By Farooq Kperogi Nigerians have become so listlessly accustomed to the epidemic of dubious awards. Every week, some grandiloquently named o...
By Farooq Kperogi
Nigerians have become so listlessly accustomed to the epidemic of dubious awards. Every week, some grandiloquently named organization nobody has heard of announces a “Man of the Year,” “Icon of Democracy,” “African Leadership Excellence Award,” “Global Peace Ambassador” or some similarly inflated honor for politicians, traditional rulers, businessmen and anyone else vain or credulous enough to accept it.
But the award racket now appears to be mutating into something potentially more consequential.
Someone recently called my attention to an organization called STAi Research University of Leadership, Management and Technology in Abuja, which on July 25 installed the Lamido of Adamawa, Muhammadu Barkindo Aliyu Mustapha, as its “Founding Chancellor.”
There was no mainstream media coverage of the event. But Idi Mukhtar Maiha,Tinubu's Minister for Livestock who is from Adamawa State, was there. The Lamido himself is said to be old and sick and was represented by his eldest son.
Although the Lamido was made the “founding chancellor” of the unlicensed university, there was no vice chancellor at the occasion.
The person who alerted me to this strange institution also pointed out that “Dr.” Ogah seems to have an unusual attraction for Northern traditional rulers and Islamic clerics.
Premium Times reported in 2022 that StandTall honored the Emir of Dutse and created a research center bearing his name. The same event involved Adamu Baba-Yunusa, the Ona of Abaji, with another center named after him. STAi's current board chairman is the Emir of Zazzau.
A 2021 StandTall conference was held in collaboration with the Kabiru Gombe Centre for Religious Diversity, Ethics and Peace Studies, named after the prominent Izala cleric Sheikh Kabiru Gombe. Ogah named a building on the 3D design of his campus after Izala leader Bala Lau.
“I looked at the photos of the event and asked myself how prominent Nigerians could be so much in love with titles that they would not even ask if an awarding institution is genuine,” the source said.
He has a point. STAi Research University is not on the National Universities Commission's list of licensed Nigerian private universities.
The organization behind it is StandTall Africa Initiative, founded by one self-described “Dr.” Ogah Emmanuel Edeoja whose PhD is “in view,” which is Nigerian English for “not yet earned,” but he addresses himself as a "Dr.," nonetheless.
Perhaps his “Dr.” derives from an honorary doctorate. But if it is honorary, there is another complication. In May 2026, the Federal Government approved rules specifically forbidding recipients of honorary doctorates from using “Dr.” in official, academic or professional contexts on the strength of those awards. The National Universities Commission had already become alarmed enough by Nigeria's epidemic of honorary doctorates and manufactured “Drs” to establish guidelines against their abuse.
Anyway, an organization that grew partly through the promiscuous distribution of awards is now promoting a “research university” whose founder publicly bears a doctoral title that his own published academic biography does not explain.
The supposed university itself appears to exist only in the imagination of its founder. I could find no independent university website, no publicly advertised accredited degree programs, no academic catalogue and no recognizable institutional infrastructure of the sort one associates with an operating university.
More revealingly, the organization's own account of the Lamido's installation describes faculties and research centers that “will” be established and announces fundraising for a proposed Senate House.
In other words, even its own publicity indicates that much of the institution whose “Founding Chancellor” has already been installed remains in the realm of futurity.
But the titles have arrived ahead of the university. There is already a “Founding Chancellor.” There are proposed faculties bearing the names of wealthy Nigerians. There are research centers named after prominent people. There are dignitaries, ceremonies, photographs and the grand institutional vocabulary of academia.
The buildings can come later. The titles must come first.
That is precisely how Nigeria's award culture works. Prestige is manufactured through association. Once an emir, minister, professor or billionaire appears on a stage with you, poses for photographs and accepts an imposing title, you appropriate a fraction of his social capital.
The process then becomes self-reinforcing. The fifth prominent person joins because the first four did. Nobody wants to be the tiresome fellow who asks the embarrassingly elementary question: Who exactly are these people? That is how reputational laundering works.
There is nothing inherently improper about trying to establish a private university. Nor have I found evidence that StandTall Africa Initiative itself is fictitious or that its promoters are engaged in criminal fraud. STAi Research University may simply be a proposed university whose promoters have galloped far ahead of regulatory approval in their choice of nomenclature and ceremonial theatrics.
But before anybody accepts an appointment as chancellor, pro-chancellor, vice-chancellor, professor or chairman of something that calls itself a university, it should first be established that it has been licensed by the NUC.
Nigeria's old award racket thrived on our almost pathological hunger for titles. Its emerging mutation may be discovering that there is an even more profitable frontier than giving people impressive titles. It is creating impressive institutions to house them.
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