From the Barracks to the Boardroom: A Life Spent Decoding Risk
You Never Know Me: A Mighty Journey of Faith and Compliance, by Abimbola Adeseyoju, DataPro Limited,209pp + xvi
In the crowded genre of the business memoir, where success is often presented as a linear and solitary conquest, Abimbola Adeseyoju’s You Never Know Me arrives as a necessary and spirited disruption. It is many things at once: a corporate creation story, a crash course in Nigeria’s compliance industry, a love letter to a stubbornly hopeful mother, and a late-life memo to a country that consistently misreads its own reflection.
The title, borrowed from a Yoruba proverb warning against presumption, is re-appropriated as a taunt to every gatekeeper who ever slammed a door on the author. The narrative engine here is not nostalgia but vindication. Yet, the tone is surprisingly playful. Adeseyoju nicknames himself “Mighty” after a lost school-yard bet, a moniker that sticks through university and into corporate resolutions—a wink to the reader that ego is present, but it is wearing dancing shoes.
The book’s ten chapters move chronologically from childhood in Ondo to the founding of DataPro Limited, Nigeria’s third licensed credit-rating agency. Its most innovative feature is the use of “Family Portraits” and “DataPro Portraits”—oral-history snippets from siblings, staff, and even detractors. This polyphonic texture rescues the story from hagiography. One sister recalls the seizures that made his legs “dance palongo”; a former driver-turned-analyst remembers his boss’s exacting standards. These fragments create the intimacy of a kitchen conversation while quietly underscoring a central thesis: greatness is a team sport, even when the spotlight narrows to one name.
The emotional fulcrum is the first chapter, “With My Mother, Parenting is Forever.” Sidikat Adeseyoju—Muslim, seamstress, supermarket owner—emerges as the book’s first saint and venture capitalist, bankrolling her son’s exams with proceeds from her store and answering a neighbour’s complaints with a philosophical shrug: “This is just a battle phase in his life.” The author’s subsequent rise is offered as evidence that mercy can be a more sustainable currency than condemnation.
The most riveting section details Adeseyoju’s “Gap Years.” In 1977, the WAEC board cancelled his entire school’s results on suspicion of mass cheating, turning a golden boy into a pariah. What follows is a five-year drift through smoking joints and failed A-levels, narrated with humour so dry it crackles. Salvation arrives in the form of Major Lateef Fawehinmi, who drags him to Mubi barracks. There, a mysterious voice predicts he will “become an entrepreneur in Compliance and Rating”—two words that mean nothing to him yet. The chapter is a masterclass in pacing, planting the book’s moral compass: failure is data, not destiny.
The remaining chapters chronicle the translation of that prophecy into a pan-African compliance powerhouse. Adeseyoju is unabashed in reading divine fingerprints into every contract, a providential chorus that may make secular readers squirm but which the book steadfastly refuses to secularise. What keeps this from tipping into sermonising is the granular detail of building something in Nigeria: the Yellow Pages cold-calls, the 5:30am dashes to beat Lagos traffic, the N2,000 bribe politely declined. These snapshots amount to an underground manual on corporate governance in a frontier market.
Refreshingly, the memoir is unmacho. Adeseyoju confesses to skipping all three of his children’s births (“I could not stand the sight of blood”) and his cross-cultural marriage to Franca Omigie is offered as a micro-model for a plural Nigeria. By the final chapter, the 67-year-old is plotting succession with the same rigour he once applied to bond ratings, refusing future chieftaincy titles as a form of reputational risk-management. It is a fitting coda for a man who has spent his life translating risk into spreadsheets and then into prayers.
The book’s greatest strength, its conversational candour, is occasionally its weakness. Some passages read like dictated voice notes, and technical sections on FATF recommendations may lose the general reader. A stricter editor could have trimmed 30 pages without bruising the soul. The sprinkled-in graphics are too small to decipher; a second edition should enlarge them or use QR codes.
Yet these are quibbles. You Never Know Me succeeds because it solves the central problem of the African business memoir: how to humanise capital. By nesting profit-and-loss statements inside bedtime stories and barrack rooms, Adeseyoju reminds us that every corporate logo began as someone’s nickname. It is a vital addition to the shelf, a love story between one restless Nigerian and the regulatory voids he chose to fill.
Entrepreneurs, policy makers and anyone who still believes Nigeria is a cautionary tale rather than a laboratory of reinvention will find the book useful.
• Udofia writes from Lagos
