Tunde Ajayi: The Mind Working Tirelessly in Protecting Our Environment

Someone once joked that Lagos never sleeps because its generators refuse to rest. The line lingers each time the city’s air turns heavy, which is regularly. It is within this restless atmosphere that Dr. Tunde Ajayi has built his mission.

He leads the Lagos State Environmental Protection Agency. Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu appointed him in 2023 to steer a city famous for ambition and equally famous for smoke. His mandate is simple in writing and complex in practice: protect public health through stronger environmental governance.

His signature has been evidence. Real-time air quality monitors now sit in neighbourhoods across the city. They feed data into dashboards that guide policy. These tools allow his team to move from hunches to measurable trends. Pollution becomes something they can track, map, and confront.

Enforcement gives the science its teeth. Hotels, bakeries, factories, and prayer houses have been sealed for crossing environmental lines. His critics say the actions feel dramatic. Supporters see a consistent message: rules exist for a reason. The visibility of these shutdowns has pulled public attention toward issues once ignored.

Ajayi’s range extends beyond the streets of Lagos. He appears at regional and global forums where climate resilience and the blue economy dominate the agenda. His advocacy time and again circles back to a single idea: research achieves little until it shapes the lives of ordinary people. He argues that environmental justice requires translation, not abstraction.

His career bridges academia, public health, and administration. That combination explains his push for data-driven systems. It also explains projects like the Lagos Carbon Market, which sits at the intersection of climate finance and state-level governance. The idea is bold: create incentives for cleaner practices within Africa’s most commercially active city.

Communities respond to Ajayi’s presence because he tends to show up in person. He joins monitoring teams, speaks to residents, and treats public communication as part of regulation. These habits fuel the perception of a man in constant motion.

Lagos remains loud, crowded, and unpredictable. Yet if the city eventually breathes easier, it may be because someone, Ajayi, insisted that science deserved a seat at the table.