A Public Lecture in Honour of Professor Ndowa Ekoate Sunday Lale
A. Introduction: A System at the Crossroads
- I will like to start by expressing my sincere gratitude to the organizing team led by Dr. Williams .W. Modi, for the honour of inviting me to deliver this public lecture in celebration of my friend and brother, Professor Ndowa Ekoate Sunday Lale. I will say more about him shortly. The theme of my reflection is “At The Crossroads of Challenge and Renewal: Reclaiming the Future of Nigerian Universities for National and Global Relevance”. I do not intend this lecture to dwell on despair. Rather, it is an opportunity to draw meaningful connections between our past and present, in order to better guide the path forward.
- Nigerian universities stand at a historic crossroads. Once revered as engines of elite formation, social mobility, national consciousness, and intellectual leadership on the African continent, they now confront a convergence of structural, financial, cultural, and philosophical crises that threaten their relevance both nationally and globally. Yet history reminds us that universities are often most transformative precisely when they respond creatively to moments of profound strain.
- Universities are among the most resilient institutions ever created as they are continually redefining their purpose. From medieval Europe to postcolonial Africa, the university has remained a central site for knowledge production, leadership formation, and societal self-reflection. In Nigeria, the modern university emerged as a national project—conceived to train skilled manpower, foster unity, and provide intellectual leadership for a newly independent state. Institutions such as Ibadan, Nsukka, Ife, Zaria, and Lagos were not merely campuses; they were symbols of national aspiration and possibility.
- in recent years, however, Nigerian universities have faced layered and persistent crisis marked by declining funding, eroding academic morale, infrastructural decay, recurring labour disputes, weakened research impact, and diminishing global visibility. These challenges are not isolated failures but symptoms of deeper misalignments between scholarship and national development, between institutional autonomy and accountability, and between inherited models of governance and the demands of a rapidly changing global knowledge economy.
