a sales consultant for the company, earning a commission of 10–15 per cent on every job he secured.

“That was a significant break for me. I invested my money in buying cars for sales and marketing outreach and moved on to the next phase in my nascent professional life,” he wrote.

Otedola’s early detour from the classroom into entrepreneurship would later shape his rise into one of Nigeria’s most prominent businessmen, with interests spanning energy, shipping, finance and philanthropy.