As you read, the sweet simplicity of the steep per cents has deserted First Foundation Medical, like a spent era of prosperity and pliant luck. First Foundation, presumably one of Nigeria’s leading medical companies, has suffered a devastating blow that rankles to its foundations and the company has been forced to sack 80% of its workers yesterday, 4th August.
Dr. Tosin Ajayi has encountered his tender state. He has finally learnt that, while leaves of hope may thrive in his orchard today, blossoming and attracting abundant niceties to his name, tomorrow may dawn with famine and a killing frost.
We have not stopped wondering, neither have friends and associates and well-wishers, about the derelict state of massive properties straddling the Lagos metropolis belonging to Dr. Tosin Ajayi, the MD of First Foundation Medicals, Lagos. It was even reported last year, when half-hearted work began on some of the sites, nothing much was done on them for many years. The buildings were just there in their derelict, naked splendour. The situation has not changed even now.
Many years down the line, the buildings remain nothing short of a still-birth, attracting curious stares and pitiful glances and questions bordering on why Dr. Ajayi, a respected medical doctor, would flagrantly abandon his properties which could well be cash cows if completed.
Incidentally, Dr. Ajayi, who is married to Helen Prest, former most beautiful girl in Nigeria, is a highly sought after medical practitioner and respected businessman with a rich antecedent to flaunt and be proud of. But to what can we adduce the seeming nonchalance of the Ilesha, Osun State born doctor to complete his houses?
Ajayi, a stupendously rich businessman with interests in many lucrative pies like telecommunications (he holds the franchise of Siemens) and real estate among others, sashayed into national consciousness in 1986 when the late publisher of Newswatch magazine, Dele Giwa was rushed to his hospital after a parcel bomb exploded on him. His efforts to revive Giwa endeared him to Nigerians at home and in the Diaspora. Since his marriage to the former beauty queen who is equally doing fantastically well in business, Dr. Ajayi has become an exemplary individual more or less but his seeming abandonment of his properties is what beats the imagination of many.
