But the event turned out to be a celebration of life for the donor which also provided the ambience for sober reflection on the dwindling fortunes of the universities in Nigeria and the strangulating global economic recession due to set in, in 2014; thus climaxing the European crisis of over-spending that started in 2008. The ceremony was as well a fun fair because it paraded the cream of the donor’s conglomerate as virtually all the Chief Executive Officers and Managing Directors of the different and numerous companies in the Energy Group and Global Fleet of industries came from far and wide to grace the occasion and add colour to the event. Being an alumnus of OAU, Ile-Ife, for Jimoh Ibrahim, dramatis personae of the occasion, it was a home-coming to his alma mater. What is significant is that with the construction of a sprawling complex christened “Jimoh Ibrahim Postgraduate College Building Complex”, the donor had succeeded in putting an end, as the institution’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Bamitale Omole, remarked, to “33 years of tenancy” of the Postgraduate school inaugurated as far back as 1981 by the university Council. It means that prior to the Jimoh Ibrahim intervention with the postgraduate building complex commissioned that Thursday, the Great Ife College of postgraduate education had been squatting on the “upper floor of a building belonging to the Biological Sciences Department” of the university.
Now, coming at a time of scarcity of funds in the universities and coinciding with the golden jubilee of Great Ife University, the Jimoh Ibrahim gift and donation had graciously consigned the long years of excruciating tenancy of the OAU postgraduate college into the dustbin of history. This is a feat to be commended, celebrated and emulated by all the alumni of the nation’s universities now in dire financial straits. More of this sort of intervention from the alumni in particular and the nation’s organised private sector in general will produce a miraculous redemption of the country’s universities from insolvency and imminent collapse.
The pleasant surprise in all of this is that the donor did not see why there were so many accolades for such a simple gesture as making a gift of a building complex as payback to his alma mater for training him and giving him the clue to stupendous wealth. He wondered what sort of accolades would be poured on professors for sacrificing the pursuit of material wealth and making a commitment to a life of service to the modelling of minds for the nation’s socioeconomic development. People were simply amazed at the self-effacing, unassuming, simplicity and candour of the donor.
Yet, in the opinion of almost everyone who spoke, there is a dire need for the nation’s universities to embark on a robust and aggressive internally generated revenue drive to be able to generate the required funding for their academic and administrative activities; and thus, deliver excellent teaching and research services to their students and the nation. The donor was particularly clear that in the coming year, with the global recession moving in for the kill in the financial services sector, no one can depend on anyone else, and no organisation can, especially the universities afford to depend on government solely for its funding; as government has nothing left in its budget to service social institutions after its stupendous spending on recurrent items and subsidy on petroleum products.
As the world, predictably, is going to be in turmoil from 2014, only organisations, and that includes the universities, that think and strategise ahead can successfully weather the financial storm destined to sweep through Europe and America with spill over effects on the rest of the globe. Young institutions springing up at this time, like the Premier University of Sao Tome and Principe, should take advantage of the tips gathered from the fanfare at OAU to proceed methodically by savouring its competitive advantage and exploring the opportunities available to it in rethinking the conventional university curriculum, and filling up the gap to meet the quotidian needs of industry and society.
I dare say, by way of digression, that this issue of rethinking the conventional university curriculum dominated discussions at the Oxford Round Table in the last couple of years and some of us have proposed a compatibility curriculum to address the problems identified in the conventional curriculum; some of which have been published in the Forum on Public Policy, the official journal of the Round Table, domiciled in the United States of America.
We return now to the fanfare at Ile-Ife, which climaxed in the evening of that Thursday, with a gala night that afforded the participantshosts, guests and the donor-the opportunity of a convivial atmosphere to further celebrate the illustrious alumnus and philanthropist, and to talk freely and ask questions about how to cope with difficult times. The hilarious, yet thoughtprovoking question of the evening was, perhaps, the one asked by a certain Alhaji who came all the way from one of the North Eastern states, defying as it were, the threats of the Boko Haram to come down South to OAU in Ile-Ife, like the legendary visit of the biblical Queen of Sheba to King Solomon in Israel, to find out how the likes of Jimoh Ibrahim could become billionaires at such a young age, while some others well after middle age could barely scratch the millions.
The answer came from the business man in words that are so simple as to be commonplace, but transfigured by the divinity of genius, they turned out to be miracle in words: make clear business projections, painstakingly analyse the business opportunities available, do a cost-benefit analysis, leverage the competitive advantage and options at your disposal, make a wise and bold decision, and the millions will keep tumbling in.
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