It is a beautiful Nigerian story or better still an African odyssean epic which happened thirty years ago on the Christmas Day of 1991 when a young man of 37 who had already conquered Nigeria’s corporate world, owning two banks at a go, set his eyes on the upstream sector in an audacious search for oil—something that as at then could only be done by the “six sisters,” six multinationals namely Shell, Chevron, Agip, Total, ExxonMobil, and Texaco. Six Goliaths bestriding the Nigerian oil space “like a Colossus and we petty men walk under their huge legs,” as William Shakespeare puts it in Julius Caesar.
Now there arose this young David confronting the Goliaths with a sling of faith, hope and audacity, that with God, nothing is impossible. It’s a story about how a Nigerian Harry Porter used his magic to do the unthinkable and became the first Nigerian to strike oil in commercial quantity.
Even his mother was surprised, mouth agape with incredulity. When he finally got the highly coveted oil licence, the elated mum in all honesty called her son, sat him down and advised him not to go into the expensive gamble of looking for oil. Mum said in the now famous casino quote: “Niyi, it is better you sell the licence, make your money and invest it. Going into oil exploration is nothing but kalokalo. This oil exploration thing to me is the highest form of gambling. It is the biggest casino on earth. It is like throwing money into the bottomless pit.” But this was one occasion when son disobeyed mum who had been his coach and mentor business-wise. Looking back three decades, there are lessons to be learnt from the life and times of Mike Adenuga, the man they call “The Guru” or “The Gold Digger.”
Lesson No. 1: Dream Big. As Mike Adenuga’s biographer, one lesson I have learnt from this enigma is that to succeed in life and in business, you must be a dreamer and you must dream big. Ian Randolph, one of Adenuga’s disciples told me: “The man is a big dreamer. The only difference with him is that he gets his dreams turned into reality by persevering. Everything he has done, he had first dreamt of it. There is a childhood friend of his, the late Taju Usman. He told me that when they were in school in America, Mike Adenuga used to pose as an oil tycoon. They would go to big hotels. At the restaurant or at the bar, when they are not noticed, Mike would say: ‘Don’t you know who I am? I am an oil baron in Nigeria.’ From his early years, Mike had been dreaming big.”
Lesson No. 2: You need luck and Mike Adenuga is a lucky man. The Roman philosopher Seneca describes luck as “when opportunity meets preparation.” As at the time he was preparing to go into oil exploration, little did he know that the government of Nigeria under President Babangida and his oil minister Prof. Jibril Aminu had just introduced a policy of opening up the upstream sector to make Nigerians participate in oil exploration. In my extensive research on Adenuga, Prof. Jibril Aminu told me: “I got to know Mike Adenuga in 1990. I was in petroleum as the minister. It was a time when I started indigenous petroleum exploration and I started giving out blocks to promising Nigerians who would begin to learn the art of exploration and production of oil.”
He continued: “President Babangida had nothing to do with my meeting Mike Adenuga. He was brought to me by David Ogbodo, my P.A. I didn’t know him at that time. I had heard of Devcom and Equatorial Trust Bank but I didn’t know he was the owner of the two banks…I can say before man and God that Babangida never had anything to do with Mike or even giving a contract to anybody. Not him.”
Lesson No. 3: Know the business you are going into. As a business philosophy, Adenuga believes that “you must know the business you are going into so that nobody would pull a fast one on you.” Before he went into oil exploration, he started by taking daily tutorials from Chief Dosu Adelu who was the deputy director in charge of resources management at the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR). Chief Adelu told me: “What impressed me about Mike is his humility. He is very humble, very simple and very respectful. When you know him a little more, you discover he is a very hungry man. Hungry for knowledge. He is a moving encyclopedia. From moving around, he has learnt a lot. From our interaction daily, I knew he would go far. Even from our first lesson, I saw a man eager to acquire as much knowledge as possible. After our first lesson, he said he was going to die in my house. It was intoxicating for him. He said he was going to sleep in my house and I said I had no bedroom for him. And he said he would sleep in the sitting room. As I was teaching, he was taking notes like a student. I had a map of Nigeria on the wall and was showing him potential oil locations. Sitting before me was a man who had made up his mind to be part of the oil industry. It was not instigated by any teaching that I did. That was his own primary thing. All I had to do was to let the scale off so he can see.”
Lesson No. 4: Do your homework and be persistent. With the training he got from Adelu, Adenuga was now equipped with so much knowledge that when he was seeing the oil minister, he knew exactly what he wanted. David Ogbodo, the oil minister Personal Assistant who introduced Mike Adenuga to his boss told me: “Before seeing the minister, Mike had done his homework at DPR. He was applying for a particular oil block. So he had his homework to be considered for the allocation.”
Eventually, Mike was allocated an oil block. “I allocated him an oil block to start and I got taken by his determination,” Aminu told me. “I was impressed by the fact that a young man like that owned two banks. You cannot really ignore him. After all, what I wanted was to ensure I gave Nigerians opportunity to come into oil exploration…There was this one particular very, very favourable block he was interested in. He used to get his report from God-knows-where. He would worry me and worry me. He was worrying me about a particular oil block until I eventually gave it to him. And lo and behold, he was the first Nigerian that went to his own block and explored and drilled and produced the first sample of oil for me.”
Lesson No.5: Find a specialist. The first strategic decision Mike Adenuga made in his oil exploration journey was to recruit an oil specialist and a geologist by name Dr. Ebi Omatsola. (Next week: God’s Own Xmas Gift)
