Oladipo Olujimi Akinkugbe was born in Ondo in 1933, educated at Ibadan Grammar School, University College Ibadan (BSc Physiology, 1957), Guy's Hospital Medical School London (MB BS, 1960) and St Hilda's College Oxford (DPhil, 1965 — supervised by Professor Sir George Pickering), where his thesis on renal hypertension established the methodological framework he would apply to Nigeria for the next half-century.
Returning to Ibadan in 1965 he founded what became, by the 1980s, the most cited cardiovascular-disease research programme in sub-Saharan Africa. His 1972 monograph High Blood Pressure in the African (Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh) was the first systematic epidemiological study of hypertension in any African population — a 12-year community study across Western Nigeria establishing baseline prevalence (then 7–11 %), age-stratified incidence, the dominance of essential rather than secondary hypertension, and the early onset and severity of renal complications relative to Caucasian populations. The work was incorporated into the World Health Organization's 1978 report 'Arterial Hypertension' and remains the foundational citation for African blood-pressure norms.
Akinkugbe's institutional contribution matched his research. He served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ilorin (1977–78) and the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (1978–79), Professor of Medicine at the University of Ibadan (1968–98), founding President of the West African College of Physicians (1976) and of the Nigerian Society of Nephrology, member of the WHO Expert Advisory Panel on Cardiovascular Diseases for over thirty years, and President of the Nigerian Academy of Science (2005–08). He was conferred the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) in 1992 — the country's highest academic honour — and the Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic (OFR, 1979) and Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON, 2003).
He trained, directly or as second-degree supervisor, an estimated 80% of the consultant nephrologists and a substantial proportion of the cardiologists working in West Africa in the period 1980–2015. His students include Professors Babatunde Salako (DG NIMR), Solomon Kadiri, and Friday Aaron. He died on 15 June 2020 at the age of 86. The renal-medicine wing of the University College Hospital, Ibadan, was renamed in his honour the following year.