By Kola Alhassan
Olusola Adekoya is a household name in Nigerian tourism and environmental business. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Shodex Gardens, a tourist haven in Anthony, Lagos.
In a chat with IkejaBird, the entrepreneur cum environmentalist said, consistency, creativity, exposure and research have helped him to grow his business into what it is today.
“The strategies I deployed that are not out of this world. Consistency, research, creativity and exposure. Anytime I travel, what I take note is the environment. I’ve been working consistently reading, researching, asking questions from colleagues and then practicing. I try to implement what I see and also educate school children who come for excursion about the transformation we want to see in our environment. So, it’s not an easy job, it’s a lot of work.”
“As we speak, I still do a lot of research in the area of tree planting and ecosystem protection. We are all working to restore the ecosystem and also working with environmental activists to correct things, plan for the future, claim back our wet lands and our wood lands.”
Speaking on his business model, Adekoya said, “My business model is not extraordinary but in Lagos and Nigeria generally, it might be new to people.”
“My business model has brought in things together in terms of aesthetics and alignment. Here, we have sections for nursery, pool, museum, restaurant and we do a lot of programmes too, so for someone who is not creative, it might be very hard. My business model is anchored on creativity.”
The entrepreneur urged government to recycle waste and make a fortune from it.
“Government needs to collaborate with advanced countries that are already into converting waste to wealth.
“In my garden, there is a section we use waste tyres to do environmental art – we use plastics to build house, plastic to make tables and chairs. In fact plastics can also melted to do interlocking stones.
“We need to key into all these things to make our environment safer, cleaner and also habitable and also generate more income. Thus, government should be looking in that direction it would create more jobs for people instead of over reliance on oil and agriculture,” he added.
“When the country is very clean and you have some amount of greenery, it is a pointer that this city or nation are environmentally compliant.”
“However, when tourists see that a place is dirty they will visit the place again. Cleanliness should be in our culture and not once in a month, environmental sanitation. We need to be conscious of the little things we do that degrade our environment.
“There should be incentives to those that are doing the right thing, then we would have a cleaner, better and safer environment.”
