The Rot in Our Ivory Towers: What Next?! By TheConscienceChronicler

I have spent months walking through the corridors of Nigerian universities, sitting in lecturers’ offices that often double as bedrooms, waiting in departmental offices where the only reliable equipment is an old-fashioned ceiling fan, listening to students who lower their voices as if knowledge itself has become contraband.

I have surveyed students’ hostels and felt like I was on an excursion in refugee camps. Lecture theatres have become relics of their old forms. What I have gathered is not a collection of isolated anomalies or complaints; it is a portrait of systemic decay so comprehensive that one begins to wonder whether the Nigerian university can still be so-called anymore at all.

The rot is no longer at the foundation. It has climbed every storey, seeped into every office, and now sits confidently in the dean’s chair wearing academic robes, collecting salaries, signing results, shaping destinies. It has faces, names, positions, and patterns. And the most frightening thing about it is not that it exists, but that it has been normalised.

Let me begin with a man who has become, in the minds of students under him, a symbol of academic cruelty: Dr Olatunji Tajudeen Fasasi Abanikanda, until July 2025, professor and the Dean of the School of Agriculture at Lagos State University’s Epe Campus. The university’s Governing Council dismissed him, but the story of his misconduct resonates far beyond one man. Abanikanda subjected students to what the university itself described as “degrading and inhumane treatment.”

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In a viral video, fourth-year agriculture students were kept on the farm from 6:30 a.m. until late at night, no break, no food, no water. It rained heavily for over an hour, and they remained outside, shivering, while he stayed indoors. When he eventually emerged and saw that some students had left, he threatened to fail them. Those who stayed were detained even longer and only released when he realised the footage was spreading online.

In an audio recording that later surfaced, he described himself as a “Sango worshipper” and threatened students “physically and spiritually.” In another recording, he berated a student who could not stand because of leg pain: “I will make many things pain you, not just your leg. I will make your heart pain you. I will keep you here, and I have the authority to do it.” This is the tyranny that hides behind “discipline.” The tyranny of lecturers who schedule practicals at punishing hours simply because they can.

The tyranny of supervisors who treat mentorship as domination. It abounds in various expressions, if you care to listen to the victims. The tyranny of academics who weaponise grades, delay, humiliation, and fear. They withhold guidance the way a policeman withholds directions, waiting for you to commit an offence rather than pointing you toward the right path. Students and alumni describe the Farm Practical Year not as training but as coerced labour: useless tasks, no real instruction, no measurable learning.

Students were reportedly denied water, slapped, forced to pay for supplies supposedly covered by school funds, and threatened with carryovers for refusing. Abanikanda was also accused of sexual harassment, unauthorised collection of money, and a consistent pattern of intimidation spanning decades. He was not alone: a colleague, Dr Khadeejah Kareem-Ibraheem, was dismissed alongside him for allegedly keeping over ₦10.6 million from farm proceeds in a personal account instead of remitting it to the university. Two decades of abuse are not just a personal failure; they represent an institutional confession. Generations passed through that department while the system watched, adjusted itself around the cruelty, and called it “normal.”

If Abanikanda represents academic tyranny, Cyril Ndifon represents another face of the same rot: sexual predation at the highest levels of authority. Ndifon was, until recently, the Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Calabar, the man charged with certifying that law students were “fit in learning and character” before they could be called to the Nigerian Bar. In November 2025, a Federal High Court sentenced him to prison for sexual harassment.

The evidence included messages in which he solicited nude photographs from a 16-year-old prospective student and from other students, using academic opportunities as bait. A judge called it “dismaying” that a dean of law could turn himself into a predator. But what is truly dismaying is how unsurprising it was to students. One conviction does not cleanse a system; it merely confirms what has long been whispered: that for many young women, higher education involves navigating corridors where grades have prices and bodies have exchange values. And this is why students speak in hushed tones. Not because they are timid, but because institutions have trained them to understand that speaking out can be punished more quickly than wrongdoing.

The tyranny of abuse is matched by a quieter, more sophisticated corruption: the political capture of academic standards. Walk through many federal universities, and you will find academics who barely teach, rarely publish, and seldom appear on campus except for ceremonies. They shuttle between Abuja and state capitals, chasing appointments and contracts, cultivating governors and godfathers.

Scholarship becomes optional because political access has become more rewarding than intellectual labour. But the relationship has evolved. It is no longer only professors chasing political patronage. Politicians now chase academic titles, sometimes with astonishing speed. When news broke that a serving high-ranking political figure had earned two PhDs within a few months from Nigerian universities, the question was not philosophical; it was procedural: how does anyone, let alone a full-time public officeholder complete doctoral admission, coursework, proposal defense, seminars, fieldwork, writing, supervision, external examination, and senate approval twice in such a short window? A PhD is not a weekend seminar.

It is not an executive certificate. It is not a badge to pin on an agbada. Historically, universities offered honorary doctorates—honoris causa—for social contributions, not scholarly work. But once regulators began tightening rules around honorary degrees, restricting how titles could be used and discouraging awards to serving officials, one door closed. And a window opened: convert honorary intentions into “regular” degrees, whether or not the rigour was met. This is not merely about individual ambition. It is about institutional complicity, with administrators and supervisors weakening checks, bending timelines, bypassing scrutiny, and allowing political pressure to replace academic independence. When this happens, genuine PhD holders are devalued, postgraduate schools lose credibility, and Nigerian degrees suffer international distrust. A “PhD-in-months” is not a miracle. It is a symptom of a system that has decided image matters more than knowledge.

The collapse of standards is mirrored by the collapse of research culture, and here, the rot is not only moral; it is economic. A lecturer with a PhD in a federal university can earn a salary that struggles to sustain dignity in an economy defined by inflation, currency collapse, and rising costs. Now compare that to the cost of publishing in reputable international journals. Article processing charges can run into thousands of dollars. For many Nigerian academics, publishing internationally is not an intellectual challenge; it is a financial impossibility.

So, researchers make degrading choices: abandon global journals, publish locally with limited visibility, beg colleagues abroad, or depend on discounts meant for low-income contexts that remain crushing. Some papers only see the light of day because someone outside Nigeria pays. This is how a country kills scholarship without banning it. You simply make the cost of doing serious research incompatible with survival. Then you blame academics for not publishing, while providing libraries without books, laboratories without equipment, and internet connections that fail hourly. The wonder is not that research output has declined. The wonder is that anyone still tries. I salute those truly erudite who stay committed.

When institutions are broke and accountability is weak, corruption becomes a business model. Nothing illustrates this more brutally than the money-for-marks syndrome, the most naked, degrading, and corrosive transaction in Nigerian academic life. Allegations of extortion in tertiary institutions have become almost routine: lecturers selling handouts as compulsory “tickets” to pass, supervisors demanding extra fees for supervision, departments withholding results until unofficial departmental “contributions” are paid, exam officers offering “help” to failing students for a price, and admissions processes that quietly require unofficial payments.

The logic is simple: the lecturer controls the grade; the student fears failure; delay can destroy a family financially. In that environment, power becomes a weapon. Students pay because reporting often changes nothing, and retaliation is faster than justice. When grades can be bought, excellence becomes meaningless. The student who refuses to pay watches the wealthy or connected student purchase an A. The lesson is not subtle: merit does not matter. Money matters. Connections matter. The university is not there to develop you; it is there to extract from you.

And yet, it would be dishonest to pretend that lecturers exist outside the crisis. Many have been driven into shameful practices by the same system that condemns them. Across Nigeria, academics who were once pillars of middle-class respectability are sinking into poverty: poor salaries, yet delayed, shrinking purchasing power, rising workloads, and collapsing morale. Some sleep in their offices because transport has become unaffordable. Some trek long distances because petrol costs have turned vehicles into decorative assets, gathering dust somewhere. Some borrow to eat. Some cannot afford basic healthcare. There are reports of lecturer deaths linked to hardship; people who served the country for decades and could not afford treatment should horrify any nation that still claims to value knowledge.

A society that allows professors to beg online for medical funds while lawmakers enjoy obscene allowances is not merely unfair; it is morally upside down. And when such a society then wonders why lecturers sell handouts, why supervision becomes transactional, why mentorship collapses, it is asking a question it already answered with neglect. The workload increases. The pay loses value. The passionate ones burn out or leave. The ones who remain improvise survival. Students become customers, not because that is education, but because hunger is stronger than ethics.

The consequences are visible in staffing. Entire departments are thinning out as academics emigrate to countries where their work buys dignity. In some institutions, faculty-student ratios have become grotesque, one lecturer to dozens of students, marking piles of scripts that no human being can read carefully, supervising projects too many to guide properly, teaching without time to research, researching without tools to do it well or even publish them.

Universities respond with theatre: “accreditation tourism,” borrowing lecturers from other institutions during accreditation visits, temporarily filling offices with borrowed bodies to impress inspectors. The paperwork passes. The system remains hollow. When programmes lose accreditation, when practical courses become theoretical stories because equipment is absent, when students learn science without labs and medicine without facilities, the university keeps its outward rituals, convocations, gowns, speeches, while its substance collapses.

The rot does not stop at the lecturer’s level. It climbs into management. When a vice-chancellor is accused of collecting bribes from contractors for equipment meant to serve students, the tragedy is not only the stolen money; it is the stolen future. Every substandard lab, every missing instrument, every student trained without the right tools becomes part of the crime. And when a country appoints people into national leadership positions despite questionable credentials, it signals something even darker: that education is not respected even by those entrusted to manage it. In such a climate, truth becomes negotiable, and competence becomes optional.

Yet students receive degrees from institutions that can no longer educate. They graduate from universities where infrastructures decay, where state funding is abandoned, and responsibility outsourced, where fees rise while services collapse, where delays and administrative incompetence steal years from young lives. They emerge into an economy that distrusts their certificates, into an unemployment crisis that turns learning into regret. The university remains standing, but increasingly it resembles a factory of disappointment, collecting fees, issuing results, and producing graduates who must re-educate themselves elsewhere to become employable.

So, what next? It is the question that haunts every conversation about Nigerian universities. What is next after one predator is convicted, but ten more remain? What’s next after salaries go unpaid and the best minds leave? What is next after another cohort graduates with certificates that employers no longer trust? What next when a professor begs for medical funds and dies anyway? The ruling class treats lecturers like disposable labour while educating their own children abroad and seeking healthcare overseas. And in the middle of this tragedy, many Nigerians have been brutalised into cynicism: “Lecturers complain too much.” Yes, because they are being slowly buried alive, and you are watching the burial as entertainment.

Yet the universities still admit students. They still hold convocations. They still award degrees. The appearance survives; the essence decays. Students learn that supervisors are to be endured, not engaged. Lecturers learn that scholarship is a luxury they cannot afford. Administrators learn that corruption is easier than reform. Revival cannot be left to a negligent government alone. State governments have abandoned their institutions. Federal promises are recycled like propaganda. But citizens, alumni, professional bodies, unions, civil society, and the diaspora must also recognise that the university is not merely a campus; it is a national infrastructure. When it collapses, everything collapses with it: healthcare, law, engineering, governance, and innovation. What next could be nothing, decay continuing until the public university collapses entirely, replaced by foreign branches, online substitutes, private institutions for those who can pay, and nothing for those who cannot. Nigeria could accept a future where it no longer produces knowledge, only consumes it, permanently dependent on others for ideas that shape the world. Or perhaps, this is the thin hope that keeps a few scholars reading, writing, teaching, supervising despite everything, perhaps we finally decide that the rot is not inevitable.

Perhaps we decide that abuse must carry consequences, that salaries should reflect dignity, that research must be funded, that academic titles must mean something again, that students must be taught and protected, and not exploited. It is a faint hope. The evidence against it is overwhelming. But hope is what remains when towers have crumbled, and the stench has spread. What next? The answer, as always, is in our hands. The President, the Vice President. The Ministers and officials connected to education management and the Nigerian Universities Commission. All of us. TheConscienceChronicler.