Nigeria produces over 600,000 university graduates annually. It produces fewer than 4,000 PhD holders per year. And it pays the professors who remain at home less than $800 a month.
This is not a coincidence. It is a policy. An implicit policy that treats Nigerian intellectual labour as infinitely available and infinitely cheap, while paying the premium for intellectual capital only when it arrives with a foreign passport.
The consequences compound over decades. The best Nigerian academics leave. The ones who remain have no research funding. The universities have no equipment. Students learn from photocopied textbooks printed in 1987.
Fixing this requires not money but will. The money exists. It exists in the defence budget, in the recurrent expenditure on executive travel, in the ghost worker payrolls that were supposedly eliminated eight times and somehow persist.
