Olaleye Ajanaku is a Senior Country Accountant with Accruent Amsterdam, a leading IT consulting firm in Netherlands. In this brief chat with journalists the young man, a grandson of late Ijesa business mogul, Isaac Ojo Ajanaku shared his dream for a better Nigeria and what he plans to achieve with the Olaleye Ajanaku Foundation, OAF.
What’s the Olaleye Ajanaku Foundation About?
Olaleye Ajanaku Foundation basically is about improving the quality of the lives of the citizenry in my town. The foundation aims to alleviate poverty and hardship in the lives of our citizens in the area of provision of potable water, youth empowerment, education, widow’s empowerment scheme and many other more.
What prompted the idea of giving water and medical care to the people?
In the words of John F Kennedy, ‘Ask what what not your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’. I believe that is my little way of contributing my quota to the society, sincerely I believe it’s time that Nigerians in diaspora give back to the people that shaped us in one way or the other.
Access to drinkable water and free medical care should be the right of every citizens, hence my drive in helping the government out in this direction.
Does this in any way has any political undertone?
No, not at all! As I’ve earlier mentioned this is just my little way of giving back to my people.
Why are you doing this project only in Ilesa?
As Yorubas will say ‘ile la ti n ko eso rode’.I believe that I need to take care of the people in my immediate community first, of course there are plans to to extend these initiatives to other parts of the state and the country at large.
You live abroad and claimed to understand the people’s plight and condition, how is that possible?
I touch base with my family at home, I have a lot of family members, so I know and understand what my people face back home, and OAF is all about improving the lives of my people.
What’s the life span of this project?
It doesn’t have a life span, as long as I live its continuous. Once we identify an area of urgent need, we will do our utmost to ensure some intervention in order to put smiles on the faces of the people.
How do you fund the foundation?
We fund it through friends and families who believes in the vision. We rely on support of people that are concerned with what we are doing and interestingly the support is massive. This is a project that connects everybody living abroad with the people back home, and we plan to extend to other towns, cities and states. There is no family in Nigeria without a relative living abroad, so we need to come together and give back to the country of our birth and that’s why I said the foundation does not have a life span. We hope to have a fund raising event in the future.
