C’est la vie, as the French will philosophically say, meaning: Such is life. Man starts by dreaming and planning to go in one career direction, but God, the Almighty shaper of destinies comes with His own original plan. The Good Book says in Proverbs 21: 19, “Man proposes, but God disposes.” Who will believe that Dr. Mike Adenuga, GCON, the entrepreneur extraordinaire, whose conquest and dominance of African business is now the stuff of legends started out wanting to be a soldier?
Imagine him in an alternate reality: Mike Adenuga as a top-ranking military officer, a towering Goliath barking orders from a command top structure, a commander leading his men to the brutal battlefield where life and death await. Imagine him as a General walking in the footsteps of giants like General Yakubu “Jack” Gowon, General Murtala Mohammed, General Olusegun Obasanjo, General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida and other icons of the Nigerian military.
As Mike Adenuga’s biographer and author of the forthcoming book, HOW TO THINK LIKE MIKE ADENUGA, I can authoritatively write that as a young man, he had secretly nursed the dream of being a soldier. His love for the military stemmed from its values of discipline and leadership—qualities that became hallmarks of his business acumen. However, God intervened, guiding him towards a different kind of command, one that would span industries and continents. While the military undoubtedly missed out on a phenomenal leader, the business world embraced him with open arms, and Nigeria, Africa and the world at large is richer for it. Because of his unfulfilled dream of a military career, Adenuga enrolled his boys in a military school. His first son Babajide and the brother Paddy went to the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Texas, US. The idea was to prepare them for future leadership through military training.
Though he chose the path of business over the military, Adenuga’s love for the military never waned. In his early life as a businessman, he found himself gravitating towards friends who were top military brass. Through his first ever business partner, Femi Akinrinade, the younger brother of General Alani Akinrinade, Adenuga was introduced to a lot of top military officers. Even though Adenuga hated partnership, his partnership with Femi Akinrinade was exceptional with each one bringing something to the table. Together, they built military barracks in places like Kaduna and Kachia. Mike Adenuga’s brother Otunba Ademola Adenuga sheds light on the partnership in an interview with me: “Mike has a long history with the military. He got to know and have friends in the military through General Akinrinade’s brother Femi Akinrinade whom he met in America in their days as students. Together, they formed a company and they executed some projects for the military. In the company, Mike was like the Operations Director. When they were building some barracks in Kaduna and Kachia, it was Mike who was arranging the planks and everything.”
At the time they were doing business together, Akinrinade said he never saw it as partnership but a business between two brothers. “Mike is not my partner,” he told me. “He is my brother.” He cited instances where Mike would do a business which he (Femi) did not participate in and sometimes did not even know about, yet Mike would divide the profit fifty-fifty, and give him his share.
From building barracks and other military infrastructure, the duo stumbled into the business of selling military hardware. And Akinrinade was quick in giving Mike Adenuga the full credit for discovering the business. He narrates: “This was around 1976. It was a busy period for Mike who was into importation. He was a restless man who was into all kinds of things. He was just all over the place—a Jack of all trades kind of fellow. In his ‘wahala’ all over the place, he met some people who were into military industrial complex. And then, he got offered some equipment and military hardware. So, that’s how he came to me and said: ‘Egbon (my elder brother), I have this business deal concerning military hardware. Can you use your military connection to pull this business through?’ At that time, he had no connection with the military. I had, because of my brother. Through my brother, I got to know a lot of top military officers. So that is how the business of selling military hardware started for us. We started representing some overseas defense-manufacturing companies, mainly German and British. We represented them in Nigeria, we got the sales and they paid for our services.”
The military hardware business brought to fore Mike Adenuga’s skill as an aggressive salesman who would stop at nothing to make a kill, once he smells money. Akinrinade says of himself: “I am more of a conservative person. Mike on his part, is ready to spend his last hundred naira to look for one thousand naira. Me, because I am not sure the one thousand naira is there, I am cautious. But Mike is a bit more aggressive. And actually, the success of our business was as a result of the combination of our two qualities but more of his aggressiveness.”
There were times Akinrinade would be frustrated by the competition and would want to give up and say: “forget it,” but Adenuga would not give up. Akinrinade explains: “Like every business, you have competition. You are proposing something from Germany but there are some people who have a British equivalent and they are trying to sell it to the military. And then of course, usually, they would send a delegation out from the Ministry of Defence and the army or navy to go to those factories to inspect and write a report on those equipment. Mike would never give up. He would say: ‘Egbon, we have the best equipment. These people have already told me that So-so army is using it. That army is using it.’ Sometimes, he would say: ‘Let’s go to Switzerland,’ but I would say I am not going. Then he would go. That’s why I say it’s more of his aggressiveness that made us to use the opportunity that we had and the contacts we had to do what we needed to do to make some good money…This is where most of this money came from. We really made some good money. Mike himself got so good in the business that he started looking out for equipment manufacturing companies and people who build bridges for the army. They would give him the brochures and we would take them to people in the army engineering and in the artillery to look at. We were able to offer superior equipment to what the competition was offering…We had a lot of referrals from people we had worked for. These people were mainly Europeans. They would say: ‘Go and meet Mike and Femi in Nigeria. They are go-getters. They have the right connection.’”
It was between late 1976 and early 1977, that the two partners formed their first company called Consolidated Structures Nigeria Limited. A name inspired by Consolidated Laundries, the dry-cleaning company where Femi Akinrinade worked in the US in 1969. A magic name rooted in Mike Adenuga’s Conoil Production and Conoil Downstream, extending to Globacom. In the words of Mike Adenuga’s oil teacher and mentor Chief Dosu Adelu: “I don’t think Globacom would have been easy without Conoil. Because he had the reserves to mortgage for huge bank loans.”