Nigeria lost its premier, foremost and world renowned medical scientist, Professor Emeritus Oladipo Olujimi Akinkugbe on Monday June 15, 2020, just about a month short of his 87th birthday.  He was said to have been ill for a while but he finally succumbed on that Monday setting off numerous expressions of sadness for a man who was, indeed, a colossus in the medical and scholarly world. 

Prof. Akinkugbe chalked up so many firsts in his long career.  He was Nigeria’s first professor of medicine and at the age of 35, the youngest.  He was the first Chairman of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) and the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin.

He was a celebrated scientist, a role model and one of the legends of the Government College, Ibadan. He was a classmate of Prof. Wole Soyinka and Dr. Christopher Kolade, who went ahead and excelled in their own fields.

Prof. Akinkugbe was born on July 17, 1933 and grew up in a Christian home with its regular schedules of school, choir practice, Sunday school and the devotional service.  His father was a people’s warder at St. Stephen’s Church and a synod delegate for several years.  Under that strict Christian upbringing, Prof. Akinkugbe enrolled in the Ondo Boys’ High School in 1944.  However, science subjects were not counted among the strong points of the school, but Akinkugbe was resolute in his determination to study science.  He decided to take an entrance examination into the Government College, Ibadan.  He made it to the interview stage where he missed by one place.  His dreams seemed shattered, but providence came promptly to his aid as one of the admitted fee-paying students could not take up his own offer.  He was then called up from the waiting list.

He had a smooth sail through Government College, Ibadan where he established himself as an undisputed leader in the science subjects, conceding English and Literature to Wole Soyinka and Christopher Kolade.  After a brilliant secondary school career, he took entrance examination and gained admission into the University College, Ibadan, in 1951 to begin his study of medicine.

He proved himself again as a serious student.  After passing the second MB examination in 1955, he was posted to the University of London, the Royal London Hospital, for his clinical studies, where, in 1958, he obtained his MBBS.  After completing his six months internship at the London Hospital, Akinkugbe then embarked on a series of short programmes in different institutions, expanding his knowledge and experience and obtaining a diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene from the University of Liverpool in 1960.

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Being a Western Region Government’s scholar, Akinkugbe came back to Nigeria in 1961 and took up appointment with the Government Specialist Hospital, Adeoyo, Ibadan.  Later, he went back to England to do his D.Phil. programme in Oxford.  On the successful completion of the course, he returned to Nigeria to take up an appointment as a lecturer at the Department of Medicine, University of Ibadan in January 1965.

Thus began Prof. Akinkugbe’s brilliant academic career during which he became Professor of Medicine in 1968, Dean of Medicine 1970-74, and Head of Medicine in 1972. He took special interest in Hypertension and Kidney diseases and made tremendous contributions in those areas.  He had attended more than 100 national and international, professional, scientific, educational, and health conferences in the past 40 years across the world.  He had made presentations in many of these conferences and published many authoritative works and received numerous awards.  He was a member and fellow of more than 20 international organisations, societies and institutions.

He was a recipient of the National Honour of Cote d’Ivoire.  Within Nigeria, Akinkugbe had been the Vice Chancellor of the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria; Chairman, Planning Committee of the Ondo State University; Chairman, University Council, University of Port Harcourt; Chairman, Planning Committee, University of Abuja.  No doubt, he was an outstanding professional and scholastic role model.

Prof. Akinkugbe won the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award, the highest intellectual award by the Nigerian government.  He was a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Science; Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON). He founded the Hypertension Clinic and a Clinic for Kidney Therapy.  He was a Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the John Hopkins, Yale and Washington Seattle Medical School (1966).

He was a member of the University Grants Commission of the Ugandan Government (1973) and Visiting Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Fellow of Balliol College, University of Oxford (1981-82). He was Secretary to the World Health Organisation (WHO) Technical Discussion on Universities and Health for All in Geneva (1983-84). We commiserate with his family, the academic community and Nigeria over the irreparable loss.