The graduation of Amouna and Hauwa Indimi, daughters of Nigerian businessman Mohammed Indimi, from Lynn University in Florida should ordinarily have been a straightforward family celebration. Education is an achievement worth celebrating, and every parent has reason to take pride in the academic success of their children.
But the reported donation of $14 million associated with the establishment of the Mohammed Indimi International Business Center at Lynn University raises a far more uncomfortable question: Why are some of Nigeria’s wealthiest citizens willing to spend enormous sums strengthening institutions abroad while schools and universities in the country where their fortunes were built struggle for basic facilities?
That question goes far beyond Mohammed Indimi. It speaks to a disturbing culture among sections of Nigeria’s wealthy elite and political class—a class that too often appears eager to educate its children abroad, acquire property abroad, seek medical treatment abroad, invest abroad and, remarkably, direct some of its most spectacular philanthropy abroad, while the institutions serving ordinary Nigerians are left to deteriorate.
A $14 Million Question
Mohammed Indimi, founder of Oriental Energy Resources, built his business career in Nigeria’s petroleum industry. His contribution to Lynn University may be legally his to make, and there is nothing inherently objectionable about an African philanthropist supporting an American institution.
But context matters.
This is Nigeria—a country where many children still attend classes in overcrowded or deteriorating buildings; where some schools lack reliable electricity, water, toilets, libraries and laboratories; and where teachers and lecturers have repeatedly complained about inadequate funding and working conditions.
Against that backdrop, a multimillion-dollar gift to an American university cannot simply be celebrated as philanthropy without asking what it says about our national priorities.
At an exchange value running into billions of naira, $14 million could make an enormous difference to education at home. It could renovate schools, equip science laboratories, fund libraries, provide scholarships, support teacher development, establish research centres or create endowments capable of supporting generations of Nigerian students.
The contrast is difficult to ignore.
Nigerian Children Are Being Educated in Conditions the Elite Would Never Accept for Their Own
Perhaps the greatest indictment of Nigeria’s political and economic establishment is not simply that public education is struggling. It is that many of those with the greatest influence over the country’s direction have effectively insulated themselves and their families from its consequences.
Nigeria’s affluent families can send their children to expensive private schools and universities at home or abroad. Political officeholders and business leaders can afford educational opportunities in Britain, the United States, Canada and elsewhere.
The poor have no such escape route.
For millions of Nigerian families, the neighborhood public school is the only realistic option. When that school has inadequate classrooms, too few teachers, no functioning laboratory, an empty library or poor sanitation, those families cannot simply purchase an alternative.
That creates one Nigeria for the privileged and another for everyone else.
And therein lies the deeper tragedy.
When elites stop depending on public institutions, they also lose much of the personal incentive to demand that those institutions work. If your children will never attend the local public school, its leaking roof becomes somebody else’s problem. If your family will never depend on a public university, prolonged disruption and deteriorating facilities become distant inconveniences. If you can fly overseas for medical treatment, the condition of the public hospital becomes easier to tolerate.
This is how inequality becomes institutionalized.
What Could $14 Million Do in Nigerian Education?
Consider what a fraction of such a donation could mean to struggling schools.
It could provide properly equipped science and computer laboratories across numerous secondary schools. It could finance scholarships for talented students from low-income families. It could support teacher training, libraries, digital-learning facilities and reliable electricity.
At university level, such philanthropy could establish endowed professorial chairs, postgraduate scholarships, research grants, entrepreneurship centres and laboratories capable of supporting serious scientific research.
Nigeria desperately needs these investments.
Our universities should be producing globally competitive research in medicine, agriculture, engineering, artificial intelligence, energy and environmental science. Instead, academics and students too often work within institutions constrained by limited resources and ageing infrastructure.
The tragedy is not that Nigerians lack talent. Nigerian students and academics repeatedly demonstrate their abilities when given opportunities around the world.
The tragedy is that Nigeria too often fails to provide the environment in which that talent can flourish at home.
What About Borno?
The contrast becomes even more striking when Borno State enters the discussion.
Years of insurgency and insecurity have devastated communities across northeastern Nigeria, disrupted education and displaced families. Children growing up amid displacement and poverty require schools, scholarships, vocational training, and opportunities that offer an alternative to hopelessness.
For a wealthy Nigerian with roots in Borno, investment in education there could have enormous symbolic and practical significance.
Imagine a world-class technology institute in Maiduguri bearing the name of a Nigerian philanthropist.
Imagine scholarships enabling thousands of children affected by insurgency to complete secondary school and university.
Imagine modern libraries, laboratories and vocational centers serving communities recovering from years of conflict.
Imagine a substantial endowment supporting research at the University of Maiduguri into desertification, agriculture, public health, conflict resolution and economic development in northeastern Nigeria.
Those investments would not merely put a donor’s name on a building. They could alter communities’ trajectories.
And What About the Niger Delta?
The same question deserves to be asked about the Niger Delta.
Nigeria’s petroleum wealth has generated enormous fortunes and financed the state for decades, yet communities in oil-producing areas have long faced environmental and socioeconomic challenges.
Those communities deserve more than corporate slogans and occasional charitable gestures.
Where extraordinary private wealth has emerged from industries exploiting Nigerian natural resources, there is a compelling moral argument for substantial reinvestment in the human capital of the communities connected to those resources.
Build schools.
Fund universities.
Equip laboratories.
Finance environmental research.
Create scholarships.
Support entrepreneurs.
Train engineers and scientists.
Build institutions capable of surviving their founders.
That is how philanthropy becomes nation-building.
The Political Class Is Equally Guilty
It would be unfair, however, to turn one businessman’s donation into the explanation for Nigeria’s educational crisis.
Government bears the primary responsibility for providing quality public education.
Nigeria’s political leaders cannot preside over failing educational institutions and then lecture private citizens about patriotism. For decades, governments at federal, state and local levels have had responsibility for funding, regulating and improving education.
The political class must therefore face an even harder question.
Why should a country blessed with enormous natural resources still have schools struggling with basic infrastructure?
Why should Nigerian parents have to make extraordinary sacrifices to obtain the quality of education that should be available through functioning public institutions?
Why do members of the political establishment frequently seek overseas education and healthcare while governing a country whose citizens cannot escape dysfunctional public services?
The problem is therefore larger than philanthropy. It is about an elite culture in which too many powerful Nigerians appear to have abandoned the project of building Nigerian institutions.
We Export Wealth—and Then Import What Wealth Should Have Built
There is a painful contradiction at the center of Nigeria’s development.
We export resources and capital, then import the services that those resources should have helped us build.
We travel abroad for education.
We travel abroad for healthcare.
We acquire homes abroad.
We invest abroad.
We send our children abroad.
And then we sometimes send our philanthropy abroad as well.
Meanwhile, the Nigerian teacher asks for better classrooms. The university lecturer asks for research funding. The student asks for a functioning laboratory. The rural child asks for a desk, books and a qualified teacher.
Then we wonder why our best-trained professionals leave.
A country cannot continuously neglect its institutions and be surprised when its citizens lose confidence in them.
Charity Is a Choice, but Responsibility Is Bigger Than Charity
No private citizen is legally obligated to donate his or her fortune to a Nigerian university. Wealthy Nigerians have the right to support institutions anywhere in the world.
But legality is not the only measure of leadership.
There is also responsibility.
There is gratitude.
There is legacy.
And there is the fundamental question of what wealthy citizens owe—not legally, but morally—to the society that created the economic environment in which their fortunes became possible.
The best philanthropy does more than produce buildings carrying wealthy people’s names. It expands opportunity for people whose names will never appear on buildings.
Nigeria does not simply need rich people.
It needs institution builders.
Build Lynn University—but Build Maiduguri Too
The argument is therefore not that Mohammed Indimi, or any Nigerian philanthropist, should never donate to an American university.
Donate to Lynn University.
Donate to Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge if you wish.
Support global education.
But build something extraordinary in Nigeria too.
Build the laboratory in Maiduguri.
Endow the professorial chair at a Nigerian university.
Fund the secondary school in Borno.
Equip the science laboratory in the Niger Delta.
Give brilliant children from poor families scholarships that do not depend on whom their parents know.
Create a research institute capable of attracting Nigerian scientists home.
Build something so excellent that wealthy Nigerians will one day be proud to send their own children there.
That is the standard Nigeria should demand from both its wealthy elite and, even more importantly, its political leadership.
The ultimate measure of a nation’s elite is not how comfortably they can escape the failures of their country. It is whether they use their wealth, influence and power to ensure that future generations do not have to escape at all.
Our priorities reveal our values.
And when history judges this generation of Nigeria’s wealthy and powerful, the question will not simply be how many billions they accumulated or how many buildings overseas carried their names.
The more consequential question will be:
When Nigeria’s schools needed classrooms, laboratories, libraries, teachers, scholarships and hope—what did those with the greatest wealth and power choose to build?
