Amidst thousands of unread WhatsApp messages, with more flowing in as Sallah day, Friday, June 6, 2025, progresses, I noticed an unusually lengthy message sent to my direct message (DM) by a well-respected senior professor; I couldn’t help but pay attention to it. It was a message announcing the death of Professor Abubakar Roko from the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Physical and Computing, after failing to crowdfund an N13 million medical bill in Egypt. In quick sessions, three articles on the matter were posted on the ASUU ABU Platform: When the System Hates Knowledge by Dr. Kabiru Danladi Lawanti, Nigeria Has Murdered Another Professor: The Shameful Death of Prof. Roko by Dr. Muhammad Lawal Ibrahim, and Nigeria: A Country Where the Ruling Class Thrives on the Corpse of Its Intellect by Haruna Adamu. Despite the festivity, I was sad, shocked, and dismayed beyond description by the attitude of Nigerian leaders who have destroyed the university system, teaching, and research through gross underfunding, disregard, and negligence, making academics a laughingstock. How else has the government, over the years, grossly failed to provide the needed attention to education beyond rhetoric?
Imagine a government led by President Buhari dragging ASUU to court, requesting an end to ASUU’s industrial action and starving the university workers through withheld salaries, rather than fulfilling its responsibilities to fund the university system and address other contentious issues that were amicably resolved during negotiations under the labor protocol.
In my column last week, I made a passionate appeal to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, stating the case of Prof. Roko, who needed a mere N13 million to save his life. Without mentioning Roko’s name, I said, “Mr. President, Sir, the need to enhance the salaries of academic staff cannot be overstated. There are two distressing stories of professors engaging in petty trading: one professor sells tomatoes, peppers, and onions to supplement his meager salary for survival. Another professor is seeking N13 million in donations to cover medical bills. At the same time, yet another has died because the financial assistance from friends and associates was too little and arrived too late to alleviate his illness, causing him to pass away. This is a shameful narrative for academics in Nigeria, and Mr. President can change it for the better. May God grant him wisdom and the political will to do so, amen.” Unfortunately, two days after my article was published, Prof. Roko passed away like others before him. What a tragedy of a nation, killing its intellectuals without qualms.
Earlier, several university lecturers died due to hardship during and after the 2022 industrial action. For example, Dr. Ayo Ojediran of the Faculty of Education, Obafemi Awolowo University, slumped and died in his office in November 2023; the University of Calabar alone lost over 15 teaching staff within the period of the industrial action between 2020 and 2022. On December 8, 2023, Prof. Tanko Ishaya, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Jos (UNIJOS), reported that over 20 lecturers in specialist fields had died due to severe stress resulting from an acute workforce shortage. The university system is edging toward a perilous abyss of corruption, which could be detrimental to the nation. No thanks to decades of decadence, gross underfunding, negligence, and emasculation of the university system by the Nigerian leadership from the military to the current democratic dispensation.
Ideally, professors deserve special treatment to do their best for the development of society. For example, before becoming a professor in a Nigerian university, one must have excelled academically and ranked among the top five students in their classes at both primary and secondary school levels. Furthermore, the person must acquire at least three degrees and spend not less than 16 years after graduating with a first degree, in addition to having several academic publications and experience as a mentor to students. The eggheads in the university are the intellectual bank for innovative solutions to societal challenges and progress, as the university system is designed to provide workforce development that can address the nation’s developmental challenges. However, Nigerian leaders often despise them and treat the university system with contempt. As a result, Nigeria’s intellectual crème de la crème, the academics, are among the most disenchanted, discontented, unmotivated, and embittered workers. What an irony.
The shabby treatment of academics has led to a brain drain in Nigeria, resulting from the inadequate compensation and support provided to its academic staff. Other nations have immensely benefited from such losses. The Nigerian lecturers are courted and lured with mouth-watering offers to exploit their intellectual treasures while their home country, Nigeria, treats them with disdain. What a shame! The academic staff who, out of patriotism, remain to work for their fatherland are facing severe hardship in an unfriendly environment, intense work pressure, and poor health services, resulting in the deaths of professors like Roko and lower ranks. These are the ordeals of academics in Nigeria. What is the consequence of the ugly trend?
A significant repercussion of the university system’s negligence is the decline in educational standards. The falling standard of the university system produces half-baked graduates. Engineers who lack the knowledge to engineer, lawyers who are unfamiliar with the laws, accountants who neither understand checks nor balances, and medical practitioners whose services often lead to patients’ demise rather than healing.
The situation is even more concerning when paraphrasing Haruna Adamu’s statement in his recent write-up, in which he said, “It is evident that a nation that destroys its systems of education destroys itself. Nigeria’s epitaph is already being written, not in libraries, but in the empty wallets of its scholars and the silent graves of its thinkers. The nation that systematically exterminates its intellectual class, or when the last academic flees, will find that what remains won’t be a country, but merely a geographic space filled with angry, uneducated people, their looters and warlords as their leaders.”
Today, Prof. Roko and other fallen heroes are gone, and no one can bring back their lives. While mourning their deaths with strenuous pain and praying for their souls to rest in peace, we must not allow their demise to be in vain by letting things continue as they are. The key to unlocking the solution to the precarious decay in the university is accessible to Mr. President and his team, the President of the people, who was massively voted into power against all odds within and without—the case of currency exchange before the 2023 election is still fresh in our memory, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He can salvage the situation by favorably considering and expressly approving Yayale’s renegotiation outcomes, which we hope will permanently address the challenges facing public universities in Nigeria. May God grant him wisdom and the political will to do so, amen