Tunji Olowolafe, co-founder of Deux Project Limited, making lemonade out of the lemons life hands you is not just a cliché, it is a philosophy of progress. He believes that opportunities must be seized when they come and that they appear only once in a while, always for a reason.
A trained physician who left medicine in 1988 to build a construction company, Olowolafe has now funded West Africa’s first ophthalmic surgical simulation centre and named it after his late wife Gbemisola Olowolafe Centre for Ophthalmic Surgical Simulation. The centre which was recently unveiled at the Guinness Eye Centre in Idi-Araba, Lagos was as a result of a partnership between the Tunji Olowolafe Foundation, the National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria’s Faculty of Ophthalmology, Lagos University Teaching Hospital and Lagos State University Teaching Hospital.
The centre boasts of the EyeSi Surgical Simulator, a sophisticated machine that allows eye surgeons to rehearse procedures on a virtual patient. It scores every movement and records every error, enabling trainees to return to the same surgical step the following day and attempt it again. This innovation addresses a critical gap across most of Africa, where resident surgeons often learn micron-scale cataract and vitreoretinal surgery by operating directly on patients, simply because simulation equipment remains scarce and prohibitively expensive.
While many have questioned why he would commit such substantial funds, Olowolafe explains that naming the centre in memory of his late wife, Gbemisola, gave the project a purpose far beyond infrastructure. He frames his argument for funding around habit rather than technology, arguing that across nearly every profession and vocation in Nigeria, too little value is placed on continuous education. The most vital training, he insists, lies in refining what people already know.
According to sources, the centre has already admitted its first cohort of six trainees, drawn from Kaduna and Onitsha, suggesting its reach is extending well beyond Lagos. This eye centre is the latest in a sequence of legacy projects Olowolafe has established in honour of Gbemisola Olutayo Olowolafe. Earlier initiatives include an ICT hub and a community secondary school in Are-Ekiti, as well as a five-year scholarship programme at Miva Open University worth ₦1 billion, timed to coincide with the first anniversary of her passing.
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