How Tunji Olowolafe Built a Cathedral of Hope

Dr. Tunji Olowolafe trained as a physician before building a career in infrastructure, construction, and investment. Medicine may have stopped being his profession decades ago, but the instinct behind it has never fully left him.

This year, he funded West Africa’s first advanced ophthalmic surgical simulation centre at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, dedicating it to the memory of his late wife, Gbemisola Olowolafe.

The facility uses virtual reality to train eye surgeons in delicate procedures before they ever operate on a living patient, a development that directly addresses the shortage of skilled ophthalmic surgeons across the sub-region and the avoidable blindness that shortage produces.

The dedication to his wife was deliberate. On the first anniversary of her death earlier this year, Olowolafe had already launched the N1 billion Gbemisola Olowolafe Miva Scholarship, a five-year endowment funding university education for 1,000 Nigerian students.

The simulation centre extends that same philosophy into healthcare, ensuring her name is attached to restored sight rather than just grief.

Olowolafe’s record outside this tribute fills in the portrait of the man behind it. He serves as Chancellor of Ekiti State University and Pro-Chancellor of Miva Open University. When EKSU produced 83 first-class graduates, he rewarded each of them with N500,000 from his own pocket. He partnered with London-based Springpod to give Nigerian students free virtual internships with firms like Amazon and Barclays.

On the infrastructure side, he chaired the Lekki Concession Company during the expansion of the Lekki-Epe Expressway, sits on the board of InfraCorpNigeria, the CBN, NSIA, and AFC-backed $15 billion infrastructure fund, and holds a non-executive directorship at West Power and Gas.

The simulation centre, though, carries something the infrastructure work does not. Long after the projects are completed and the boards have changed, young surgeons will train in that facility. Patients who never meet Olowolafe will recover their sight because of it. His wife’s name will be present in every one of those recoveries.

That is a different kind of monument.