By Ahmed Garba
Happy 50th Anniversary, University of Ilorin. Since the celebration, I have listened to forwarded Prof Lumumba’s speech severally and each time I imagine that there are at least two speeches hiding inside the University of Ilorin’s 50th anniversary lecture. One is PLO Lumumba’s warmly ceremonial, morally urgent, and anchored in dignity: restore respect for scholars, decolonise the mind, stop begging, rebuild African self-esteem. The other is a harsher voice that often stalks contemporary African debates but is not Lumumba’s: a “Machine” frame that measures national worth almost entirely by technical power, microchips, satellites, patents, weapons systems, manufacturing speed, and treats anything else as sentimental delay.
Both frames diagnose Africa’s predicament. They just disagree on what Africa is, what Africa needs, and what kind of human being the university must produce next. Follow me, if you would,
Lumumba’s moral frame: the university as a factory of dignity
Lumumba speaks like a civic priest of the republic. His first tool is to praise UNILORIN as a giant that grew from modest beginnings, and his second tool is memory: proverbs, repetition, history, and identity. He insists that African greatness is blocked by misordered values: academics underpaid while politicians thrive, institutions seeking validation from former colonizers, societies trained to doubt their own worth. His remedy is moral and cultural reconstruction: restore pride, respect intellectual labour, revive African languages and cultures, and orient science and professional education toward local problems.
In this frame, the university is not simply a technical institution; it is a nation-making institution. Its primary output is not merely engineers, but citizens with a different relationship to themselves, less mimicry, less inferiority, more agency. His best line in this register is the praise of UNILORIN for wanting to be “the Ilorin of Nigeria,” not the Oxford or Harvard of Nigeria. This is a moral argument against imitation as a default posture.
The “Machine” frame: the university as a factory of control
The other frame, common in 21st-century techno-nationalist commentary, does not begin with dignity. It begins with domination. It says: the countries that design microchips control the countries that buy them; the nations that launch satellites control the nations that rent them; the nations that make weapons control the nations that pray for peace. Here, underdevelopment is not a tragedy of self-esteem; it is a predictable outcome of not mastering the rules of production.
This frame does not trust moral appeals, and it doubts cultural revival unless it converts into industrial capability. It is impatient with what it sees as a continent’s habit of metaphysical explanations, demons, curses, miracles, for problems that are actually systemic: planning failures, legal failures, education failures, and incentive failures. Its central commandment is blunt: process before prayer. Not because prayer is mocked, but because prayer is treated as a substitute for work.
In this frame, the university is not a temple of identity. It is an engine of competitiveness. Its output is not agency in the abstract, but prototypes, patents, factories, supply chains, and a workforce that can build machines and maintain them.
Where the two frames converge
Despite their different languages, Lumumba and the Machine frame overlap in three important ways.
- Both reject dependency.
Lumumba rejects the “beggar’s bowl” and the posture of asking the former master how to be free. The machine frame rejects dependency because it creates vulnerability: you can be switched off, sanctioned, priced out, or technologically denied.
Where the two frames clash
The tension is not small. It is philosophical.
1) Human meaning vs national power
Lumumba’s speech is about what Africa should become morally, self-respecting, culturally rooted, intellectually honoured. The Machine frame is about what Africa must acquire strategically, productive capability, technological sovereignty, and bargaining power.
Lumumba asks: Who are we?
The Machine frame asks: What can we build, at scale, before the world leaves us behind?
2) Decolonization as identity vs decolonization as capability
For Lumumba, decolonization is partly cultural: languages, self-esteem, refusing to benchmark. For the Machine frame, decolonization is operational: local industrial standards, domestic manufacturing, satellite capacity, code ownership, and the ability to cure diseases without waiting for imported solutions.
The Machine frame distrusts identity politics if it doesn’t end in factories and functioning systems. Lumumba distrusts factories without identity if they reproduce a hollow modernity: a people technically busy but spiritually colonized.
3) Rhetorical tradition vs scientific precision
Lumumba is a master rhetorician; he uses proverb and moral contrast as instruments of persuasion. The Machine frame demands a colder discipline: numbers, timelines, deliverables, measurable outputs. It is less forgiving of imprecision because bridges collapse, vaccines fail, and grids crash when details are wrong.
This is not simply a stylistic difference. It is two different theories of change: moral awakening versus technical execution.
What the diaspora ear hears in both frames
From the diaspora, one hears the seduction and the risk in each frame.
– Lumumba can awaken a sleeping civic conscience, but moral awakenings often dissipate without institutional reforms, research funding stability, and hard governance.
– The Machine frame can build discipline and competitiveness, but it can also flatten human life into metrics and produce a new inferiority complex: not toward Europe as “civilization,” but toward technology as “salvation.” That too can become a form of dispossession, where Africans feel valuable only when they resemble the machine-strong nations they fear.
A synthesis that keeps Africa whole
UNILORIN’s anniversary becomes significant precisely because it is a rare place where the two frames can be held together without contradiction.
Lumumba’s insistence, be Ilorin, not Oxford, should not mean “reject global standards.” It should mean: meet standards as yourself, in your languages, your problems, your environment, your institutional culture. Meanwhile, the Machine frame’s insistence, build or be controlled, should not mean “worship technology.” It should mean: treat knowledge as sovereignty, and sovereignty as a moral responsibility.
The university’s task, then, is not to choose between moral imagination and machine discipline. It is to produce graduates who can hold both:
– ethically serious enough to reject corruption as normal,
– culturally rooted enough to speak to their people without shame,
– technically competent enough to build systems that work,
– institutionally disciplined enough to measure outcomes and keep promises.
Because the coming century will punish illusion, whether the illusion is that culture alone will save us, or that machines alone will redeem us. The most dangerous dispossession is the one that convinces a people they must abandon either their soul or their science to be modern.
The real victory would be an Africa whose universities can do what Lumumba calls for, restore self-esteem, while also doing what the Machine frame demands, restore capacity. That is not two Africas. That is one Africa, finally insisting on being whole.
Congratulations again to the University of the city of knowledge where the pen is our weapon and horses are our masquerades.
