Four Years Of Love-Driven Leadership: Prof. Ibiyemi Olatunji-Bello’s Transformative Journey As LASU Vice-Chancellor

On Sunday, 21st September 2025, the Vice-Chancellor of Lagos State University (LASU), Prof. Ibiyemi Ibilola Olatunji-Bello, mni, NPOM, marked her fourth year in office.

With the single five-year tenure policy introduced in 2016, she now enters the final lap of an administration that has been defined not only by massive physical transformation but also by deep personal sacrifice and love-driven leadership.

Her tenure has recorded landmark infrastructural and academic milestones, but perhaps her greatest legacy lies in the unseen values she brought into office: selflessness, devotion, and an unwavering commitment to building LASU into a family project rather than a mere workplace. Four examples stand out as defining proofs of this philosophy.

The first is the Olatunji-Bello Auditorium at the Epe Campus, commissioned in August 2025. Though donated by her husband, Hon. Tunji Bello, the vision was hers. In 2020, years before becoming VC, she urged him to forgo a grand 60th birthday party and instead invest in a legacy project for LASU. That idea birthed the edifice, a monument to their joint belief that true treasures should be planted in the lives of generations of students.

The family’s investment in LASU predates this. Since 2011, Hon. Bello has quietly sustained a ₦100,000 annual prize for indigent but brilliant graduates across five faculties, while in 2017, Prof. Olatunji-Bello established her own ₦2.5 million endowment, rewarding the best graduating students in MBBS and Physiology annually.

Her devotion also extends to personal growth within LASU. In 2017, while already a professor, she enrolled for a Postgraduate Diploma in Education at the university, graduating in 2018. She remains the only sitting Vice-Chancellor in LASU history to hold an academic certificate from the institution.

Her love for LASU also shone during her earlier stint as Acting Vice-Chancellor in 2010 and 2011, when she championed staff welfare and initiated key projects like the Students’ Arcade and LASU Radio. Notably, she first proposed the now-standing Senate Building and Main University Library during that brief tenure. Today, both projects are realities under her substantive leadership, alongside the imminent commissioning of the six-storey University Library.

Since assuming office in 2021, she has driven the completion of outstanding projects she inherited and spearheaded unprecedented new ones, from hostels and academic buildings to research centres and innovation hubs. Her administration has also witnessed the boldest expansion in LASU’s history, birthing new faculties, schools, and programmes that have grown the institution into Nigeria’s largest brick-and-mortar university with over 60,000 students.

Beyond infrastructure, she has consolidated academic programmes, strengthened research, expanded partnerships, and institutionalised platforms for innovation, gender advocacy, career development, and digitisation. Her leadership vision of making LASU the best university in West Africa was never a lofty slogan—it has become a living reality backed by deliberate planning and execution.

As she begins the final year of her tenure, Prof. Olatunji-Bello’s administration stands as a model of leadership rooted in love, sacrifice, and devotion. When LASU’s history is told, these five years will be remembered not just for the visible transformation of the university, but for the selfless spirit that powered it—a legacy of love etched into the foundation of Nigeria’s most sought-after institution.