A professor of Public Administration, Oladipo Adamolekun, has revealed how his wife was killed by kidnappers in broad daylight in Ibadan, Oyo State.
Speakingin interview with The PUNCH’s, PETER DADA, the former United Nations and World Bank employee, also revealed how he lost his first child at the age of seven.
Prof. Adamolekun who recently turned 89 tears of age made this know while opening up on his life challenges.
He said, “I lost my first child at the age of seven. The child had a congenital disease which the hospital told us was going to be self-corrected. When it didn’t self-correct, we had surgery during my time at the UN and again, we were told that we had a successful surgery which was given at 95 to 98 per cent but it relapsed. So, that’s some sadness in the journey. And of course, the very big sadness was the tragic loss of my first wife who was carjacked on the streets of Ibadan on May 14, 2002, between 11am and noon. She was kidnapped and killed in broad daylight in Ibadan. I was working at the World Bank in Lome, Togo, at that time. I was preparing for my retirement and she came home to prepare. So, those are the two sad stories. The biggest regret that I talk about, and I do it with all honesty, is the school of management, a world-class school of public and business management, that I had planned to establish. I had a concept paper developed. It had a trajectory of admission. In the process of preparing, I learned that I need to raise a lot of money, and fundraising is not one of my strengths.
“But specifically, some colleagues were planning the same thing in their home country, India. When I read that they had raised between $2 million to $4 million to establish a world-class school of business and public management which was my intention, I knew that there was no way I could ever raise that kind of money. However, I had already identified the location, Porto-Novo in the Benin Republic. I already acquired a private land for myself to build my private accommodation, so that as the founder and all of that, after I would have served, you know, I would be able to retire to my new property there. The reason I wanted to do all that was bilingual. My first degree was in French, so I wanted to locate it close to Nigeria, the largest anglophone market, but also in a francophone country, so I abandoned it. But in my autobiography as an annex, I provided that concept paper.”
