Neusroom Exclusive: Teejay Opayele’s First Years and Final Hours: A Brilliant Life Cut Short by Nigeria’s Systemic Failure

Written by Emmanuel Azubuike for Neusroom

May 20, 2025

“My Brother, Teejay, was generally unique,” Segun Opayele told me in a voice laden with sadness and pride.

It was 1:27 PM on  Friday, April 18, 2025.

Outside my room, it was extremely hot. The sun was scorching, hovering around a temperature of about 34 degrees Celsius. 

 

 

As a thin wave of hot air brushed across my sweating face, a sharply different atmospheric reality flashed through my mind: Teejay, lying in the cold. It was dark. Car horns blared. Human voices murmured in a dreamlike, faraway tone. He was on the tarred road — still. Unconscious. Breathing. But fading.

The Bumpa co-founder was killed at 10:20 PM on Tuesday, March 4, 2025.

“If he was taken to the hospital 10 minutes after the accident, my brother would have still been alive,” Segun, Teejay’s younger brother, told me.

Several ‘ifs’, a wishful replay of scenarios that could have changed the turn of events.

The life of Adetunji Opayele, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Bumpa, who is fondly called Teejay by friends and family, was cut short on March 4, 2025. Properly kitted in his full gear, Teejay left his house on his power bike for the i-Fitness Gym & Wellness Centres in Victoria Island, one of the affluent parts of Lagos, for his usual gym session. Teejay, though extremely busy, never compromised on his fitness routine.

But fate would strike — fate, the failure of Nigeria’s healthcare system, and the actions of who multiple reports have described as an unsympathetic driver, Biola Adams-Odutayo, would cut short the life of the 32-year-old, whose best life and potential, still lay far ahead of him.

 

Adetunji ‘Teejay’ Opayele (Photo: Bumpa)

Teejay was hit by a car driven by Adams-Odutayo at around 10:20 PM along Ozumba Mbadiwe Road in Victoria Island, Lagos, on his way back from the gym. According to multiple accounts, Adams-Odutayo, who was returning from a restaurant with her friend, reportedly did not yield the right of way when she merged into the expressway.

 

The Search for Teejay, and the Perceived Lack of Empathy from Adams-Odutayo

Back home at Surulere, on the Mainland, Segun had been anticipating his brother’s return. A Bumpa employee himself, Segun also rides power bikes, and takes physical fitness seriously too; in fact, he had been to the same i-Fitness Gym earlier that evening. Teejay, who closes work much later, left for his own workout session around 7:30 PM after Segun returned. He was not expected to be home till around 10:30 PM, but by 11:00 PM, he was not home.

Did he branch somewhere? He must have…

Segun received a call from a friend at around 11:30 PM.

Is Teejay home? There has been an accident…..

“After the call, I had to check our rider’s WhatsApp group, and when I saw the bike, I knew it was my brother’s.”

Yet, the details were, as of then, sketchy. By who? Where? Where is he now? Is he alive?

In that frightful mood of unanswered questions, Segun grabbed his car key and began his frantic journey to the Island.

“At this point, I had no explicit idea where my brother was.” But he soon received direction and went to the accident scene, where he met a guy who was holding his brother’s devices, and together, they drove to the General Hospital.

Over 8,000 kilometres away in Canada, with a time difference of about 5 hours from Lagos, Adeola Monofi, Teejay’s immediate elder and only sister, was having some sense of foreboding — a strong but strange feeling that something bad or evil was about to happen. She was uneasy. Unable to concentrate.

“I was recording a session for my class. But I wasn’t just having it,” Mrs Adeola, a DIY investing coach and financial advisor based in Canada, told me. “I would leave my office to go bring my children back from school, and it was at the bus stop that one of the mothers asked if I was okay. I believe it was around this time that his spirit left him.”

The news of the accident would reach her a few hours later when Teejay’s fiancée called. They were set to marry later this year, and Teejay was building a house in Nigeria for this chapter of his life.

Teejay has had an accident.

“Whose Teejay? My Teejay? It was the worst day of my life,” Mrs Adeola said.

But even before Segun or Mrs Adeola was reached, Teejay spent over 1 hour in the dropping temperature of the night, struggling to breathe.

“If he was taken to the hospital 10 minutes after the accident, my brother would have survived,” Mrs Adeola told me, echoing the same ‘if’ Segun had used.

According to multiple accounts, Adams-Odutayo refused to take Teejay in her car to the hospital. While some accounts claimed that she didn’t want blood to stain her car, Adams-Odutayo’s lawyer, Olukayode Enitan, SAN, when reached by Neusroom, refused to comment.

However, while Teejay was taken to two hospitals by sympathisers who were at the accident scene, he was denied admission because there was no person to stand in for him. For the third attempt, they would circle back to the accident scene to fetch Adams-Odutayo, who, when she hit Teejay, wanted to shift the blame to her driver despite her being the one who was driving before the accident.

In all these, time was ticking away, and so was Teejay’s life.

As doctors tried to save Teejay, friends and family summoned God to save him from death. There was praise and worship. Prayer and supplication. Even Mrs Adeola, several kilometres away, was on her knees.

“When I heard he was still breathing, the first thing I did was to default to praying. I just called all my close pals and told them that this is what is happening. I need reinforcement. You guys. Please help me beg God my brother must not die.”

However, Adams-Odutayo, who was in the same hospital where Teejay was being attended to, never once entered the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) where Teejay was on oxygen.

Since she had been to a restaurant just before the accident, do you know if she had alcohol? I asked Segun. Did she run an alcohol test while at the hospital?

But Segun did not have answers to these questions. All he knew was that she was on a drip and claimed she was traumatised.

When Neusroom reached out to CSP Benjamin Hundeyin, the Public Relations Officer of the Lagos State Police Command, he did not answer whether this test was conducted on Adams-Odutayo to ascertain if she was fit to drive that night, or any other question addressed to him. Again, the question of why she insisted on driving instead of her driver, who was with them, remained unanswered.

But the concerning part, at least at the hospital where the scene was a heart-wrenching mix of prayer and cries, was that Adams-Odutayo and her party never came near Teejay’s family from midnight when Segun arrived till around 7 AM when they wanted to take him to the morgue, to offer their condolence or show any sense of remorse.

“Then immediately we wanted to take him to the morgue, Adams-Odutayo wanted to leave the hospital. She said she wanted to go and get fresh air,” Segun said, with disappointment in his voice.

The family, through the Justice for Adetunji ‘Teejay’ Opayele petition, which has been signed by over 82,000 people, is urging Nigerians to support the call for the police to charge her with manslaughter, not just the lesser offence of reckless driving.

While she has been charged to court for reckless driving, with proceedings adjourned until May 28, Segun told me that Adams-Odutayo has now visited the family.

 

Childhood: A Boy Whose Intelligence was Out of This World

The third child of a family of four, Teejay’s special connection with computers and programming was spotted at an early age. But that was not just it. He was a special child whose brilliance radiated even at a very young age.

Born in Ipaja, Lagos, Teejay, along with his sister Adeola, attended Catlad Private Academy. For their secondary school, Adeola and Teejay would attend Lagos State Model College, where their mother worked as a teacher at the time. At this time, the family lived inside a gated compound close to Command Bus Stop.

“My mum would take us to school and bring us back and we were pretty much always inside the gates. So, we were those kids that others would refer to as those children who don’t come out of the gates.”

However, Teejay’s curiosity and technological exploration would not confine him within the gates. Soon, the neighbourhood would hear about his skills, and the small shop in front of their house, where their mother sold things, became the go-to place where people, seeking solutions to their phone and gadget problems, came to look for Teejay.

 

Teejay and Kelvin Umechukwu in 2018 (Photo: Bumpa)

Inside the house, even at the time he had not gotten his own phone, his computing passion led him to the phones of his older siblings.

“We didn’t leave our phones and our laptops when we got into the university and Teejay was still in secondary school because when you come back to pick it, you’ll find it hot and dead.”

 

The Law Student Who Taught Computer Science Students How to Code

A young boy who exhibited such technological brilliance would be naturally expected to be in the science class and pursue courses like engineering at the university. But Teejay, who Adeola described as ‘having a very distinct opinion about things’, chose to study law at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), one of Nigeria’s respected universities located in Ile-Ife, Osun State.

However, his interest in computers and programming, instead of waning, grew, and he began teaching coding to students in the Computer Science department.

Adeola, who was already in her final year when Teejay entered OAU, recalled a particular moment where her brother’s picture was used on a billboard at the White House, the nickname OAU students called the Faculty of Science. Then, he was known as Codes on Point.

“Everybody knew him as this law student that was teaching computer scientists and engineers how to code,” Adeola said.

Femi Fadahunsi, who met Teejay in school around 2011, recalled how he was always in the computer lab programming through the night.

“He was always going somewhere with his HP backpack, containing a large laptop, as he often carried then, and his glasses, just heading to the computer lab to program all night, and you’d mostly only see him in those places,” Fadahunsi told Nigerian technology journal Tech Cabal.

But beyond teaching people programming languages, Teejay began building platforms as an undergraduate student. One of his earliest platforms in school was called ‘I Rep OAU.’ It was around this time in 2013 that he met Kelvin Umechukwu, who became his co-founder for Bumpa.

By this time, his fixation on making a career in tech was taking a toll on his law degree. During a tech competition which was co-organised by Oracle in 2015, Teejay and seven others proposed an online escrow service which they called Paypanda. This idea won them first place and ₦1 million. The exposure from Paypanda helped him secure a job as a software engineer at E-Settlement Limited, a Nigerian financial technology company.

Although he had been skipping class, he made the decision to drop out entirely from school when he was in 400 level, according to Adeola.

“Of course, that didn’t go down well with them at home,” Adeola said. “We had a family meeting, and my mom was like, nobody is saying don’t do your tech or whatever you’re doing, but you have to finish law, you can give us a certificate and then go and continue your tech.”

But Teejay’s mind was made. He left OAU to go neck deep into tech.

 

The Journey With Bumpa

To address his dissatisfaction with cloud providers at the time, Teejay started HostCabal, a hosting service company, and would hire Kelvin Umechukwu, who, through his own firm, Consonance, had built a community of developers.

The duo later launched SalesCabal, a project which evolved into Bumpa and was relaunched as such in 2021. Now with a customer base of over 60,000, who rely on the business to manage inventory and boost sales, Bumpa reportedly processed over ₦160 billion in five years.

 

Kelvin Umechukwu and the late Adetunji ‘Teejay’ Opayele (Photo: Bumpa)

 

What Was Ahead of Teejay?

Already enrolled in a US university pursuing a degree in Software Engineering, Teejay was not done using his brilliant mind to solve problems using tech. One of his latest projects was on robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), according to Adeola.

“Teejay was already into AI, building robots that can walk. He was already thinking about how we can introduce AI into Bumpa processes. How can we create robots that can shop for our clients? That was his next move and he was already doing it.”

In an era of AI and robotics, the likes of Teejay are the great minds that would have perhaps led Nigeria in the much-needed advancement and proper integration of this new technology that is taking over the globe.

That possible future where he reasonably contributes to Nigerian society was cut short by the institutional negligence of Nigerian society, which cascaded down from government institutions to the private sector.

 

One of the robotics prototypes that Teejay was working on (Photo: Neusroom)

Why would a hospital reject a dying man because he has no one to stand for him?

I asked a lawyer if there were any consequences for hospitals that refuse to admit patients in emergency situations, according to Section 20 (1) of the National Health Ac,t which states that “a health care provider, health worker or health establishment shall not refuse a person emergency medical treatment for any reason.”

According to Barrister Terem Inyambe, “the first step is to determine if the Act provided for a remedy or penalty for infraction of its provision.” And the law did provide a penalty. Section 20 (2) of that law states;

“A person who contravenes this section commits an offense and is liable on conviction to a fine of N100,000 or to imprisonment for a period not exceeding six months or both.”

But this law is often neglected, and Teejay is not the first to become a victim of Nigeria’s failed institutions. In October 2023, Greatness Olorunfemi, a victim of road traffic robbery, died after she was rejected by a hospital.

On March 28, 2022, Dr Chinelo Nwando Megafu lost her life when bandits attacked their train along the Abuja-Kaduna rail track. Her post on X (formerly Twitter), crying that she’d been shot, was mocked. But it was the lack of quick medical response that ultimately resulted in her bleeding to death.

As I neared the end of my conversation with Adeola, I had a strong wish that Teejay had not made that trip back to Nigeria in December last year. He had been living in Canada for almost two years. He was meant to return to Canada on March 17, barely two weeks after the accident that claimed his life.

Now, he leaves a devastated fiancée, grieving parents, and siblings who love him so much that they’ll live with the vacuum of his absence throughout their lives.

“I don’t think any of us will ever get over it. So we’re just finding ways to cope with a new reality. So we are just taking it one day at a time,” Adeola said.