Biography & Perspective
About Olayiwola “Layi” Kola-Seriki
Olayiwola Kola-Seriki is a writer, essayist, and cultural thinker exploring the unresolved tensions between religious faith, inherited colonial scripts, and generational ambition in contemporary Africa.
Olayiwola Kola-Seriki
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The Intellectual Premise
When he was four years old in Western Nigeria, his family called him “Doctor Layi.” Like millions of ambitious young Africans, he understood the unspoken code early: follow the syllabus, master the foreign grammar, outrun the immediate chaos, and secure a life that would be legible to institutions ten thousand kilometers away.
Three decades later, Layi had followed that inherited syllabus to impressive effect: an accounting degree, an MBA, professional qualifications with the Association of National Accountants of Nigeria (ANAN) and the Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria (CITN), and an executive seat as Chief Financial Officer of an indigenous fintech organisation.
Yet standing under the scrutiny of European border police at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, an inescapable question presented itself: had he built a life of his own, or simply become very good at following a map someone else had drawn?
The Distinctive Perspective
Layi’s distinctive authority comes from being an active participant in the world he examines. His career in corporate finance and executive leadership has trained him to audit assumptions, interrogate numbers, identify root causes, and distinguish symptoms from systemic failures.
He brings that same forensic discipline to questions usually treated as purely cultural, personal, or theological. The result is a voice that moves between the boardroom and the family compound, between financial logic and questions of faith, identity, and generational purpose. He writes not as an alienated outsider attacking the system, but as a successful corporate insider auditing the very machinery that produced his success.
His debut trade non-fiction volume, The Borrowed Map: Navigating Faith, Ambition, and the Foreign Scripts of Modern Africa (39,387 words), forms the flagship diagnostic of this work.
Author Bios for Publication
Olayiwola “Layi” Kola-Seriki is a writer and cultural essayist examining African identity, post-colonial conditioning, faith, and ambition. He is the author of the forthcoming non-fiction book The Borrowed Map: Navigating Faith, Ambition, and the Foreign Scripts of Modern Africa. Find his work at olayiwolakolaseriki.com.
Olayiwola Kola-Seriki writes at the intersection of faith, culture, and civilizational ambition in modern Africa. Through incisive essays and public speaking, he investigates how inherited colonial scripts continue to dictate definitions of success for the continent and its diaspora. His debut non-fiction manuscript, The Borrowed Map, charts a pathway toward authentic spiritual and intellectual sovereignty. He lives and works between Nigeria and the global diaspora.