Beyond the Trenches: Why NELFUND is not the answer to our higher-education problem

I was recently watching the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, on the Afropolitan podcast, walking through what this administration counts as its achievements. NELFUND came up again and again, presented as the crown jewel. And I’m always puzzled whenever NELFUND is mentioned as one of the best programs being run by this admin. I understand why the average person would applaud the program. Loans that let a young person sit in a lecture hall who otherwise couldn't are no small thing, and I'm glad they exist. But as I listened, a quieter question kept forming. If this is the crown, what is the kingdom? When will our universities climb out of the trenches and move beyond begging for allocations, surviving on poor fees, managing worn-down infrastructure and live up to its duty as a pillar of nation building? Let me explain why I can't stop asking it. Two lessons from home I grew up around two very different proofs of what a university can be. My father, a Professor of Medicine, worked at the University of Ibadan on Halfan, a malaria drug, in the mid-90’s before he moved on to the United Nations. I didn't appreciate it then, but I do now: a Nigerian university once sat at the start of a global effort to produce an important product. Not a paper. A product. I remember boxes of Halfan stacked in our house in UCH and my father and his research students getting together in our house to discuss their work. Good times! Later on, mother pursued a postgraduate degree at Harvard. Through her, I learned something no Nigerian syllabus taught me: that the buildings, the libraries, the fellowships, and the scholarships around her were all paid for by something patient and quiet. Harvard's endowment fund, which is now north of $50 billion. Put those together and you get the thought that has shaped some key ideas I believe about education: The world's great universities don't live off their students. They live off what they own and what they invent.** The campus that was really a company Years ago I visited Meta's campus. Somewhere between the cafés and the open-plan labs, I realized I was standing on something that looked like a university, with one difference: it had a product that made billions of dollars. The learning, the experimentation, and the talent development were all funded by the engine next door. Then I turned the idea around. What if a university were built the same way? Not an institution that earns its keep from tuition and hopes for the best, but an enterprise with an education arm. It sounds radical, but it's closer to the norm than the exception. Michigan, a public university, holds an endowment in the high teens of billions. Duke's health system generates billions a year. Columbia is one of New York's largest landowners. Stanford sold its Google shares in 2005 for about $336 million, a stake it received for licensing the search technology invented on its campus. And in China, the state pushed its universities toward industry, research, and licensing, and within a generation its top institutions moved from the margins to the frontier. Then there's another story I find myself telling a lot. In 1965, researchers at the University of Florida were asked a practical question by the football coach: why were his players collapsing in the heat? They studied it, worked out what the players were losing in sweat, and built a drink to replace it. They named it after the team, the Gators. Gatorade was licensed to a beverage company in 1967, and the university has collected royalties ever since, well over $500 million across the decades. Today it's a multibillion-dollar global brand. Notice what started it. Not a national strategy. A coach's question, a curious researcher, and an institution that knew what to do with the answer. Now I need to be honest about the catch, because the lesson matters more than the headline. Harvard's wealth took nearly four centuries. Most university tech-transfer offices barely cover their costs, and a handful of blockbusters carry the rest. China is a warning too: Peking University's Founder Group, once a flagship, went through bankruptcy restructuring in 2020, and the cause was governance, not ambition. So I'm not arguing for magic. I'm arguing for a model, and for the discipline to build it properly. The Gatorade I watched disappear Some years ago I hired a developer (an agricultural economics student) who was in his final year at university. His project, suggested by his professor, was on frying techniques for tiger nut (I’m a tiger nut milk supremacist btw). He did it grudgingly. It sounded small, even a little absurd, to someone who just wanted to build software. But what I told him was this: that's exactly the kind of work that can become a patent, a licensing deal, and real money for him, his professor, and his school. Tiger nut is hardly obscure. Spain built an entire regional drink, Horchata de chufa, around it. A better process for cooking, preserving, or flavoring a crop we grow in abundance could be worth something to a food company on the other side of the world. There are many of such opportunities within universities across the country. Multiply him by the thousands. Every year, across roughly 300 universities, students and professors produce projects on local crops, materials, processes, and diseases. Nearly all of them end in a bound copy on a shelf. Nobody is asking the question that changed a Florida football program and created a global beverage category: What is the commercial value of this? I don't think we lack talent. I think we lack the eyes to see what the talent has already made. And we only need a few to be right. This lack of commercial thinking is why our universities are forever stuck in penury. From 300 universities to 300 capital allocators Nigeria has roughly 300 universities and a median age under 20. Hundreds of institutions, millions of young people, and nearly all of it financed by the same three sources: government allocations, fees, and hope. Now imagine each of those institutions with a second identity. Not a factory owner. Not a conglomerate. A capital allocator, a product developer and a dealmaker, able to raise money, invest it, and use its reputation to connect Nigerian businesses with the world's best technical partners. Here is what that looks like, sequenced by how fast each piece can be built. Months 0 to 12: The foundations - Consulting arm (1 to 3 months): Our universities house statisticians, economists, engineers, and agronomists who are already advising companies informally. Give them a structure, and domestic and international clients a front door. Tie faculty performance bonuses to revenue and outcomes, so it becomes part of the job instead of moonlighting. - Technology transfer office and IP policy: A small team that screens student and faculty projects for commercial potential, with a clear policy on who owns what and how royalties are split between inventor, department, and university. Start with the ten most promising projects on campus. Without this, the tiger nut idea goes nowhere. - Endowment (6 to 8 months): A donation, a professional money manager, and an independent board. Anyone can start one. What matters is the discipline of never touching the principal. - Investment fund (6 to 8 months): A small team, seeded by the university, raising from outside investors to back growth-stage companies, often ones the university's own people helped spark. Years 1 to 5: Building the muscle - Product development and licensing: Expect 5 to 6 months to assemble the team and networks, and 1 to 3 years to find winning products. Most won't win. A few might be another Halfan. - JV facilitation: Pair Nigerian businesses with foreign technical partners and hold a fair stake for the university. Years 5 to 20: The compounding - Asset acquisition: Land, real estate, patents, and equity, built patiently over two decades. Sequenced well, and aimed at plugging into global supply chains, I believe many of our universities could become financially self-sufficient within 15 to 20 years. The part that makes it real Here is where the skeptics will push, and they should. Who stops a political appointee from draining the endowment? Governance is the whole game. The investment and endowment vehicles must be privately managed, with independent boards, external fund managers, audited and published returns, and a legal wall between them and the university's leadership. Private institutions like Covenant and Babcock, free of civil service culture, will likely move first. Public giants like Ibadan and Lagos, sitting on extraordinary land, talent, and alumni networks, will be the real prize if they can secure that ring-fence. Doesn't this pull focus from teaching? It would, if we did it carelessly. That's why the model only works if the wealth flows back into the classroom. What about NELFUND? Keep it. Student loans widen the door. But an open door into an underfunded, understaffed building only takes you so far. Access and quality have to rise together. The flywheel Better finances are the means. The end is a better education, and there's much we can do now, without waiting for an endowment to mature: - Partner with global universities: to fill curriculum gaps and train the next generation of professors.- Bring home the diaspora: Our professors abroad are a reservoir of expertise. Give them funded labs and real research budgets, and many will return.- Pair industries with departments: Coca-Cola with industrial engineering, Nord Motors with automotive engineering, DSTV with mass communications, so students see their learning at work.- Adopt open curricula: MIT, Harvard, and Michigan have opened up vast bodies of course material. There's no shame in standing on those shoulders.- Use AI to personalize learning: where teacher-to-student ratios fall short, letting each student move at their own pace. Better quality attracts better students, industry partners, donors, and researchers. They bring more revenue, which funds more quality. Every flywheel starts with a first push. What does this look like 20 years from now? Let me close with a picture. It's 2046. A young woman wakes up in Ibadan. She's on a scholarship funded by her own university's endowment, now worth billions. Her professor came home from Toronto five years ago to run a lab that partners with a global pharmaceutical firm. Down the road, a consulting team from the same campus is advising a cross-border fintech looking to set up in Abuja. A food scientist's process for tiger nut, first dismissed as a small final-year project, is on shelves in three continents, and a royalty check from it is paying for a new library. In Lagos, a licensing deal is landing a Nigerian-invented product in clinics around the world. Nobody in that picture is waiting on a handout. Nobody thinks of a Nigerian degree as second best. Graduates aren't leaving to find a future. They're staying, or returning, because the future is being built here. That world isn't a fantasy. It's real and possible with the right sequence of decisions, and the first ones are small enough to start this year. My father's lab in Ibadan proved a Nigerian university can touch the world. My mother's graduate experience proved what patience and capital can build around an idea. A coach's question in Florida proved that a single good answer can pay dividends for sixty years. We have the talent. We have the young people. We have the precedent. What we need now is the vision, and the audacity to build beyond surviving the trenches.

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