Professor Oladipo Olujimi Akinkugbe is dead. He passed on this afternoon, 15 June 2020. The cause of death is still unknown. He was said to have given up the ghost at his son’s residence. Jericho Ibadan. He was aged 93
Professor Oladipo Akinkugbe, CFR MD DPhil FRCP NNOM Hon.DSC was one of Nigeria’s most respected and distinguished academics and physicians. He was Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the College of Medicine, the University of Ibadan. He studied and taught at some of the world’s most prestigious universities including the University of London, Balliol College University of Oxford England and Harvard Medical School Boston, USA.
Professor Akinkugbe was Chairman of the Presidential Projects Implementation Committee (PPIC) on the refurbishing of Teaching Hospitals in Nigeria. He was also a former Chairman of the Board of Management of University College Hospital Ibadan, Nigeria and one-time Chairman of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board. He served as Pro-Chancellor, the University of Port Harcourt, was a Former Vice-Chancellor, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, a Former Vice-Chancellor, University of Ilorin; and a Former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ibadan.
Professor Akinkugbe received several awards including the Boehringer Ingelheim Award of the International Society of Hypertension. He is a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Committee on Health Research and Secretary of WHO Technical Discussions on University and Health for All.
“Professor Akinkugbe was born in Ondo, Ondo State on 17th July, 1933. His father, who was a chemist and druggist, belonged to an impressive family tree in Ondo traceable and connected in some distant past to the marble rich clan of Igbeti in Oyo State.
Professor Akinkugbe grew up in a Christian home, his father being a people’s warden at St. Stephen’s Church and a synod delegate for several years. The regular routine of school, choir practice, Sunday’s Devotional Worship, Sunday school, evening service, and other such engagements left him with little time for frivolities after school. However, whenever the opportunity presented itself, young Oladipo never failed to enjoy his juvenile frisk and frolic.
