The University of Ibadan has just announced the endowment of a professorial chair in the Law Faculty by Dr Wale Babalakin, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), who also holds the national honour of the Member of the Federal Republic (MFR).

Only one or two newspapers published the news, and even so it was given casual treatment. Other media probably didn’t get the news or did not consider it important enough. Well, this may not be surprising. Endowment of professorial chairs is still essentially a novelty in Nigeria .

The practice is well pronounced in more developed societies, especially the West. It is often the case that the more reputable a university is, the more it has endowed chairs and other forms of support from the larger society, including alumni. An endowed chair is occupied by an eminent professor. As we all know, there are professors and there are professors. The more senior and internationally renowned ones naturally attract endowed chairs.

Truly distinguished scholars like Wole Soyinka, Michael Echeruo and Chinua Achebe are good examples. No black person in American history got an endowed chair in engineering until 1993 when the University of Massachusetts named Bart Nnaji, a 37-year-old Nigerian, its distinguished professor of industrial engineering and director of the robotics and automation laboratory.

Most endowed chairs are sponsored by businesses and foundations to honour outstanding researchers and scholars and, more importantly, to enhance the development of certain disciplines in particular institutions through research, teaching and publications. It is common to find Harvard alumni, for instance, who sponsor professorial chairs in their alma mater in appreciation of the quality of instruction and orientation they received as students, in addition to the fact that a Harvard background is a door opener anywhere. There are businesses whose founders may not have attended certain institutions, but they go out of their way to finance chairs in them.

Maybe, such businesses are located in the same community as the universities. Babalakin is no graduate of Ibadan , though he grew up in the ancient city. An indigene of Osun State , he is an alumnus of the University of Lagos and Cambridge University . Does his endowment of the professorial chair at the University of Ibadan owe to the fact that it is Nigeria ’s oldest university?

The ebullient young lawyer has, by his action, thrown a challenge to businesses and professional firms in Nigeria . Huge businesses like Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Nigerian Ports Authority, Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) and companies like MTN, Nigerian Breweries, Guinness, Nigeria Bottling Company can create numerous professorial chairs in universities across the country as part of their corporate social responsibility. And the financial implications will be almost negligible.

What it takes to create a professorial chair in Nigeria is quite modest. The total package is still far less than what each of the wealthy organizations mentioned above could spend to organize a television reality show featuring teenagers in a quarter or to organize a beauty pageant. We live in a society where not even the government shows much respect to the intellectual tradition, even when it pretends that the reverse is the case.

The government in Nigeria would have no difficulty giving national honours, houses and millions of naira to 20 year-year-old boys for winning an African Cup of Nations football competition, apart from naming streets for them. But it would merely hand over a paltry sum to a 65-year-old academic who wins the Nigerian National Order of Merit award, the country’s highest honour for intellectual attainment. The late Dr Pius Okigbo , Nigeria ’s most decorated economist, used to warn that any society which pays homage to mammon, rather than to the intellect and the right values, would have only itself to blame.

The Nigerian education system needs massive interventions. The system, by all accounts, is in a mess. More Babalakins are critically needed. One of my saddest experiences in life was when the great Chinua Achebe suggested when I visited him at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka that I pay a lecturer to drive me to Enugu where I was scheduled to meet a state governor. It was getting too late, so I had asked someone to go to the motor park and get me a taxi to drive me to Enugu at any amount. It was at this point that Achebe made the suggestion. I was crest-fallen. Nigerian ascademics were in the late 1980s and early 1990s paid just peanuts.

“Our take home”, they used to lament, “can’t even take us home!” To be sure, professors are scarcely millionaires anywhere in the world, but their material condition never deteriorated to the level that they would drive “kabu kabu” ( that is, using their private cars as unapproved taxis) until Ibrahim Babangida appeared on the scene as Nigeria’s military ruler. During this period, Nigerian intellectuals who had hitherto been regarded somewhat as a breed apart, lost a critical element in every person called self worth or self dignity or self pride.

A good chunk migrated abroad in what is known as brain drain, an ironic phenomenon in which highly talented individuals, often trained by their own countries which are in dire need of their services, move in droves to the developed world and elsewhere in search of greener pastures and better working environments.
The difference between the developed world and the poor world is, at bottom, the difference in education. The budget of a top American university is more than the annual budget of many a state government in Nigeria .

Bart Nnaji, while serving as Nigeria ’s Minister of Science and Technology, used to impress it upon the Head of State that the allocation to his ministry was lower than his vote as the director of a laboratory at the University of Massachusetts . Nigeria ’s tertiary institutions are bereft of modern books, journals, studios, workshops, laboratories and regents. Research grants, where they exist, are scandalously slender.

What is more, values are now totally twisted in the ivory towers. Okigbo in 1992 at the University of Lagos called the new order “crisis in the temple”. The university administrators have lost their sense of mission and their self dignity that they now hanker after wealthy businessmen and people in power to bestow honorary doctoral degrees on them so that they would, in turn, donate money to the institutions.

Labour employers complain incessantly about the quality of current Nigerian university graduates. They are right. Shell, for instance, tries to make the best out of a bad situation by now sending its fresh graduate employees, to do a one year remedial programme on the job.

But their effort will have a greater effect if they intervene in the universities by endowing chairs, among others, so that the best academics will remain on the campus, instead of struggling to become state commissioners or economic refugees in the United States , Saudi Arabia , South Africa , Botswana , etc.

Let successful individuals and organizations borrow a leaf from Dr Babalakin. He is a good example of a young Nigerian who “thinks home”. Compare his endowment of a chair at Ibadan with the action of the immediate past Zamfara state governor, Sani Yerima, who has just donated a $1m to an American university. Or what do we say about former Head of State Abdulsalami Abubakar, who endowed a chair at some American university? With people like Dr Babalakin, there is a ray of hope for Nigeria.

Adinuba writes from Lagos.