To speak of the African professor today is to speak of a figure who, in the imagination of the public, stands at the summit of learning, scholarship, and national intellect. Yet in the lived reality of this continent, particularly Nigeria, that professor is more often a figure besieged. Not by ignorance, as many suppose, but by the thousand daily humiliations of survival. It is therefore necessary to respond to the article by Dr. Isaac Yae Asiedu, an article that, for all its intent to provoke reform, collapses into unfairness and convenient rhetoric.
The claim that African professors are addicted to counting publications while neglecting “nation building” sounds sharp enough to win applause in a conference room, but it does not survive contact with actual conditions under which the academic labours. There is a certain cruelty in calling upon a man to build a cathedral when you have refused him both stone and bread. It is easy to romanticize invention when you have never worked in a laboratory where the only functional equipment is chalk and hope.
Let us begin with the most unadorned truth: *a scholar cannot think on an empty stomach.*
This is not metaphor. This is the daily arithmetic of existence. Salary of a Nigerian professor: approximately ₦350,000 to ₦450,000 monthly, depending on institution and years of service. That is, on average, $240 to $320 at current exchange realities. The cost of food for a family of five, transportation, health care, power (since the professor must fuel a generator to even read), school fees, clothing, rent, mathematical impossibility. And yet, this professor is expected to be a global fountain of innovation, producing groundbreaking research in the same world where his colleague in Finland receives $7,000 monthly, has access to fully funded laboratories, and is not interrupted by existential survival.
So before we speak of publications, let us speak of life.
Because survival consumes the hours that scholarship requires.
Dr. Asiedu writes as though research publication is a vanity ritual, proof of intellectual peacocking. That is not only uncharitable; it reveals an incomplete understanding of how knowledge works. Research is not a detour from invention; it is invention’s bloodstream. A nation without active knowledge production is not a nation on pause. It is a nation in regression. You do not get lightbulbs without electricity theory. You do not get vaccines without microbiology research. You do not get technology policy without political science scholarship.
The professor writes. He publishes. He contributes to the world of thought. This is not a weakness. This is civilization itself.
But what of the laboratories? What of innovation? Dr. Asiedu chides African professors for not transforming theory into machinery. Yet he does not mention the laboratories whose electricity is rationed, where spectrophotometers lie broken for years because procurement budgets have been diverted into SUVs. He does not mention the research grants that are promised, publicized, praised, then never released. He does not mention how “approved funding” must travel through a labyrinth of ministries, approvals, and middlemen, until the final amount that reaches the researcher is as thin as a prayer whispered into harmattan wind.
How does one invent when one’s first invention must be how to survive?
Let us go deeper into this obscenity.
A Nigerian General retired recently. A man under whose tenure countless citizens slept with fear as their blanket, whose command period coincided with unending insecurity, banditry, kidnapping, terrorism, and military morale at its lowest ebb. That General leaves office to a severance package worth hundreds of millions, a house in any state of his choosing, fleets of vehicles, drivers, security escorts, medical care at state expense, and a guaranteed pension so rich it could fund the postgraduate scholarships of an entire department.
Now compare that with the professor who has taught the nation’s engineers, doctors, economists, architects, scientists, and soldiers, including the very General whose retirement benefits now stand higher than the lifetime earnings of the man who taught him distinctions of strategy.
The professor retires into silence.
No housing.
No care.
No dignity.
Sometimes not even his pension arrives.
I have seen retired professors reduced to private tutoring in neighborhood parlors. I have seen them stand in pharmacy queues asking for generic alternatives to the medicines they truly need. I have seen widows of professors begging unions to “follow up” their late husband’s pension. I have seen funerals that felt less like a life completed and more like a national shame we have learned to ignore.
We ask these men and women to build nations.
We give Generals wealth, power, glory, comfort.
We give scholars chalk and suffering.
Then we dare to ask why invention has not bloomed.
Let us imagine what happens when a professor proposes a research project to develop drought-resistant grain varieties, or to design affordable solar dryers for rural produce, or to model climate-resilient building materials. The university will ask him to submit a proposal. He submits. The proposal travels upward, where it competes with conferences in Dubai, vehicles that must be purchased, and unnamed “strategic expenditures.” By the time the funding returns, what is released is just enough money to buy stationery and two bags of cement.
And then the same country asks why he has not built an agricultural breakthrough.
There is something immoral in this: the habit of demanding greatness from those we starve.
This is not to say all Nigerian academics are saints; no class of people is. But to indict the whole because of a fraction is lazy and irresponsible. If we must speak of accountability, let us begin where the rot begins, not at the desks of lecturers, but at the desks of those who control budget, power, and policy.
The tragedy is not that the African professor lacks brilliance. The tragedy is that brilliance has been placed in a cage and told to fly.
Innovation does not grow in deserts. It grows in ecosystems, funding, labs, mentorship, research culture, stable power supply, industrial collaboration. Where is that ecosystem in Nigeria? Where industry looks at universities not as knowledge partners but as decoration. Where government sees education not as investment but as an expense to be trimmed. Where scientists must leave to thrive, and the word “brain drain” becomes shorthand for national amnesia.
If you want the professor to build the nation, then build the professor’s environment.
If you want innovation, then fund research.
If you want research to translate to industry, then create the bridge.
If you want scholars to remain, then treat them as human beings, not disposable chalk dispensers.
The lecturer who spends his afternoon in a cybercafé printing handouts for sale is not a symbol of greed; he is a symbol of collapse. He is the man who must do anything to stretch a salary that evaporates on arrival. He is the embodiment of a system that teaches him that research is noble, but survival is compulsory.
Those who speak of the African professor as inadequate should ask themselves: *What would become of them, if placed under the same conditions?* If the critic himself were paid $200 a month, told to publish internationally, while feeding a family and teaching 400 students per semester, with no libraries and epileptic power, would he produce prototypes, or prayers?
We do not suffer from a lack of talent.
We suffer from a lack of conscience.
The same state that cries that lecturers are lazy approves ₦80 billion for new legislative offices and ₦18 billion for presidential jets. The same state that claims universities must “generate revenue” approves ₦5 billion for political conventions. A nation is not built on slogans. A nation is built on budgets.
This is why the argument that professors should abandon publication to “build nations” is fundamentally flawed: nation-building begins *with* research, *through* research, and *by means of research.* The countries we admire, Japan, South Korea, China, Germany, Iran, did not build nations by telling scholars to stop publishing. They built nations by taking scholars seriously.
The African professor has done his part.
He has written.
He has taught.
He has persevered.
Now the burden of proof lies not on the scholar, but on the state.
Before we scold the lecturer, let us pay him.
Before we demand invention, let us equip the laboratory.
Before we accuse lack of patriotism, let us provide dignity.
Before we ask him to build nations, let us remember that he built every professional who governs, heals, constructs, or commands.
If the African professor has not yet built the nation, it is because the nation has not yet built the conditions under which creation is possible.
And the day we decide to change that, not in speeches, not in white papers, not in op-eds, but in budgets, policies, salaries, and laboratories, that day, you will see that the African professor never lacked the ability.
Only the air to breathe.
Only the ground to stand upon.
And perhaps that is the simplest truth:
*You cannot ask a man to raise a castle on top of sinking sand.*
Yet if you give him stone, if you give him his tools, if you grant him dignity, and pay him the living wage already paid to those who have failed us, he will not merely count publications.
He will build a nation worthy of them.
