Rooted and Rising: The New Code for Life, Leadership & Legacy

What do you do when the ground beneath you disappears?

When the relationship ends. When the job offer is pulled. When the year passes and not a single door opens. When grief arrives before you are remotely ready to receive it. When the very floor you were standing on, your plans, your identity, your sense of what was possible, gives way beneath your feet?

Femi Royal knows that ground. He has stood in that silence.

Rooted and Rising is his answer, not a polished answer, not a tidy one, but a true one. Part memoir, part manifesto, part leadership framework, this is a book born from the raw materials of a real life: the loss of his mother at sixteen and his father at twenty-five. The twelve months of job applications that yielded nothing. The relationship that crumbled when everything else already had. The IFAD placement in Rome that nearly vanished because of an immigration policy clause. The government role that was offered and then quietly taken back.

But here is what Femi discovered in the ruin of each of those moments: the roots were going deeper.

Drawing on his extraordinary journey from Nigeria to the United Kingdom, from agritech entrepreneur and youth mentor to global policy tables, TEDx stages, and the corridors of IFAD in Rome, Femi writes as a man who has earned every word he sets down. He writes with the authority of someone who has built organisations from scratch, trained over 12,000 young farmers, led a fundraising effort that constructed ten rooms in 120 days, and launched a writers' movement that reached a thousand students across twelve universities. He writes as someone who has also spent nights wondering whether any of it mattered at all.

Rooted and Rising is structured in three movements. Rooted asks the foundational question: who are you when you have nothing left to perform? It leads the reader through the architecture of identity, the power of principled living, and the radical idea that pain is not punishment, it is preparation. Rising maps the journey from setback to strategy, from the inner game of emotional intelligence and growth mindset to the outer work of servant leadership and community vision. Legacy turns the whole project outward, toward what we are building that will outlive us and outlast us.

Woven throughout is a philosophical thread drawn from Christian faith, Ubuntu philosophy, and the work of thinkers from Carol Dweck to John Maxwell, Myles Munroe to Nelson Mandela. But the beating heart of this book is personal. It is Femi's story, and through it, an invitation to yours.

This is not a book about arriving. It is a book about becoming.

If you have ever been broken and refused to stay down, Rooted and Rising was written with you in mind. The roots are going deeper than you know. The rising is already underway.

Oluwafemi Aliu