By Mahfuz Mundadu
There is certain sadness that creeps into the soul when a professor speaks, not from the citadel of inquiry, but from the pit of hunger. The recent video of a Nigerian professor lamenting the sorry state of his profession was not merely viral. It was viral in the way a virus is. It is a symptom of a terminal decay, not the cause. The tears of the intellectual class, once tasked with sculpting the future, now irrigate the dry soil of a nation that has no seeds left to sow. It is not a tragedy; it is negligence masquerading as governance, a bureaucratic theatre of the absurd.
But let us begin not with sentiment but with diagnosis. Management, Drucker taught us, is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. Nigeria has done neither. It has managed to mismanage. It has led the nation astray by following the footsteps of its colonial ancestors. Those who never intended for its institutions to thrive beyond producing clerks and subjects. The present state of education, particularly in its universities, is not a deviation from the plan. It is the plan.
Yet, the failure here is not just structural. It is intellectual. It is the deliberate disinvestment in thinking, in creativity, in critical inquiry. If the professor cannot eat, the student cannot dream. If the lecturer cannot think, the nation cannot hope. If knowledge is not rewarded, ignorance will be. So, when ignorance is in power, the only narrative that survives is propaganda. That is not a lyrical swagger. It is a strategic collapse.
To understand the present, Fanon reminds us, we must interrogate the past. The colonial university was not designed to produce scientists or inventors. It was a colonising tool. A place where the colonised learned to mimic the colonizer just well enough to serve but never good enough to question. The post-independence elites inherited the buildings but not the vision. They dressed the institutions in national colours but retained the colonial curriculum. Thus, our universities remained factories of foreign dependency: training minds for ministries, not for missions; for employment, not for enterprise.
Michael Porter would call this a case of poor competitive advantage. Nations, he argued, thrive when they harness the specificities of their endowments such as resources, institutions and capabilities, into a value chain of national productivity. But Nigeria, rather than leveraging its vibrant youth population, its linguistic diversity, its mineral wealth, and its ancient traditions, has instead outsourced its brain. We produce knowledge that is neither contextualised nor applicable. We teach what we do not practice and award degrees in fields that have no industries.
There is no SIWES because there are no industries. There are no industries because we have no strategy. There is no strategy because we have no vision. And we have no vision because our policymakers mistake administration for leadership and branding for governance.
Let us pause and compare, not with envy but with reflection. In 1980, at the height of the Iran-Iraq imposed war, the Islamic Republic of Iran was a “pariah” state, beleaguered, isolated, sanctioned, and bleeding. The West denied it arms, denied it trade, denied it access to technology. But what they could not deny Iran was the ability to think for itself. Iran turned inward, not out of isolationism, but out of necessity. It began to mine not its oil alone, but the most precious resource of any nation: its minds.
Today, Iran manufactures its own missiles, drones, satellites, and pharmaceuticals. Its military is feared by regional and global powers. Its universities are hubs of scientific production. Its professors do not beg. They build. This did not happen by accident. It happened by intent. It happened because Iran chose not to be ruled by foreign benchmarks but to define its own. It happened because a government believed that sovereignty was not political rhetoric, but intellectual independence.
Muhammad Iqbal would say this is the awakening of a nation’s khudi. Its inner self. Its divine potential. A professor who weeps in public is not merely crying for his salary. He is mourning the death of his nation’s self-esteem.
George Bernard Shaw once said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.” In Nigeria, even that cynical remark seems generous. For we are not governed by democracy but by a marketing campaign. Governance in Nigeria is now an event-management operation: every speech, every appointment, every budget, every policy is a spectacle, not a substance. No one asks what has been achieved. They ask only what has been announced.
But announcements do not build nations. Press releases do not build roads. Hashtags do not educate children. Branding, no matter how professional, cannot replace the sweat and rigor of governance.
If Adam Smith was alive, he would recoil at this misallocation of national resources. In his “Wealth of Nations,” he argued that prosperity depends not on gold or land but on the productivity of labour. And productivity is tied directly to education, innovation, and the moral sentiments that underpin social trust. When universities are neglected, the entire economy suffers. When professors are poor, industries, real industries, become non-existent and markets become leaner and poorer.
There is no invisible hand rescuing Nigeria because the hands that ought to be visible are shackled by bureaucratic stupidity. We have built a nation where excellence is punished and mediocrity is praised with rewards and awards. Our best brains flee, our worst liars lead, and our loudest empty barrels are given MDAs to (mis)manage. The result is not just brain drain. It is soul drain.
What then shall we do? Shall we join the professor in lamentation? Shall we resign to fate? No. That would be unworthy of us. Fanon warned us that to remain silent in the face of oppression is to be complicit in our own demise. Iqbal would say that to be idle is to betray the trust of creation. Drucker would say that the only way to predict the future is to create it.
And this is where the burden falls back on the professor. Yes, he is right to cry. Yes, he is right to protest. But protest is not enough. The true value of knowledge, Drucker reminds us, lies in its application. A professor who cannot transform knowledge into innovation is simply a librarian of decay. And if our universities cannot generate alternatives to a failed state, then they are part of the failure.
We must rethink the role of research. Research is not just the pursuit of journal publications. It is the mapping of national futures. It is the diagnosis of systemic rot. It is the design of institutional antidotes. Let every department, every faculty, every think tank reorient its focus from foreign indexing to domestic problem-solving. Let research funds prioritise applied sciences that can build roads, multiply yields in the farms, treat patients, create and power industries, and reform policies.
We need blueprints for an economy built on local resources and intellectual capital. We need to reimagine governance structures that decentralise power and reward performance. We need education that serves enterprise, not just certificates.
Let the sociology departments study why Nigerians prefer silence to resistance. Let the engineering faculties design indigenous machinery. Let the political scientists draft models of participatory budgeting and electoral reforms. Let the economists break free from IMF prescriptions and draft homegrown policies. Let the philosophers, like Iqbal, remind us that a nation without self-knowledge is a colony even in freedom.
The professor must become more than a teacher. He must become a builder of civilizations. He must rise from behind the lectern and enter the battlefield of national rebirth. He must do more than complain. He must convene, collaborate, and construct.
Porter would urge him to build clusters; networks of universities, industries, and government agencies working in synergy. Drucker would urge him to manage outcomes, not just syllabi. Smith would urge him to reconnect the moral with the material. Fanon would urge him to radicalize the minds of the youth. Shaw would urge him to mock the hypocrisies until they collapse. Iqbal would urge him to dream and demand.
But he cannot do it alone.
Government must fund education not as charity, but as strategy. The private sector must support universities not as corporate social responsibility, CSR, but as self-preservation. Students must see learning not as a chore, but as a revolutionary act. And society must stop applauding ignorance and start rewarding thought.
Until that happens, the clip of the crying professor will not be the last. It will be a trailer of a greater catastrophe. For no nation can rise above the level of its thinkers. And when the thinkers are hungry, the whole nation starves.
We must do more than speak. We must think. And then, we must act. That is the Druckerian imperative. The Porterian strategy. The Smithian wisdom. The Fanonian courage. The Shawian sarcasm. The Iqbalian soul. Together, they offer us a roadmap. Not of reform alone, but of renaissance.
Let us not reform this decaying order. Let us replace it.
Let us not beg for crumbs. Let us bake the bread and gurasa.
Let us not weep alone. Let us weep our complacency.
Let us not teach survival. Let us teach sovereignty.
The seed of our rebirth lies not in foreign aid, nor in IMF loans, nor in World Bank templates or vulture capitalists. It lies in our minds. And those minds, like Iran’s, must be mined, respected, and deployed.
The question is no longer whether the professor is hungry. The question is: are we angry enough to build a nation where he never needs to be?
If not, then we too are complicit. In silence, in cynicism, and in surrender.
But if we are ready, then let the universities rise.
Let the minds awaken.
Let the nation begin again.