Right now, I'm physically exploring one of the most impactful universities in Nigerian history, Obafemi Awolowo University.
A combination of majesty and degeneration.
Sublime natural environment and glorious buildings, but buildings badly in need of maintenance, inconsistent management of vegetation, leading to well kept lawns coexisting with bushes.
In my view, almost all the buildings in the staff quarters should be torn down and rebuilt.
The staff quarters have the look of a ghetto.
Yet this is the university of Nobel Laurete Wole Soyinka and other great ambassadors of Nigeria.
The university bookshop has good books, but to reach them you have to pass through buckets positioned to catch water dripping from the ceiling.
In attending a funeral at the cemetry there, one observes that the place is bushy and largely unkept, yet illustrious scholars like the one whose funeral I attended yesterday are buried there.
I wonder how the academics there see themselves, living and working in an environment that in some cases looks like an abandoned space falling into ruin.
Everyone has their perspective on what their self development and labour are worth in relation to their standard of living.
By the time a person invests a good part of their life in self development through decades of specialised education and have to keep daily educating themselves on the job as well as developing others through this knowledge, such people particularly need to ask the value of what they are doing with their lives and how this value translates into quality of life.
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