The son of a petty trader, Alhaji Tajudeen Owoyemi, grew with minimal education and 4-year apprenticeship in plumbering to become a construction contractor. Today, the silent Nigerian beat the odds to become one of the wealthiest luxury hotel owners in Nigeria. He is the billionaire-owner of The Radisson Blu Hotel.
Owoyemi also established Avalon Intercontinental Nigeria Limited company which birthed the First Protea Hotel in Nigeria in the early 2000s.
“I love to live a quiet life and I don’t really like paparazzi exposure. That is how God has created me from the onset and that is how I have lived my life,” he said in an interview sometime ago.
“I was raised by a petty trader who instilled the spirit of hard work in me. I remember after school I would hawk ‘Ekuru’ for my grandmother. And I used to go to the construction sites with a group of friends to assist in carrying sand and all that. In those days, we would pack sand from the river and stack it up to a certain level before we got paid. It was our own little contribution to our families. The physical struggle continued till I finished secondary school and moved to Kaduna.
“I wanted to go to school but there was no money. In Kaduna, I learned a trade. I am an artisan who was trained as a plumber. And I learnt it for four years. From there, I went to Kaduna Polytechnic where I did a part-time study in Civil Engineering. I will do plumbing in the morning and go to evening classes. I did that for three years and obtained a National Diploma in Civil Engineering.”
With his experience, he established his company at age 22 in 1978 and started contract jobs when Alhaji Shehu Shagari came into power. “We had a lot of people, a lot of friends who gave us their projects to supervise because of the trust they had in us. We weren’t too ambitious as a company. We concentrated on our strength and the work started growing,” he added.
His company soon started enjoying patronage from institutions such as Command and Staff College Jaji, Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), Nigeria Communication Commission (NCC) and several other Federal Government Agencies and Parastatals.
“We did so many contracts. The biggest project we started then was in Staff College in Jaji, Kaduna. We did the Nigerian Army of School Infantry. We did the remodelling, reconstruction of the Nigerian Army School of Infantry head office in Jaji. It was around 1991 we did it and it was very successful,” he recalled.
With strength in the north, he moved to Lagos in 1985.
“It was this contract job, building construction. The late Haladu, a General from Kano, invited me to Lagos. He said they wanted to build Police barracks for Nigerian Ports, they had their board meeting and they approved it and they wanted me to do it. So he sent for me from Kaduna. He insisted that I must come to Lagos immediately. That was how we got the first flight coming to Lagos. I now found out that it was another establishment where once you do your job satisfactorily you get paid. That was how I started coming to Lagos constantly before I and the family finally moved in 1993,” he told ThisDay.
In 2003, he went into hospitality business birthing Protea Hotel, Victoria Island (renamed Park Inn by Radisson).
Internationally branded hotels currently owned and operating under the auspices of Avalon Intercontinental are Park Inn by Radisson, Victoria Island, Radisson Ikeja Hotel and Radisson Blu Ikeja Hotel.
He was born on April 16, 1956, in Offa, Kwara State.
Credit: Ethnic African Stories