Femi Otedola is releasing a book on August 18th titled ‘Making It Big’. A recent tweet claims his worst day was losing a billion dollars — ₦1.5 trillion in today’s money, roughly equivalent to Lagos State’s entire annual budget.
The Nigerian internet has responded with fire. The reactions split along revealing lines. One camp dismisses the book before it is written, convinced it would be another tale of grace ascending into more grace — the rehearsed beat of the well-connected stumbling upward until they land on success. What wisdom, they ask, could emerge from a life where failure comes with golden parachutes?
The other camp, smaller but dogged, wonders if something honest might exist here. The underlying billions could conceal a story that speaks to the ordinary Nigerian hustle. Even these sympathetic voices issue a warning: if Otedola fails to acknowledge his head start — the silver spoon, the family connections, the safety nets — then whatever story he tells will ring hollow.
This division reveals something crucial about how we process success stories in contemporary Nigeria. We hunger for them, yet remain deeply suspicious. We want to believe effort matters, but we have seen too much inherited advantage masquerading as merit. The question is not whether Otedola worked hard — it is whether his particular kind of work bears any resemblance to the work the rest of us do.
I have been thinking about this because I spend my days in the writing world, another space where privilege plays invisible roles. Writing is not lucrative. It offers no quick returns, no glittering rewards. What it gives you instead is a long corridor, stretching further the longer you walk it. The piece you are reading took me countless hours to shape. Not to fill space, but to make each sentence a small window you might look through and see something true.
Here is what haunts me about that process: the time I pour into words does not guarantee the world will meet them with open arms. Some writers build their skill through trial and error, studying in silence under flickering bulbs, writing between shifts in the corners of crowded lives. They write anyway, despite everything. Yet, even they face the same question Otedola’s critics are asking: Does the struggle itself matter if the playing field was never level to begin with?
Consider F. Scott Fitzgerald, not because literary comparisons make everything more sophisticated, but because his story illuminates exactly what privilege does and does not do in creative work. Fitzgerald came from wealth. His mother had money, he attended private schools, and Princeton University opened its doors to him without the burden of financial anxiety that crushes most artistic ambitions before they begin. He was given the rarest luxury: uninterrupted time to write.
This advantage was enormous. Financial security meant he could sit with his thoughts without worrying about rent. He had access to books most people never see, professors who asked questions that sharpen the mind, and social circles that became the raw material for his fiction. When he finished ‘The Great Gatsby’, publications like The Saturday Evening Post not only published his work, but they also paid well for it.
Here is where the story gets complicated: Fitzgerald still suffered over every sentence. He revised endlessly, doubted himself deeply, and spent days when words would not come or came in crooked shapes. His marriage crumbled, alcohol became a crutch, and he lived under constant pressure to remain dazzling, to be the man the world thought he already was. The privilege did not make writing easy. It made it possible.
This distinction matters because it cuts to the heart of what we are arguing about when we discuss success stories like Otedola’s. Privilege does not eliminate effort — it eliminates barriers. It does not guarantee quality — it guarantees opportunity. The work itself remains difficult, lonely, and uncertain. The context in which that work happens can be radically different.
Fitzgerald’s circumstances gave him a lit stage, but the performance still had to burn through him. His best writing came not from his advantages but from his ability to transform his particular pain, his intimacy with wealth’s beauty and rot, into something universal.
The question is whether this distinction matters. Does acknowledging effort absolve us of examining advantage? When we celebrate the ‘work ethic’ of the privileged, are we telling a useful truth or a convenient lie? I do not have clean answers. What I know is this — every person begins somewhere. Some from balconies, others from basements. Some barefoot on gravel. The starting point shapes everything that follows, even when the destination looks the same. Especially then.
When Otedola’s book arrives in August, it will join a long tradition of successful people explaining their success. Some of these stories are honest about their advantages. Most are not. The honest ones do not diminish the work — they contextualise it. They help us understand not what effort looks like, but what effort looks like when it is supported, resourced, and given room to breathe.
This understanding would not solve anything. It would not level the playing fields or redistribute opportunities. It might help us stop mistaking context for content, advantage for merit, and possibility for inevitability. The rest — the work, the lonely reaching in the dark, the sentences that refuse to come — belongs to all of us, regardless of where we start. It is the only part that does.
