Title: You Never Know Me
Author: Abimbola Adeseyoju
Publishers: DataPro Limited, 2025
Reviewer: Kingsley Udofia
Abimbola Adeseyoju’s autobiography You Never Know Me is many things at once: a love letter to a stubbornly hopeful mother, a corporate creation story, a crash-course in Nigeria’s compliance industry, and a late-life memo to a country that still misreads its own reflection. Written in the first-person but generously laced with voices of family, friends, employees and even detractors, the book refuses the tidy arc of the conventional memoir. Instead, it insists that destiny is a conversation, sometimes a shouting match, between what God whispers and what a human being is willing to do about it.
The title is borrowed from a Yoruba proverb that warns strangers against thinking they have sized you up. Adeseyoju re-appropriates it as a taunt to every gatekeeper, examiner, banker, regulator, diplomatic clerk, who once slammed a door on him. The narrative engine is therefore not nostalgia but vindication: “You thought you knew me; watch what I become.” Yet the tone is surprisingly playful, even self-deprecating. The author nicknames himself “Mighty” after losing a school-yard bet on a 1974 football final, and the moniker sticks through university, corporate corridors and finally into board resolutions. It is a wink at the reader: ego is present, but it is wearing dancing shoes.
STRUCTURE & STYLE
The book is arranged in ten chapters that move chronologically from childhood in Ondo and Akure to the founding and expansion of DataPro Limited. Interludes titled “Family Portraits” and “DataPro Portraits” insert oral-history snippets from siblings, wife, children and staff, creating a polyphonic texture that rescues the story from hagiography. One sister still calls him “Taiye” and remembers the seizures that made his legs “dance palongo”; a former driver-turned-analyst recalls how his boss once barked for “the transparent” (cellophane bag) and reduced a rookie to trembling. These fragments give the memoir 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.
Chapter 1, “With My Mother, Parenting is Forever,” is the emotional fulcrum. Sidikat Adeseyoju—Muslim, Fawehinmi’s daughter, seamstress, supermarket owner—emerges as the book’s first saint and venture capitalist. She bankrolls her son’s re-sit exams with proceeds from her “provision store,” refuses to flog him when he is caught smoking, and answers a neighbour’s accusation with the philosophical shrug: “This is just a battle phase in his life; he will outgrow it.” The scene is cinematic: two women in an Akure veranda, one clutching the moral high ground, the other cradling unconditional love. The author’s subsequent rise is offered as evidence that mercy can be a more sustainable currency than condemnation.
EDUCATION AS PLOT TWIST
Chapter 3, “The Gap Years,” is the most riveting section. In 1977, WAEC cancelled the results of an entire school—Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti—on suspicion of mass leakage. Overnight, the author goes from golden boy to pariah. What follows is a five-year drift through smoking joints, girl-friends, failed A-levels and a spectacular car crash in an uncle’s brand-new Peugeot 504. The descent is narrated with humour so dry it crackles: “I ran away to Ibadan; my father was convinced I had joined a bad gang. My mother sent word: It is just a car, we will fix it.”
Salvation arrives in the form of Major Lateef Fawehinmi—soldier, disciplinarian, fashionista—who drags him to Mubi barracks in 1980. 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 master-class in pacing: despair, comic relief, epiphany, escape velocity. It also plants the book’s moral compass: failure is data, not destiny.
BUSINESS AS THEOLOGY
The remaining chapters chronicle the translation of that midnight prophecy into DataPro Limited—first as a one-room correspondent of Dun & Bradstreet in 1995, then as Nigeria’s third licensed credit-rating agency in 2004, and finally as a pan-African compliance powerhouse offering AML/CFT training, data-protection audits and the world’s largest country-specific Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) list.
The author is unabashed in reading divine fingerprints into every contract: the chance encounter with a neighbour who mentions D&B, the SEC letter that mistakes an information report for an unsolicited rating, the Vodacom deal that collapses but leaves behind a compliance template. Secular readers may squirm at the providential chorus, but the book refuses to secularise grace. In Adeseyoju’s cosmology, capital is answered prayer.
What keeps the narrative from tipping into a sermon is the granular detail of actually building something in Nigeria: the Yellow Pages cold-calls, the 5:30 a.m. dash to beat Lagos traffic, the memo that blows the whistle on NYSC girls abusing office phones, the N2,000 bribe politely declined because “we were building a reputation.” These snapshots will delight students of institutional history; they amount to an underground manual on corporate governance in a frontier market.
WIFE, CHILDREN & THE ART OF EXIT
Chapter 4, “The Family Man,” is refreshingly unmacho. The author confesses he skipped all three childbirths, “I could not stand the sight of blood”—and accepts his wife’s teasing with sheepish grace. Franca Omigie, Edo-born, Pentecostal, computer entrepreneur, becomes co-protagonist. Their cross-cultural marriage is offered as a micro-model for a plural Nigeria: no tribal jokes, mutual linguistic concessions, shared balance sheets.
The children’s testimonials—Mikky the chemical engineer, Soji the architect, Ronnie the accountant—are proud but brief, a reminder that the book is ultimately a workplace memoir disguised as a family saga.
By the final chapter, Adeseyoju is 67, plotting succession with the same rigour he once applied to bond ratings. He will step aside at 70, morph into chairman-cum-roving-ambassador, and refuse either chieftaincy title or political appointment. The refusal is framed as risk-management rather than arrogance: “I have seen what public office does to reputations; I ensure mine by staying out.” It is a fitting coda for a man who has spent his life translating risk into spreadsheets and then into prayers.
CRITIQUE
The book’s greatest strength, its conversational candour, is occasionally its weakness. Some passages read like dictated voice notes, with repetition creeping in, and technical sections on FATF 40 Recommendations or GDPR articles may lose the general reader. A stricter editor could have trimmed 30 pages without bruising the soul. Graphics (sample rating reports, vintage photos of Bata House) are sprinkled throughout but are too small to decipher; a second edition should enlarge them or embed QR codes for digital viewing.
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, hospital corridors and barrack rooms, Adeseyoju reminds us that every corporate logo began as someone’s nickname. The book deserves a place on the shelf beside Olu Oguibe’s A Letter to the Future and Ibukun Awosika’s The Girl Who Built a Mirror; it is a love story between one restless Nigerian and the regulatory voids he chose to fill.
WHO SHOULD READ IT
• Entrepreneurs who think Lagos traffic is their biggest obstacle.
• Policy makers hunting for a case study on how compliance culture is seeded from scratch.
• Parents of “difficult” children who need evidence that mercy outperforms flogging.
• Students of African business history are curious about the pre-fintech era of fax machines and telexes.
• Anyone who still believes Nigeria is a cautionary tale rather than a laboratory of reinvention.
IN ONE SENTENCE
You Never Know Me is a 200-page rebuttal to every cynic who ever said “Nigeria will not allow you to finish well”; it turns out that with enough maternal love, midnight prophecies and spreadsheet discipline, you can not only finish—you can rate the rest of us while you are at it.
