TOGETHER IN LIFE, UNITED IN GLORY…The Akejus of Okeagbe Akoko: A Life of Purpose, A Love That Endured
By Femi Salako
Punlisher Triangle News International Magazine
There are marriages that last, and there are marriages that become monuments, quiet structures that outlive the two people who built them and go on shaping everyone who passes through their shadow. The union of Chief Erastus Oludolapo Akeju and Princess Eunice EbunOluwa Akeju, née Arasanyin, belonged unmistakably to the second kind. Theirs was a partnership so complete, so woven into the fabric of Okeagbe Akoko and the wider Akoko North West community, that even in death, separated by only twenty days, they are being remembered together, mourned together, and this week laid to rest within the same solemn season of grief and thanksgiving. “For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain,” reads the scripture the family chose for its tribute, a line from Philippians that could easily serve as the epitaph for both their lives.
Chief Akeju was born on March 21, 1938, in Okeagbe Akoko, in what was then the Akoko North West Local Government Area of Ondo State. He was the first of six children born to Mr. Elijah Ogundana Akeju and Mrs. Mary Fatimo Akeju, a proud son of Oyin Akoko whose early years already carried the outline of the man he would become. Those who wrote his family tribute remembered a boy marked from childhood by discipline, by a hunger for learning, and by a seriousness about responsibility that seemed almost out of step with his age. It was, in hindsight, the raw material of the community leader, national builder, and humanitarian he would grow to be, a man whose lifetime of service would eventually touch a school, a company, a local government, a state ministry, and a church, and whose name would come to stand for what it meant to give oneself fully to the people around him.
His education followed the familiar but demanding path of a bright child in mid-century Akoko. He began at St. George’s Anglican Primary School in his home town of Okeagbe Akoko between 1946 and 1951, before completing his primary schooling at United Anglican Primary School, Omuo Ekiti, in 1952 and 1953. He went on to obtain the General Certificate of Education at both Ordinary and Advanced Level, a credential that, in that era, marked a young man out for something more than the ordinary. His pursuit of knowledge did not end there. Driven, as his family recalls, by a genuine passion for teaching and learning, he enrolled at All Saints’ Teacher Training College, Usi Ekiti, from 1956 to 1957, earning his Grade III Teacher’s Certificate, and then proceeded to St. John’s Teacher Training College, Owo, where he obtained his Grade II Teacher’s Certificate. For a period of years afterward, he stood in front of classrooms in both primary and secondary schools across Ondo State, shaping young minds with the same dedication and integrity that would later define his business and public life. Even then, he was not finished. He later completed the University of Cambridge International Studies programme, specialising in accounting, a decision that would open the next chapter of his working life.
It was accounting, in fact, that carried him into the corporate world. Chief Akeju joined Lever Brothers Nigeria Limited in Apapa, Lagos, the company now known as Unilever Nigeria Plc, where his diligence and integrity earned him steadily greater responsibility. He rose through the ranks to become Accounts Manager, a position he held until his retirement from the company in 1976. But retirement, for a man of his energy, was less an ending than a pivot. In 1977, he founded the West African Wood Processing Industry, known within the family and the business community simply as WAWPIL, and served as its Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer for the next twenty two years, until 1999. Through that enterprise, he was said to have created opportunities for many, empowered others to build their own livelihoods, and demonstrated the kind of steady, exemplary business leadership that outlasts any single balance sheet.
As his business career matured, Chief Akeju turned more deliberately toward public service, a calling he pursued with the same unwavering desire to contribute to the development of his people that had marked every earlier chapter of his life. In 1996, he was elected Chairman of Akoko North West Local Government, a role in which he built a reputation for visionary leadership and genuine grassroots development, the kind that ordinary people remember long after the politics of the moment has faded. Between 1999 and 2003, he served as Commissioner for Works and Transport in Ondo State, under the administration of Governor Adebayo Adefarati, a period in which he contributed significantly to the state’s infrastructure and to the practical business of public service delivery.
Politics in southwestern Nigeria over those decades was a landscape of shifting alliances and reinvented parties, and Chief Akeju moved through nearly all of them without ever losing the progressive convictions that anchored him. He served faithfully within the Alliance for Democracy, then Action Congress, then Action Congress of Nigeria, and within the broader pan-Yoruba political movement Afenifere, before settling, as so many of his generation eventually did, within the All Progressives Congress. It was within the APC that he closed his political career, serving until his passing as Chairman of the APC Elders’ Forum in Ondo State, a position that recognised him less for ambition than for the accumulated wisdom, experience, and steady counsel that younger politicians in the state had come to rely on.
Yet for all these titles, teacher, accounts manager, industrialist, local government chairman, state commissioner, elder statesman, those closest to Chief Akeju insist that none of them sat above his commitment to his Christian faith. He served for years as the Asiwaju Okunrin of St. George’s Anglican Church, Okeagbe Akoko, a leadership role within the church that made him a pillar of encouragement and generosity to his congregation. In one of the clearest demonstrations of what mattered most to him, he and his wife together donated and commissioned the Children’s Church Building at St. George’s, a physical legacy built specifically for the youngest members of their church, a gift meant to go on forming young lives long after the couple who funded it had gone.
None of it, however, can be told fully without his wife. Princess Eunice EbunOluwa Akeju was born Eunice EbunOluwa Arasanyin on July 22, 1939, in Affa, Okeagbe Akoko, into a family whose own royal lineage gave her the title Princess she carried for the rest of her life. On December 22, 1963, she married Chief Akeju at the Local Government Registry in Ado Ekiti, then still part of the old, undivided Ondo State. What followed was a marriage of more than six decades, a union the family describes as built on faith, mutual respect, unwavering commitment, and sacrificial love. Together, the couple raised five children and built a close-knit family whose values, by every account, continue to reflect their example. Those who knew the Akeju household describe Princess Eunice as its warmth, the matriarch whose gentleness balanced her husband’s structure and discipline, and whose own quiet generosity ran alongside his more public acts of leadership.
Chief Erastus Oludolapo Akeju passed peacefully into eternal glory on June 11, 2026, in Lagos, Nigeria, at the age of 88. In a turn that has deepened the family’s grief even as it has drawn the community more tightly around them, Princess Eunice followed her husband in death barely three weeks later, on July 1, 2026, at the age of 87. A couple who had spent more than sixty years side by side, who had built a business, raised a family, served their state, and given a wing of their own church building to the children of their community, would not, in the end, be separated for long. It is this fact, more than any single achievement on either of their long resumes, that has given their memorial its particular power, and that explains why the family’s tribute is framed not as two separate farewells but as one: together in life, united in glory.
This week, the Akeju family and the wider Okeagbe Akoko community are marking that farewell in full. The couple will lie in state at their Akure residence, No. 2 General Bajowa Lane, Alagbaka, Akure, on Thursday, July 16, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. That evening, a wake and service of songs will be held at the family residence on M19 Odoko Street, Affa Okeagbe, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., with the family requesting that guests wear purple. The funeral service proper takes place on Friday, July 17, from 10 a.m. to 12 noon, at St. George’s Anglican Church, Okeagbe Akoko North West, Ondo State, the very church Chief Akeju served for so many years as Asiwaju Okunrin, with the colour of the day set as blue and a reception to follow immediately at the same venue. The final event, an outing service, will hold on Saturday, July 18, from 10:30 a.m. to 12 noon, again at St. George’s Anglican Church, bringing the three days of remembrance to a close.
Chief Erastus Oludolapo Akeju is survived by his children, grandchildren, extended family, and countless friends and associates whose lives he touched, alongside the enduring memory of the wife who walked beside him for over sixty years and joined him in glory so soon after. Together they leave behind five children, a family business built from nothing, a local government and a state ministry that felt their leadership, a church that carries their name in its Children’s Church Building, and a community that will be telling their story for a long time to come.
As their children wrote in farewell, addressing the man they called Dad-Dad in words that speak just as easily for his wife beside him: you lived with purpose, you served with distinction, you loved without reservation, you have left an enduring legacy. For Chief Erastus Oludolapo Akeju and Princess Eunice EbunOluwa Akeju, that is not sentiment dressed up for an occasion. It is, quite simply, the record.
Adieu, Chief and Princess Akeju. Rest well, together, as you lived.
