- By Oluwaseun Gbanja
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love._” – Mother Teresa
On Sunday 21st September 2025, the very dynamic Vice-Chancellor (VC) of Lagos State University (LASU), Prof. Ibiyemi Ibilola Olatunji-Bello, mni, NPOM will mark her fourth anniversary in office. If this were pre-2016, she would either be clearing her desk to return, amid loud ovation, to her office in the Department of Physiology at the College of Medicine or be getting set for a second term in office. But under the single five-year tenure policy introduced in January 2016, she now begins the final year of her eventful administration, one focused on consolidating gains already made.
Much has been said and written about how her leadership has transformed both the physical and academic landscape of LASU – a story that needs no retelling. Yet, in my considered opinion, her most profound impact on the 43-year-old institution lies not merely in the visible and concrete, but in the intangible: acts of love, sacrifice, and deep devotion that often escape notice. Her leadership has been defined by what I would describe as altruistic stakeholdership – the conviction that LASU is, for her, not just an institution to administer but a personal and family project. There are leaders who pursue office for the perks and appurtenances it confers, and there are those who embrace it as a call to selfless devotion. She belongs firmly to the latter. I will highlight four examples that are in the public space to illustrate this.
The first and most recent is the donation of the state-of-the-art Olatunji Bello Auditorium in Epe Campus by former Commissioner for Environment and Water Resources, Lagos State, and current Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) boss, Hon. Tunji Bello, who happens to be her husband. At the commissioning of the imposing edifice in August this year, Hon. Tunji Bello recounted how, in 2021, while reflecting on how best to mark his 60th birthday, his wife, who was not even the VC at the time, gently urged him to forgo the fanfare of a grand celebration and instead gift LASU a befitting edifice that would stand as a lasting legacy.
Initially daunted by the considerable cost of such a venture, he hesitated. Yet, buoyed by her encouragement and conviction, he embraced the vision, and today, that noble decision stands enshrined in stone and memory. Matthew 6:21: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”, sets a theological foundation for these acts revealing that the Olatunji-Bello family’s treasure rather than being locked away in private vaults or displayed in personal monuments, is invested in the dreams and futures of young people who will pass through those auditorium doors for decades to come.
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But the Olatunji-Bello Auditorium was not even the family’s first personal investment in LASU. For the past 14 years, since 2011, Hon. Tunji Bello has, quietly and without fanfare, sustained an annual ₦100,000 endowment for brilliant but indigent students graduating from five faculties and programmes: Engineering, Social Sciences, Mass Communication, Law, and the MBBS Degree Programme, awarded during LASU’s annual Convocations. In 2017, Professor Olatunji-Bello complemented this gesture with her own ₦2.5 million endowment fund, from which an annual prize of ₦100,000 is shared between the best graduating students in MBBS and Physiology.
There is a third proof. In the same 2017, while already being a professor, Prof. Olatunji-Bello enrolled for a Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the Lagos State University School of Postgraduate Studies and graduated in 2018, a bold testament of her belief in the University. If my records are correct, she is the first and only sitting VC in LASU history to have been an alumnus.
The imprimatur of the VC’s love-driven leadership reaches even further back. Between July and December, 2010, and January and October 2011 when she served as Acting Vice-Chancellor for a cumulative of just over a year, she left an indelible mark through several welfarist initiatives for staff and the initiation of landmark projects such as the LASU Students’ Arcade and LASU Radio. Of note, the proposal for the construction of a new Senate Building and a main University Library – two structures that today stand as enduring symbols of LASU’s architectural evolution – was first made during her brief stint in office, when she presented the idea to the then Visitor, Mr Babatunde Raji Fashola.
As providence would have it, it is during her substantive tenure as Vice-Chancellor that the grand Arcade, the largest in any West African university, was completed and commissioned. While the Babatunde Raji Fashola Senate Building has already been commissioned and put to use, the six-storey University Library will, in just a few weeks, also be formally commissioned under her administration. Call it divine arrangement.
Indeed, her footprints on the sands of LASU – both in the last four years and in her earlier stint as Acting VC – have been deliberately long-term in nature, validating the truth that great leaders build not merely for today, but with tomorrow firmly in mind.
Hence, when she unveiled the simple yet ambitious vision of making LASU the best university in West Africa four years ago, she was not out to dazzle stakeholders with lofty, highfalutin promises; it was simply the true state of her heart, set down on paper.
It is this love-inspired mindset that has moved her to place LASU above personal ego, facilitating the completion of most of the outstanding projects she inherited: the Main Library, Lagos HOMS at LASU, the Faculty of Education and Faculty of Arts Annex buildings, the Centre of Excellence for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (Awori House), the LASU Resource Centre, the Primary Health Centre at Ojo, the LASU International School, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila Hall, the Faculty of Media and Communication Studies Building, the 96-bed LASUDEF Hostel, the 8,000-bed hostel facility, and the boundary delineation in Epe, among others. Together, these works amount to the most unprecedented infrastructural revolution since the early days of LASU’s founding.
Her commitment also explains why she sustained inherited initiatives such as the LASU Research and Innovation Fair, the LASU Christmas Carol, and the CIPR Media Parley, while elevating existing centres and programmes like the Africa Centre of Excellence for Innovative and Transformative STEM Education, the Centre for Response and Prevention of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence, the LASU Careers Development Centre, the Stream 2 Admission Exercise, and the Open and Distance Learning and Research Institute, amongst others, while establishing new ones of her own.
Above all, it is this same devotion that has driven her to embark on the boldest expansion drive in LASU’s history, creating several new faculties and schools, introducing fresh academic and professional programmes, widening admission opportunities, and ultimately positioning LASU as the largest brick-and-mortar university in Nigeria today, with a thriving student population of over 60,000.
It is this heart of altruistic stakeholdership that fellow well-meaning stakeholders must in turn continue to show by praying for her, supporting her, and encouraging her to finish well and finish strong. For when the history of LASU is written, her tenure will not be remembered merely as five years of remarkable transformation, but as the moment when love shone best as the foundation of leadership and when her devotion to excellence created pathways for generations yet unborn.
•Gbanja is the media aide to the Vice-Chancellor of Lagos State University. He can be reached via seungbanja@yahoo.com_
