By Tunji Adegboyega
It is only selfless service that could have made TB gift a 550-seater ultra-modern auditorium to LASU
I had thought I would need speeches delivered by some of the eminent personalities at the formal handover of the state-of-the-art auditorium presented to the Lagos State University (LASU) by the donor, Mr Olatunji Bello (known as TB among his colleagues), the vice chairman/chief executive officer of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), to write this piece. But, I changed my mind after reading Bello’s own speech and his wife’s address at the occasion. What they said met every criterion I was looking for to write this column; from the philosophical to the scriptural, the moral, the philanthropic and what have you. You would see evidence of Bello’s journalistic expertise and experience all rolled into one, and his wife’s erudite address just adequate to serve as raw materials for a piece like this.
Intentionally or unintentionally, Bello’s speech answered the questions of what we call the ‘Five Ws’ in news writing: What? Where? When? Who and Why! Sometimes we may add the How? You begin to see evidence of this right from the title of the speech: ‘Why I built auditorium for LASU’.
I was at the ceremony, so I could still remember some of the interesting things said by some of the people present, if necessary.
Permit me, therefore, to begin from the beginning. And that is going to be straight from the horse’s mouth: ” Let it be recognised that we are not just commissioning a chamber to impact knowledge, but also witness, firsthand, the force of faith, the prophetic power of the tongue and what is possible when we all commit to the pursuit of public good.” That was Bello speaking.
But the auditorium is not his first philanthropic duty to education. When he clocked 50 in 2011, he instituted an annual prize in five disciplines dedicated exclusively to brilliant but indigent students of Lagos State origin in the university, at least so they would not drop out of their academic pursuit simply on account of their parents’ inability to sponsor them. As his wife, Prof Ibiyemi Olatunji-Bello, who, incidentally is the vice-chancellor of the university noted in her speech at the ceremony, ”This donation compliments his annual N100,000 endowment for the best graduating students in the Faculty of Engineering, Social Sciences, Mass Communication, Law and MBBS Degree Examination at our Convocations.” This annual prize is running till date.
It was in TB’s quest to do something bigger that the idea of the auditorium came into focus. When his amiable wife mooted the idea of the auditorium, little did she know she would be the vice-chancellor at the time it would be handed over to the university. So, it is only fortuitous that she is not witnessing the handover as an observer or very important visitor, but as the donor’s spouse and vice-chancellor.
But it is one thing to have an idea; it is another to bring it to fruition. Because nothing good comes easy, the cost implications initially scared Bello after it was presented to him by the architect. But, as they say, ‘where there is the will, there is a way’. But it is not all the time that even that will comes easy. In Bello’s case, it involved personal sacrifice, which was heavy, too. For TB, there was only one option if he was to reach his goal of delivering a befitting auditorium to LASU; that was to merely mark, (not celebrate) his 60th birthday the way a politician of his status would. Otherwise, he would have spent a fortune just as he would have reaped a fortune that he may decide to keep in his bank account, from the celebration, instead of investing it in humanity.
It was at this point that the Miracle Worker intervened and deposited the idea of what to do to raise money for the project in Bello’s mind. Again, listen to TB: ”But when God gives you a vision, God Almighty will also provide the means in miraculous ways. Of course, God’s miracle sometimes comes by having some brilliant ideas suddenly deposited in your mind. After days of wrestling with the architect’s budget in my head, it suddenly occurred to me I could ask those going to buy me gifts for the 60th birthday to monetise such and hand me the cash to do something really dear to my heart.”
Bello is not done.
”It worked. A very wealthy friend and known businessman had wanted to surprise me with a brand new Toyota Land-cruiser Jeep. I appealed to him to convert it to cash. With donations from other able friends and well-wishers, we got started in 2021.”
Things appeared to be going smoothly until late 2023 when fuel subsidy withdrawal and the merger of the foreign exchange markets inevitably led to price hikes. In government parlance, they would need to do cost variation. TB was faced with this problem as well. But he persevered, believing that God would never start a thing He cannot finish.
”The toughest moment being late 2023 and early 2024 when the Naira went down and inflation upset all previous calculations. It meant that the costs were almost tripled at the point of buying finishing materials. To continue, I had to sell my property at Magodo Estate to keep the workers on site in order that it may not become an abandoned project after three years of construction.”
As he said, ” To God be the glory, the rest is history.”
But the rest is not just history; the end-product is the N500 million 550-seater magnificent edifice that is sitting majestically beside the Faculty of Environmental Sciences on the Epe Campus of LASU: the Tunji Bello Auditorium: The reason for the gathering of dignitaries who had honoured Bello with their presence at the handover ceremony on August 20. These included Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, his deputy, his deputy, Dr Obafemi Hamzat, the Minister of Education, Mr. Tunji Alausa, former Governor of Ogun State, Aremo Olusegun Osoba, among others.
This piece cannot be complete without some mention of TB’s wife, Prof Ibiyemi Olatunji-Bello, for two reasons. One is the biblical injunction of ‘what God has joined together, let no man put asunder’. Beyond that is the axiom that ‘beside every successful man is a successful woman’. This is true of Tunji Bello.
An elated Prof Olatunji-Bello could not but show her gratitude to her husband: ”this facility represents more than architectural beauty; it is a strategic investment in academic excellence and institutional identity. It reinforces the fundamental truth that when we invest in education, we invest in tomorrow’s leaders. Hon. Tunji Bello has, through words and deed, inscribed his name in the permanent record of LASU’s growth story.” She added: ”For a campus housing the Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, and School of Agriculture, this auditorium marks a significant milestone toward achieving Goal 3 of our administration: making infrastructural facilities available and accessible for seamless academic and administrative operations.”
Expectedly, the vice-chancellor did a lot of advertisement for her university, among which is that today, it stands as Nigeria’s most preferred university, with a diverse student body of over 60,000, brilliant, and ambitious. Of course, she also seized the opportunity to mention some of the university’s needs, top of which is electricity supply. There cannot be a more auspicious occasion to mention all of those needs than when the governor, Sanwo-Olu, is physically around, the first of its kind to the university campus in his official capacity as Visitor.
True, LASU has seen significant improvements all over since she came on board as vice-chancellor in September 2021. To go beyond these would attract passing a bill to the university to pay. But this is not the time for that.
At this juncture, the question: who are TB’s models in philanthropy? Usually, people have role models that inspire them to go into the kind of philanthropy that Bello has done. These included his late father, Alhaji Azeez Olatunji Bello who donated a large parcel of land to accommodate what we now know as Ansar Ud Deen College at Isolo in Lagos, in the 1950s. Then, Bashorun Moshood Kashimawo Abiola, the acclaimed winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, who, according to TB ”on a single day in the late 80s, announced an endowment for universities across Nigeria.”
We also have incumbent President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who, when he was Governor of Lagos State, donated his salaries and allowances to the cause of charities, including orphanages. About four years ago, he also announced an endowment fund of one billion naira to LASU.
We have all of these people to thank for their impactful lifestyle on TB. But Prof Olatunji-Bello seems the person to thank most. Most women in her position would have gone for vanity when a crucial decision like the one that led to the donation of the Olatunji Bello Auditorium arose. Many women would have gone for the ‘owanbe’ party that people would long have forgotten about, even if they had served guests with elephants and human flesh. Like my father would always say, the greeting is usually the same: ‘e ku inawo ana’ (congratulations on the success of yesterday’s event), irrespective of what you served the guests!
As a matter of fact, a colleague of mine and I saw at least two examples of the vanity that life or excessive material accumulation could become, especially when the original owner dies, when we were returning from the handover event on Wednesday. We could not but help bemoan the plight of the deceased owners of those edifices, seeing all they laboured for becoming desolate only a few years after their passage. I want to become this; I want to build an empire on four football fields; it’s all vanity when death comes. That person would be taken out of the mansion when he dies and sometimes people who did not know how he made it would start struggling with the children for the mansions.
But Olatunji Bello Auditorium will continue to speak long after TB would have gone because many generations are going to sip from the well that would dispense knowledge in the place for the benefit of the country and humanity at large. What he has done for LASU and people that have had cause to cross his path would be the legacies that he would leave behind.
Bello has benefitted so much from Lagos and it is good he realised the importance of giving back to Lagos and even beyond, part of what he benefitted. Nigeria would be a better place if our wealthy people invest in education rather than frivolities.
