Book Announcement - The Tower of Mammon.

The Tower of Mammon by Femi Olawole has been released to the market. It details the author’s personal experience while working as a staff of the now defunct NAL Merchant Bank. NAL, as it was fondly called, was the premier merchant bank in Nigeria. It commenced operations in 1960, rose to prominence in the 1980s and began a massive decline in the late 1990s. By the middle of 2000s and, like a ship adrift, the Nigerian Acceptances Limited a.k.a NAL Merchant Bank PLC a.k.a NAL Bank Plc had sunk in the murky terrain of the Nigerian banking industry. The coup de grâce occurred in the aftermath of a re-capitalization exercise from which the bank never survived.

The book is filled with the names of almost everyone that ever worked in NAL between 1978 and 1995. It also contains samples of the drama and intrigues that were experienced or witnessed by the author within that same timeframe. There was the story of a bank’s driver who tried to use diabolical means to obtain cash from the author. A former staff confessed to theft, four years after the deed. The arrest of some staff for threatening an MD & CEO. And there were other strange events, including a bout of food poisoning and assassination attempt on the life of the author.

An accountant cum freelance journalist, the author once contributed a weekly column of social commentaries to The News Journal (Delaware’s top-most newspaper) and he did this in his capacity as a member of the newspaper's Community Advisory Board. He has also contributed to journals, anthologies and the online/print media across the world. In 1993, he received The Nigerian Media Merit Award in the Business Reporting category for his work, Sailing on Dark Waters, a special report on the travails of Nigerian entrepreneurs in their search for seed capital. He is also the author of The Temptation of Fate and lives in Delaware, United States.