God has been the controller of my life – Dr. Raphael Olarewaju

When William Shakespeare wrote that “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them”, he must have had Dr. Raphael Sunday Olarewaju, Founder and former Medical Director, Mother and Child Hospital, Lagos, in mind. By all means, Dr. Olarewaju cannot be said to be born great and definitely did not have greatness thrusted upon him. But through hard work, support from family members, especially his elder brother and the supreme backing from the Almighty God, he achieved greatness within the medical and healthcare business field.

The story of his life has thus become an inspiration to anyone who may find the odds stacked against them!

Born in Oko, a small, quiet, rustic but serene town in Ifelodun LGA, just about five kilometers to Omun Aran in Kwara State. Due to his humble background, his date of birth was not written. However, he used the event that happened around the time he was born to determine the date. Therefore, he was born between 1953 and 1954. Dr. Olarewaju remembered his birthplace with nostalgia. He said with a smile, “Oko has evolved. When I was born, it was a little village. We enjoyed our lives growing up in the village. There were not many social things then. We just enjoyed village life. We were happy.” Of course, happiness does not cost or require money. It happens through fulfillment and peace from within. And Oko offered him just that as a child.

From his humble beginning to owning one of the most successful private medical practices in no less a place than Lagos, Dr. Olarewaju achieved success in medical profession and business. He believes there is a distinction between business and practice of medicine. He feels that the problem of medical students or practitioners is that, while in the university as medical students, they were never taught the business of medical practice.

His “grass to grace” story is as inspiring as it is a lesson in how life may treat you…shall we say unfairly. He was not meant to attend a formal school but he did. By family arrangement, it was only his elder brother that should go to school. According to him, “my parents were what I will call poor. They couldn’t afford to send me to school.  My father had two wives. He decided to send one boy from each wife to school. That is how he sent my senior brother to school. He told me he had no money to send me to school.”

That arrangement ensured that his education was delayed…but not denied. For him, it was God who “arranged my schooling. He arranged how I will go to school.” But he had to wait and while waiting, he had become a farmer and palm wine tapper. According to him “I knew how to tap palm wine before I started primary school in 1967.”

So he started primary one at about 13 years courtesy of efforts and support from his elder brother who was at the time a student at King’s College, Lagos. He was able to make up time as a result of double promotion he got while in primary school. What was more, he even got into the university before all his age mates who started before him! “I was already a big boy”, he said. “My cousins were already in primary six. You know God, who ruleth in the affairs of men actually helped me and I was in the university before my cousins.” By the time his cousins got their own university admission, he had already resumed three months before them.

Dr. Olarewaju went to St. Andrew Primary School in Oro and Igbomina Comprehensive High School, Ajase Ipo. Getting to Ajase Ipo is another story.

But getting into secondary was a challenge as his name was removed from the list of those who passed the common entrance at the time even though he passed very well. Narrating the story, Dr. Olarewaju said, “in 1971, we wrote the Common Entrance Examination. I was told I came second in the whole of Igbomina, Ekiti Local Government. They told me the boy who came first was from Omu Aran. But when the admissions came, they removed my name.” They invited him to Ilorin several times to do another interview but at the end, they told him there was no school for him in Kwara State. He had to settle for Igbomina Comprehensive High School, a community school at the time. He took this in good faith and did very well while in school. His result is still standing in that school till today with no one good enough to equal it.

His journey to medical field started when he gained admission to study medicine at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. Asked about the motivation behind his decision to study medicine, Dr. Olarewaju highlighted three factors that influenced his decision. The first and second have to do with his mother and the event that happened to her. The third was about his own curiosity.

His mother was not from Oko, his own birthplace. She came from Saare, in the northern part of Kwara State. When his sister was about to wed, his father wanted her to marry another man who was a local herbalist, a Babalawo. But she did not want to marry that man and his mother supported her. Of course, the Babalawo was an old man. If his sister had married him, she would have been the third or fourth wife. But because the man was a Babalawo, everybody feared him, including his father. Therefore, they were all against his sister for not marrying the old man and his mother for supporting her daughter. That was the time his mother was carrying his pregnancy.

As a result, everybody neglected his mother in the compound with no help as she was not from Oko. He was born in that uncertainty. According to him, “it was a very terrible period for her. It was in that confusion that I was born.” Dr. Olarewaju considered it a great sacrifice for him because she had to weather the storm during the time he was born. “That event made me to be close to her and I was the last born.”

The second factor is that one day, his mother went out to fetch water in the village and she suffered a stroke (he would later understand this when he got into medical school). People had to carry her home from where she went to fetch water. She could not speak again and she died soon after. Painfully, “my mother could not talk to me”. That touched him a lot. So he wanted to know what the reason was. They were telling him it was witches and wizards. But he wanted to know what actually killed his mother. That pushed him to medicine.

The third motivation to study medicine was that when he was in primary one at Oro, he had double promotion to primary three and another double promotion to primary five. It was in primary five that he had this terrible headache. For days, the headache did not abate. He took Cafenol tablets (I bet you remember this drug…laugh), but the headache persisted. It was not until he was given one native medicine (what you might call a “concoction”) to wash his head that he got relief. So, what is in this magical concoction that took away this stubborn headache? He must have asked himself.

In any case, as a result of these three major events in his life, his curiosity for medicine was already developed and cemented. He needed to know more about medicine so as to help humanity.

And so, his love for humanity led him to specialize in Obstetrics and Gynecology (O&G) in medicine. He hates to see people crying or being sad. After considering all branches of medicine as a junior doctor, he discovered that many of them had to do with the signing of death certificates and he did not want that. Therefore, he settled for a place where he would be treating young women. If they deliver children, people will be happy.

However, the founding of Mother and Child Hospital started with a dream he had as far back as when he was in primary five. That dream has always been manifesting in his life since then till 1996 when he founded the hospital. As he explained, after passing his residency exams, he became a consultant and a lecturer in the O&G Department of University of Jos Teaching Hospitals. One day in 1994, he came for a conference on breastfeeding in Lagos and lodged at Gateway Hotel, Ota. That journey would be the turning point in his career. In his hotel room, he was exposed to foreign television channels like CNN, BBC and other cable stations for the first time in his life. And so for the first time, he said, “I realized at that point that I have been living in the other side of life.” His worldview changed completely. The kind of life he has just been exposed to was the exact opposite of the lifestyle he had been living with his ₦4,000 pensionable salary and some allowances from the teaching hospital. The money was not even enough to sustain the family which included four children. He had to support with farming.

What he was earning would not afford him a better life. And he resolved in himself that he must train his children differently from the way he was trained. When he saw all the enjoyment in that hotel, he told himself “my life has to change”. He believed what he took for granted, his children will not accept it. Getting back to Jos, he told his wife all that he encountered in Lagos and why he must move. She agreed with him and they moved to Lagos. In Lagos, he joined a hospital around Allen Avenue as a consultant in 1994. Now with a clear vision and knowledge of where he was going, he signed only a two-year agreement with the hospital. According to him, “I was clear in mind that I would only work for two years and then start my own hospital”. And exactly two years after in 1996, Mother and Child Hospital was born! 

From the beginning, continued, “I have the idea of the type of hospital I will establish. First, I do not want a mushroom hospital. I do not pride myself to know everything. I do not want to treat everybody. I want to leverage on my own strength, which is O&G. I just want a place where you will have both women and children catered for”.  His reasons are one, they (women and children) are the ones that are most marginalized in the society. Two, they are very critical to the family. Three, men don’t go to hospital as such. But when their wife or child is sick, they go to hospitals. So the idea was to leverage these factors.

He then planned to start with his friend with whom he co-wrote many academic papers. He was a pediatrician. And after intensive prayer by the duo, the inspiration for the hospital name was received. However, Dr. Olarewaju did not start the hospital with that friend. He settled for someone else. The pediatrician friend nevertheless functioned as the hospital’s Chief Pediatrician for many years until he relocated from Lagos.

When asked about the journey so far for him and for the hospital, Dr. Olarewaju attributed the journey to God. According to him, “God has been so good to us. There are challenges but God has been very good to us”. How did he raise money to build Mother and Child Hospital? Dr. Olarewaju said “there is a difference between the practice of medicine and the business of medicine”. He said when they started, they started with someone who knows something about business. It was the businessman among the friends that he shared the proposal with that offered to be part of it as a partner. While his friend and partner put down the money, Dr. Olarewaju said he only contributed his profession experience. And so, the hospital was built and developed till what it is today without a single loan from anyone or institution. In his own words, “Mother and Child Hospital is not owing anybody. It was just of recent that the management was talking to Bank of Industry facility”. The only loan they took was in 1997 to buy generator.  

The success and good standing of the hospital is attributed first to God and second to his business partner whose involvement enable them to run the hospital as a business. Today, that his friend and business partner, Engr. Dr. JBO Adewumi, is the chairman of the hospital’s board while the managing director is Dr. John Olaniyi Bankole, that boy from Omu Aran who came first in the common entrance examination he wrote in Kwara State in 1971!

Dr. Bankole had attended University of Ife where he also studied medicine after finishing his secondary education at Omu Aran High School.  And the first and second placed pupils in that year’s common entrance examination in Kwara State had gone on to be doctors!

Fate, or shall we say God, had brought them together in Yola in 1999. After completing his postgraduate training, Dr. Olarewaju decided to travel to Yola to relax for a month. Dr. Bankole also had come to Yola from Ife and they met and became friends.

Unknown to two of them, they were the pupils that were denied secondary admission after their exploits in their common entrance examination.

Dr. Olarewaju is a Christian and is happily married with four children. He socializes by joining others to provide community and humanitarian service.

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