The Honorary Fellow of the National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria, Dr. Tunji Olowolafe, has revealed that he left clinical medicine not out of a grand plan, but because of a personal encounter over baby formula meant for his own child.
Dr. Olowolafe made the revelation while delivering his acceptance speech after being conferred with Honorary Fellowship at the College’s 44th Convocation ceremony.
He told Fellows and new specialists that as a young doctor, a tin of SMA Gold cost N420, and his family tried to switch his daughter to the cheaper ordinary SMA which was N200 less.
“SMA Gold cap was four hundred and twenty naira. We were trying to switch her to ordinary SMA which was two hundred naira cheaper. She refused and that was the signal that I needed to earn a better living,” he said.
“Mr President sir, as of today I’m still working hard to earn that decent living.”
Dr. Olowolafe, who earned his MBBS from the University of Ilorin, said he never set out to abandon medicine.
“I did not leave medicine in any grand plan, there was no mission, there was no vision. I simply responded to opportunities and to problems that needed solving,” he said.
According to his official citation, that first problem was the poor state of Nigerian hospitals. In 1988, he founded Deux Project Limited to modernize hospitals, which later grew into a leading civil engineering, construction and consultancy firm.
Over the last forty years, he said he found himself functioning as a civil engineer, design architect, biomedical engineer, and marine specialist without formal qualification.
In 2008, as Chairman of Lekki Concession Company, he delivered West Africa’s first toll road – the Lekki-Epe Expressway. He also sits on the board of Infracorp Nigeria, the $15 billion infrastructure platform, and serves as Non-Executive Director at West Power & Gas, principal stakeholder in Eko Disco.
In education, he was appointed Chancellor of Ekiti State University in 2024 where he instituted a N500,000 award for first-class graduates, and Pro-Chancellor of MIVA Open University in June 2026 where he established the N1 Billion Gbemisola Olowolafe Scholarship for 1,000 students.
The College honoured him for his intervention in ophthalmic training – a landmark donation of US$125,000 to the Faculty of Ophthalmology in July 2025 for a high-fidelity virtual reality simulation machine and complete renovation of the Gbemisola Olowolafe Center for Ophthalmic Simulation.
He said the honour was a homecoming.
“My own career took me away from clinical medicine more than forty years ago. Perhaps there is an irony that medicine has found a way to bring me back today. I accept this honorary Fellowship with humility,” he said.
