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By Chukwunonso Ejike
Between 2016 and 2019, the satirical television drama series, Professor Johnbull, aired on many Nigerian television channels. The main character, Professor Johnbull, was portrayed by the veteran Nollywood actor, Kanayo O. Kanayo (otherwise known as KOK). In the different episodes of the drama series, Professor Johnbull, a retired academic reputed for his highfalutin grammar, served as both the knowledge bank of the community and its moral compass. The “erudite professor” as he was called, taught students who were not in the regular classrooms taking notes or laboratories performing experiments. Rather, he taught everyday people in his immediate vicinity – the society. One of the successes of that series was that it put before the Nigerian public, in an accessible way, the role of a true professor – service to his students and to society.
The evolution of the university from the Socratic tradition to the monastic scholarship era, and to the modern universities as we currently know it, have relied heavily on a Professor guiding his students in the direction of interrogating the contradiction between truth and falsehood, substance and illusion. The interaction between the Professor and the student, and by extension, the society, should lead the student away from their hitherto state of darkness to light, at least from the prism of knowledge.
From the 20th century, it became common in European universities that professors are afforded an opportunity give an inaugural lecture once appointed. This has since spread across the world and has been the case in Nigeria since the early 1970s. An inaugural lecture as I had earlier posited (in my own inaugural lecture), is “a celebration of erudition and scholarship and an epiphany of sorts for an intellectual giant, … a sojourner who has returned from the proverbial Olu, from where has brought back some fish in his weather-beaten bag. It, therefore, affords a newly promoted professor … an opportunity to discuss the ideas that had preoccupied them, research-wise, and show their contributions towards pushing backwards the frontiers of ignorance…”. I had further insisted that “For a university in pursuit of its triune mandate of teaching, research and community service, the platform offered by the inaugural lecture enables it teach truths borne out of the empirical research of the lecturer, to members of Congregation and the community outside the university’s walls. This enhances the clichéd town and gown relationship, and contributes to national development.” Because an inaugural lecture is an opportunity for the gown to account to the town, it is a veritable opportunity for the cross-fertilization of ideas. And so it was that Kanayo O. Kanayo was at the Alex Ekwueme Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ebonyi State, on Thursday, September 3, 2026, to witness the 10th inaugural lecture of the institution delivered by the corporeally diminutive but linguistically Brobdingnagian Professor Nnenna N. Nwosu.
In the evening after the inaugural lecture, some professors of diverse disciplines in the university and a few other members of the community caught-up with the “erudite professor” for some banter that all too often is birthed when friends who are pulled apart by the exigencies of their professions, and have not seen themselves in a while, suddenly have an opportunity to recline in the convivial environment of an ivory tower’s staff quarters. KOK was boisterous, poignant and blunt, as is typical of him. His submissions on the failures of different sectors of the Nigerian state were scathing and scalding. More bruising (or even more appropriately, lacerating) was his depositions on the failures of the supposed egg-heads of Nigerian universities. He wondered aloud “Of what use is a professor who is not engaged in solving society’s problems; who participates in rigging elections, and yet sends out prayers every morning on WhatsApp?” his blistering comments reminded me of an article by Professor Toyin Falola titled “Professor What?” which appeared in Premium Times on January 8, 2023.
The failing of every society may safely be traced to its universities. The converse is also true. The Nigerian university system is currently in dire straits. The challenges are numerous. There is the problem of successive governments at all levels blatantly refusing to properly fund education. Indeed, the referenced article by Professor Falola was premised on how professors have become so poor that they beg him for money, as little as ten thousand naira. There is also a putrid degenerative moral asphyxia which the society appears to have normalized its presence around education. It is now common place that parents actively connive with school authorities (even in faith-based schools) to midwife cheating especially during SSCE and UTME. However, more concerning (at least for me) is the active or passive collaboration of university professors with the forces driving the ongoing citadelcide. Professors are responsible for admissions into universities; for teaching and examination of students, for the award of degrees and diplomas, and for the recruitment of their replacements. This affords professors the opportunity to sieve society. What have Nigerian professors in Nigerian universities done with this power?
One of the expectations of the Socratic tradition is that the professor’s judgment and action should be free from prebendal and mundane considerations of self, and be elevated above that of the Talakawa or common man. Only then will the professor truly be able to truthfully guide his students and the society in the delicate duty of making the distinction between truth and falsehood, substance and illusion. Only persons at this level of intellectual purity and maturity should be called professors. Kanayo O. Kanayo went beyond the image of the “erudite Professor” on screen to remind Professors of their true calling and the expectations of society. Two Igbo proverbs loosely translate to “an ear that would hear does not have to be as large as an elephant’s” and “the words don’t have to be as loud as the popping crack of the African oil bean seed pod for an ear to hear”.
• Ejike, PhD, is a professor of Medical Biochemistry at Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike
