Billionaire businessman Femi Otedola has revealed how, at the height of his financial success, Nigerian banks aggressively competed for his attention — even deploying attractive women as part of their tactics to win his deposits and loan requests.

In excerpts from his forthcoming memoir, Making It Big: Lessons from a Life in Business (out August 18, 2025), Otedola offers a candid account of the extremes financial institutions went to when his business empire was flying high.

“One moment, I was the darling of the banks, who did everything in the world to court me,” he wrote. “They would send bewitching ladies to make their offers more convincing.”

But the tone of those relationships changed swiftly when his fortunes reversed. “Now I was waking up to the sight of hefty, barrel-chested men standing menacingly in front of my gate, waiting for the moment I’d step out of my compound.”

At the core of Otedola’s crisis was a perfect storm of global economic shocks. In 2008, he placed a major diesel shipment order when crude oil was trading at $147 per barrel. By the time it arrived, prices had plunged to just $40.

The losses were catastrophic. He recounts losing $480 million to the oil price collapse, $258 million to naira devaluation, $320 million to mounting interest on dollar loans, and $160 million in stock market losses — totalling more than $1.2 billion.

“It was devastating, like a terrible nightmare,” he wrote. “But a nightmare would have been better: day would break, and I would wake up. There was no waking up from this.”

Otedola had entered the oil sector with Zenon Petroleum, distributing diesel in drums, before acquiring and revamping African Petroleum into Forte Oil — a company that rose to become a stock market darling. But with the 2009 devaluation of the naira from ₦120 to ₦167, his dollar-denominated debt ballooned, and his empire unraveled.

The memoir promises an unfiltered look into the harsh realities of doing business in volatile markets — and how banks, once eager partners, can become aggressive creditors overnight.