Tunji Olowolafe: The Builder Who Went Beyond Business

GLIT FOCUS

Some lives can be filed under a single heading: a profession, a title, one defining achievement. Dr Tunji Olowolafe resists the exercise. He trained as a physician, left clinical medicine in 1988 for business, and four decades on, he has emerged as an investor, institution builder, education advocate, and philanthropist. Much of the work that says most about him happens away from the cameras. Today, as Chancellor of Ekiti State University and a driving force behind a range of significant national projects, his story has moved beyond personal success to the more enduring business of giving back to humanity. Raheem Akingboluwrites.

The first departure was the boldest. Medicine offered a settled path and he took another, building Deux Project Limited into a group spanning infrastructure, construction, engineering, consultancy and investment. He had to learn unfamiliar industries from the ground up and earn credibility in rooms where a medical degree counted for little. The decision was less a rejection of his training than an acceptance of a different challenge, one that would eventually take him into some of the country’s most demanding infrastructure and enterprise conversations.

His own account of that journey reveals the scale of the leap. Reflecting on the breadth of roles he has taken on, he said: “Over the last 40 years, I have functioned as a civil engineer, design architect, biomedical engineer, even as a marine specialist. There is a caveat: without any formal qualification in any of them.” It is a telling admission from a man whose career has repeatedly required him to enter unfamiliar territory, find the right people and build something that works.

A classic example, he recalled, was the Lekki-Epe Expressway in 2008, when he became chairman of Lekki Concession Company. “I was not a civil engineer and had never built a road. We brought the right people, expertise and capital to build an asset that had never been done before.” The experience was instructive. It demonstrated that building institutions is not always about possessing every technical skill oneself, but about recognising competence, assembling it and creating the conditions in which it can deliver.

His business career brought other high-profile chapters. His association with the Lekki Concession Company placed him inside one of Nigeria’s closely watched infrastructure stories, while his involvement in GZ Industries took him into manufacturing. Board seats and investments across sectors followed. Through it all, a physician’s habit remained useful: understand the problem, consider its consequences and look for a practical remedy.

That experience appears to have strengthened a philosophy that now runs through much of his work. “Nigeria has talent and capacity to build world-class institutions,” is the conviction attributed to him, and it helps explain why his interest has increasingly shifted from what he can accomplish personally to what institutions can make possible for others. It is a subtle but important distinction, because institutions outlive individual achievements.

The COVID-19 crisis in Ekiti State showed that instinct at work. In 2020, he served on the state’s Medical Logistics and Project Nomination Committee and supported efforts to strengthen healthcare infrastructure and diagnostic capacity. The Molecular Diagnostic Laboratory at Ekiti State Teaching Hospital was among the initiatives associated with that period, bringing more sophisticated testing capacity closer to people who needed it.

Medicine has since found its way back into his story, in a different form. In 2026, the National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria conferred on him an Honorary Fellowship. The man who left the consulting room decades ago was being recognised by the profession in a new chapter of a journey that had carried him far beyond clinical practice. His career, by then, had become an argument for what can happen when expertise is combined with curiosity and the willingness to learn.

Education has become another defining chapter. As Chancellor of Ekiti State University, he has pushed the institution towards greater digital proficiency, practical exposure and stronger links between academic learning and the world of work. By 2026, the university was pursuing Project Digi-Teach for its 650 lecturers, while the Foundation had sponsored 37 lecturers to international conferences since 2024.

For students, some of those changes are more tangible. EKSU’s accreditation on Springpod, a London-based careers platform, gives students and graduates access to virtual work experiences with global firms including Amazon, Barclays, Deloitte and Rolls-Royce. The value is not merely in adding another line to a CV. It is in allowing a young person in Ado-Ekiti to see professional possibilities beyond the immediate geography of the campus.

MIVA Open University carries the same thinking into another part of the education landscape. As its Pro-Chancellor, Olowolafe has argued that open and distance learning can reduce the geographical, economic and logistical barriers that keep many Nigerians away from university. At his investiture as the institution’s first Pro-Vice-Chancellor, he acknowledged the weight of the assignment in words that were both simple and revealing: “As the first Pro Vice-Chancellor, MIVA Open University, I find myself standing before you with a weight of responsibility that is quite sober. I accept this responsibility with full heart.”

The words are striking because they reveal something beneath the public image of the builder and businessman: an awareness that institutions are ultimately about responsibility. The money matches the argument. The Gbemisola Olowolafe MIVA Scholarship commits 1 billion over five years to support 1,000 students at MIVA Open University. Each place represents a young person whose academic journey could have been delayed or abandoned because of financial circumstances. Here, philanthropy is expressed less as a gesture than as an attempt to alter the direction of individual lives. The most telling work, however, is closer to home, in Are-Ekiti. The Tunji Olowolafe Foundation has built an educational chain there that runs from secondary education to digital skills and tertiary opportunities. The Gbemisola Olowolafe Memorial Community Secondary School and GOMTECH give children access to facilities, knowledge and possibilities that are too often concentrated in larger cities. The Foundation currently reports more than 125 students at GOMCSS.

The response from those around the projects is revealing. At a recent geoscience career-awareness outreach at GOMCSS, EKSU students introduced JSS1 pupils to geology and wider geoscience careers. Prof. Adeyinka Oluyemi Aturamu, who participated as a speaker, described it as a privilege and thanked the Foundation for supporting the initiative. EKSU student Boluwatife Osasona, who presented to the pupils, said it was an honour and looked forward to more opportunities to inspire young minds.

Olowolafe has often expressed the belief that where a child is born should not determine what that child can learn. GOMTECH puts that conviction into physical form. The 40-seat, solar-powered and connected hub offers training ranging from digital literacy to artificial intelligence, coding, data analytics and cybersecurity. The Foundation describes it as a model intended for wider replication, with its sights set well beyond the immediate community.

For Ekiti, that makes him more than a successful son of the soil. He is one of the state’s notable modern benefactors, a great indigene whose connection to home has moved beyond sentiment into investment in people. In Are-Ekiti, the distance between a rural community and the global digital economy is measured not only in kilometres, but in access, exposure and opportunity.

His late wife, Gbemisola Olowolafe, runs quietly through much of this work. Her name is attached to the community secondary school, the digital centre and the Gbemisola Olowolafe Centre for Ophthalmic Simulation at the Guinness Eye Centre, LUTH. The memorials have therefore been conceived as working institutions, places where remembrance is converted into something useful to another generation.

The ophthalmic simulation centre, commissioned in July 2026, brings the story almost back to its beginning. It gives eye surgeons access to advanced simulation training before they perform delicate procedures on patients. The first trainees completed the programme and received certificates at the commissioning. For a former doctor who left clinical medicine more than four decades ago, it is an unexpectedly fitting chapter. Seen together, the pieces form a recognisable pattern. Medicine came first, followed by infrastructure and enterprise, and then by education, digital access, scholarships and medical training. The road was never straight. What gives it coherence is the gradual movement from personal achievement towards institutional impact, with each chapter creating room for other people to advance.

Underneath it all is a plain set of values. Olowolafe says his grandmother taught him three: hard work, humility and honesty. She passed them on in the Ekiti dialect through songs and stories, and he later carried the same message to graduating students at EKSU. Those three words have become a recurring thread in his public reflections on leadership, education and responsibility.

Away from boardrooms and ceremonies, he maintains an interest in long-distance running, reading and self-development. Running rewards pacing and discipline more than a fast start. There is a similar quality in his professional journey, which has been marked less by one dramatic leap than by the ability to keep moving, changing direction when necessary and remaining engaged with the next challenge.

Those who benefit are increasingly the better witnesses. A student discovering a digital skill, a lecturer returning from an international conference, a pupil encountering geoscience for the first time, a first-class graduate receiving recognition, or a medical trainee mastering a delicate procedure on a simulator all represent different expressions of the same idea: that success acquires greater meaning when it creates room for someone else to move forward.

Buildinºgs weather, companies change hands and titles pass on. What a student learns, or a surgeon masters, travels further than the person who created the opportunity can follow. Olowolafe’s story has moved from treating patients to building businesses, then institutions, and now opportunities for people he may never meet. In that progression lies the quiet measure of a life increasingly defined not by what it has acquired, but by what it has made possible for others.