by isqil najim
The Investiture of Professor Umar Dambatta as the 14th President of the Nigerian Academy of Engineering coincided with the Academy’s Public lecture delivered by teh Emeritus Professor, Fola Lasisi. The highly experienced professor implore it on Nigerian engineers to see mentorship as Infrastructure that must be cultivated while also urging Nigerians who Japa to return home and rebuild the country at a point in their career.
Professor Fola Lasisi, a former President of the Academy, was delivering a keynote address titled “Engineering through Innovation and Mentorship,” and it turned into one of the most personal and pointed addresses the Academy has heard in recent years. Drawing from a career spanning over five decades, Lasisi used the lecture to confront three issues that cut close to home for many Nigerians: the slow death of mentorship culture, the misplaced hype around artificial intelligence, and the unresolved national wound of brain drain, popularly known as Japa.
Lasisi opened by taking the audience back to 1956, recalling the grand homecoming reception given to a senior engineer who had just returned from Imperial College. “I asked what his profession was, and they said he was an engineer. That was when I started dreaming about becoming an engineer,” he said. Two years later, he gained admission into the Yaba Technical Institute, which he described as a melting pot of young Nigerians from every part of the country, where he encountered, for the first time, conveniences such as toilet paper and a regular water closet — things his own village did not have at the time.
By 1963, he had won a place on the American African Scholarship Programme for American Universities (ASPAU), a scheme he credited to Professor Stephen Awokoya, the first Minister of Education in the old Western Region, whom he described as the man who first dreamed of free education and convinced Chief Obafemi Awolowo to implement it. Before the scholars left for the United States, Awokoya gave them a charge that Lasisi said has stayed with him to this day: “You are going to America. Don’t disgrace America, and don’t disgrace Nigeria. Keep your eyes and minds open. Learn there, come back, and become mentors.” He noted that the batch numbered just ninety-nine, representing the whole of Africa. “That tells you the truth,” he said. “I am not special.”
Turning to the substance of his lecture, Lasisi argued that no nation develops without engineering at its core, pointing to China as an example of what happens when a country backs research and innovation with real investment. He recalled his own role, fifty years ago, in setting up the National Centre for Agricultural Mechanization (NCAM), describing himself as one of the master planners of that institution, even as he lamented that the country has not fully embraced what was built. “We don’t want to see the things that have been built up,” he said.
He stressed that engineering is not a standalone sector but an enabler running underneath medicine, agriculture and every other field built on science. “We build upon science so that you can see the physical, tangible results. That is engineering for you,” he said, urging the gathering to think in terms of high-speed trains, semiconductor plants and smartphones, and warning that vision without action achieves nothing.
But the part of the lecture that landed hardest, by the admission of several people in the room afterward, was his treatment of mentorship. He did not present it as a soft, sentimental virtue but as something closer to engineering itself — a load-bearing structure that everything else depends on. “Innovation creates possibilities, but mentorship sustains those possibilities,” he told the gathering. He went further, in language that has already begun to circulate beyond the auditorium: “Mentorship is a form of national infrastructure. We need people before projects. If you don’t have trained people who can execute these ideas, the materials and infrastructure won’t matter.” He pushed the point to its logical conclusion, warning that a career without succession is, in his own words, ultimately wasted: “If we do the job but don’t have people behind us to take over and continue it, then our existence leaves no lasting impact.”
He did not leave the claim abstract. Lasisi gestured around the hall to former students now sitting among the profession’s most senior ranks — vice-chancellors, professors, heads of department — men and women he had personally taught and supervised. He singled out the Academy’s incoming Vice President as one of his own students, recalling that the man had graduated under him with a first-class degree, and named several others present, now leading engineering faculties across the country, as living evidence of what mentorship produces when it is taken seriously rather than treated as an afterthought.
On artificial intelligence, Lasisi was equally direct, refusing to let the room treat the technology as some inevitable replacement for human beings. “Anyone thinking AI is going to completely replace humans is joking,” he said flatly. “Human beings will always guide it; that is how God planned it.” He placed the remark within the long arc of technological change, walking the audience from the Industrial Revolution of 1760 through electricity, computers and automation, marvelling at how much had shifted in barely two centuries compared to the nearly two thousand years that came before it. His argument was not that AI should be feared, but that it should be understood correctly: a tool that amplifies human judgment, not one that replaces the need for it.
The third strand, and the one that touched the room most personally, was his address to the Japa phenomenon — the steady exodus of Nigerian professionals abroad, a reality that has touched nearly every family in the country in one way or another. Lasisi did not condemn the instinct to travel and seek experience elsewhere. What he objected to was permanence without return. “Go and learn what to do there, but come back home and make a difference,” he said, his voice carrying the weight of someone who had lived the choice himself. He warned plainly against those who simply absorb into foreign systems and never look back. “Those societies were developed by others,” he said. “If you go there and simply merge into those societies, you have failed us.” He pointed to colleagues in the room who had done exactly the opposite — acquiring training and exposure abroad before returning to build at home — and led the hall in applause for them as living proof that the model works.
He tied the three threads together by insisting that none of it can be left to hope or sentiment. Systems, he said, must work efficiently and economically or they fail, no matter how impressive they sound on paper. “If you build something that costs a limitless amount without viable value, you have a failure,” he said, explaining why economics is taught alongside engineering rather than treated as someone else’s department. He closed with the line that has already outlived the lecture itself: “The future is not merely imagined, it is engineered,” before adding that Nigeria’s future “must be consciously engineered through innovation, integrity, competence, collaboration, and mentorship. There is no other option for us.”
Other Voices Echo the Theme
Lasisi’s emphasis on mentorship and the responsibility of those who leave to eventually return found an echo in remarks made by other speakers at the event. The Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University, Kano, Professor Haruna Musa, who attended as a special guest of honour, directly corroborated Lasisi’s call, urging the incoming president to “mentor the next generation of engineers who will build safer, more resilient and sustainable infrastructure for our nation” — a charge that mirrors, almost word for word, Lasisi’s own description of mentorship as a form of national infrastructure. Musa went further to call on the Academy to provide evidence-based counsel to government and champion ethical practices, but it was his insistence on mentoring younger engineers that placed him squarely in agreement with the spirit of Lasisi’s lecture.
Musa also touched on home-grown solutions in his goodwill message, calling on the Academy to prioritise technology-driven answers to insecurity, energy deficits and transportation challenges — themes that run in parallel to Lasisi’s broader argument that Nigeria’s future has to be engineered locally rather than borrowed from elsewhere.
Delivering his acceptance speech as the incoming 14th President of the Academy, Professor Umar Garba Danbatta pledged that mentorship and capacity development for young engineers would be one of the four pillars of his presidency, alongside policy engagement, academia-industry collaboration and strategic partnerships. He promised workshops, conferences, research grants and professional development programmes for younger engineers, and said the Academy would champion home-grown technological solutions to challenges in power supply, broadband expansion, climate change and environmental sustainability — a commitment that sits comfortably beside Lasisi’s insistence that Nigeria’s problems require locally built, not imported, answers.
The outgoing President of the Academy, Professor Rahamon Bello, in his valedictory remarks, spoke directly to the newly inducted fellows in language that mirrored Lasisi’s framing of mentorship as a continuing obligation rather than a one-time honour. “You are joining a community of thought leaders and nation-builders. Your expertise is needed now more than ever to support national development and advance the work of the academy,” Bello told them — a charge that, much like Lasisi’s lecture, placed the weight of Nigeria’s engineering future squarely on the shoulders of those present to carry it forward.
