Two Nigerian academics are each delivering an Inaugural Lecture within a week of each other in June 2026. Ordinarily, an Inaugural Lecture is a solemn but routine practice in that domain. There’s, however, a commonality tying the routine this time into a rarity: each of the professors delivering the Inaugural Lecture went from journalism into academia.
While University of Jos’s Prof Major Adeyi moved into Political Science (studied it, obtained a PhD and attained the rank of a professor), Baze University, Abuja’s Prof Abiodun Adeniyi retooled in Mass Communications and went on to become a professor in the field.
In each case, it is a movement from being a marksman to a philosopher. In military practice, it is the marksman who practicalises sharp shooting, but it is the officer (the trained philosopher of war, more popularly known as the strategist) who decides the point the marksman hits.
It doesn’t matter that Prof Adeyi Major did not train in Mass Communications, a PhD and an academic career still puts him as a model of “the caste of professional intermediaries”, the collective depiction veteran communication scholar, Prof C. S. Hamelink, reserved for journalists. In this case, Prof Major is an interpreter of the social as a whole rather than specifically through the journalistic antenna.
It is not much different in the case of Prof Adeniyi whose transition is from the newsroom to the classroom but who chose to specialise in media epistemology. Ideally, epistemology is the place to be for the scholar but, perhaps not at the beginning of the 21st century when it is in total disarray following the disruption the post-positivists have brought about there, worsened by the social media phenomenon. So, it becomes an act of bravery to anchor there and only a former field journalist may have such courage.
In other words, the impending Inaugural Lecture in the two different universities have backgrounds that should make their potential listeners to salivate. While Prof Adeniyi will be giving account of his research journey on June 9th, 2026 at Baze University, on “How Your Village is Following You: Your Mobility, Memory and Mediated Persistence of Belonging”, Prof Major will be doing so at the University of Jos on June 16th, 2026 on “The Dialectics of Teleology, Governability Crisis and the Sovereignty of the Invisible Hand in Nigeria’s State-Nation Building Process”
The tragedy in all these is the wide distance between the story of academic journey of leading Nigerian scholars and the policy mill which should have something to take from Prof Adeyi weaving transcendental variables in the title of his Inaugural Lecture or from Prof Adeniyi’s unpacking of the magic of ‘distant witnessing’.
