UNIVERSITY ENDOWMENTS: UNITED STATES vs. NIGERIA

By Akin Ojumu

On Monday, Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, launched what has been described as the largest initial public offering (IPO) in African history on the Nigerian Exchange for Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals.

The refinery is reportedly seeking as much as $2.1 billion from the investing public to finance expansion.

Two-point-one billion dollars.

While I was still digesting that number, another story appeared on my social-media feed. An American billionaire had given billions of dollars to an American university.

And immediately, the contrast slapped me in the face.

One billionaire was asking the public to invest billions into the expansion of a private commercial empire.

Another billionaire was transferring billions of his own private fortune into an institution of learning so that students he will never meet, professors yet unborn, and researchers working decades after his death may benefit from it.

That contrast sent me down a rabbit hole. I began asking a simple question:

Where are the Nigerian university endowments?

I’m not asking about the ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Not the freshly painted lecture halls with somebody’s name engraved across the entrance. Not the twenty-seater buses donated while television cameras roll. Not the computers handed over to a vice-chancellor while photographers scramble for the right angle. Not the ₦10 million scholarship fund announced at a banquet where the champagne budget may itself rival the donation.

I mean real endowments. Permanent capital. Professionally managed assets. Money invested so that universities can draw income from it not merely next semester, but fifty, seventy-five, one hundred years from now.

Where is that money?

Because Nigeria certainly does not lack wealthy people. Good heavens, no. Nigeria has billionaires. Nigeria has multimillionaires. Nigeria has oil magnates. Banking titans. Telecommunications barons. Industrialists. Real-estate emperors. 

Political grandees. Retired governors whose lifestyles suggest that public service may be the most lucrative entrepreneurial venture known to man.

Former ministers. Former senators. Former this. Former that. Men whose convoys are longer than undergraduate registration queues.

People who build mansions with enough rooms to house an entire faculty. People who own private jets in a country where university students sometimes sit on broken chairs inside buildings without reliable electricity.

Nigeria does not lack wealth. Nigeria lacks a culture of converting private wealth into permanent intellectual capital.

That is the scandal.

And when you compare the numbers with the United States, the scale of the failure becomes embarrassing.

The United States has standardized annual university-endowment reporting through organizations such as NACUBO. Hundreds of institutions publicly disclose the market value of their endowments.

Nigeria, by contrast, does not appear to possess anything comparable—a comprehensive national database showing what its universities hold in permanent endowment assets.

Even our ignorance is underfunded.

We do not merely lack giant endowments. In many cases, we lack the institutional infrastructure required to tell the public what universities even have.

Nevertheless, the publicly available numbers are revealing enough.

Consider the University of Lagos.

UNILAG reported a 2024 Endowment Fund of: ₦4,438,093,099.08

At the exchange rate used for this comparison, that comes to roughly $3.35 million.

Now compare that with one American donor.

Michael Bloomberg gave Johns Hopkins University $1.8 billion.

One man. One gift. One university.

That single gift is approximately 537 times the entire documented endowment of the University of Lagos.

Read that again.

Not Johns Hopkins’ entire endowment. Not all the money ever given to the university. Not the cumulative generosity of generations of alumni.

One donor. One gift. Approximately 537 UNILAG endowments.

And we are not finished.

Harvard reported an FY2025 endowment of approximately $56.9 billion.

That means Harvard’s endowment is roughly: 17,000 times larger than the documented endowment of the University of Lagos.

Seventeen thousand.

At that point, we are no longer discussing a gap. We are discussing different financial civilizations.

Someone will immediately protest: “But Harvard is Harvard.”

Fair enough. So let us leave Harvard alone.

Let us stop comparing Nigeria with the financial Olympus of American higher education.

Among the 657 American institutions participating in the 2025 NACUBO study, the median endowment was approximately $253.6 million.

Median. Middle. 

Not Harvard. Not Yale. Not Princeton. Not Stanford. Not some university sitting on a mountain of Rockefeller money.

The middle of the sample.

That median American institution possesses an endowment approximately: 76 times larger than UNILAG’s documented endowment.

That is where the excuse collapses.

This is not merely a comparison between Nigeria and America’s richest universities. Even the middle American institution may possess a permanent investment pool dozens of times larger than one of Nigeria’s flagship federal universities.

And then comes the truly humiliating part.

Harvard distributed approximately: $2.5 billion from its endowment in FY2025 alone to support university operations.

Harvard did not raise $2.5 billion. Harvard spent $2.5 billion from the earnings and distributions of a vast capital base accumulated over generations.

That one year’s payout was approximately: 747 times the entire documented endowment of UNILAG.

In plain English:

Harvard can spend from its endowment in twelve months hundreds of times more money than one of Nigeria’s premier universities possesses in its entire disclosed endowment fund.

If that does not sober us, nothing will.

Across the United States, the 657 institutions in the NACUBO study collectively held approximately $944.3 billion in endowment assets.

They spent approximately $33.4 billion from those endowments in FY2025 alone.

Thirty-three-point-four billion dollars. In one year.

America’s universities are not merely educational institutions. Many of them are enormous, professionally managed, intergenerational pools of capital with campuses attached.

Meanwhile, in Nigeria, our universities spend half their lives begging government ministries for releases, praying for intervention funds, enduring strikes, patching leaking roofs, improvising laboratories, and watching brilliant academics emigrate.

And yet we have billionaires. Plenty of them.

That is what makes this conversation uncomfortable.

Nigeria’s problem is not simply lack of private wealth. The money exists. The question is what our wealthy class considers worthy of permanence.

We know how to immortalize ourselves in marble. We know how to build mansions. We know how to buy jets. We know how to throw weddings that could fund postgraduate fellowships. We know how to hold birthday celebrations whose floral arrangements may cost more than a departmental research budget.

We know how to erect gigantic churches, event centers, hotels, estates, and monuments to personal success. We know how to acquire luxury vehicles that depreciate before the ribbon is removed from the bonnet.

We know how to spray money at parties. We know how to announce donations with oversized cheques and undersized long-term vision.

But ask us to put $500 million into a professionally managed university endowment that we cannot personally control, turn into patronage, use for political leverage, or convert into a monument bearing our face?

Suddenly, everyone becomes financially cautious. This is where the cultural difference bites.

In the United States, major philanthropy has repeatedly produced fortunes that outlive the men who made them.

Rockefeller dies. The money keeps funding institutions. Stanford dies. The university grows. Duke dies. The institution compounds. A donor disappears into history. The capital remains alive.

That is civilization thinking in centuries. Nigeria too often thinks in commissioning ceremonies.

Cut the ribbon. Take the photograph. Praise the donor. Name the building. Upload the pictures. Everybody goes home.

Five years later, the air conditioners no longer work. Ten years later, the roof is leaking. Fifteen years later, the building requires “total rehabilitation.”

And somebody launches another appeal. That is not an endowment culture. That is philanthropic event planning.

There is a profound difference between charity and institution-building.

A building is useful. A bus is useful. Computers are useful. Scholarships are useful. But they are consumable. They age. They depreciate. They disappear.

Endowment capital behaves differently. Properly governed, it reproduces itself. The donor dies. The principal remains. The money compounds. The returns fund research. The returns fund scholarships. 

The returns fund professorial chairs. The returns finance libraries. The returns support laboratories. The returns attract scholars. The returns build intellectual ecosystems. The gift stops being a donation and becomes infrastructure.

This is what much of Nigeria’s billionaire class has failed to grasp—or has simply failed to prioritize.

And our political elite is hardly in a position to lecture anyone. Many of the same politicians who preside over decaying public universities somehow manage to discover world-class institutions abroad when their own children need an education.

Nigeria’s elite have achieved the extraordinary feat of governing one university system while privately subscribing to another.

They will underfund the Nigerian campus and pay full tuition at Imperial College. They will starve a state university and proudly post their children graduation photographs from Harvard. They will tell Nigerian lecturers to sacrifice for the nation while their own children are studying in London, Toronto, Boston, or New York.

Apparently, patriotism has geographical limits.

The Nigerian university is good enough for speeches. Foreign universities are good enough for their children. And then we wonder why our universities struggle to become globally competitive.

You cannot build world-class institutions on speeches, appropriations, emergency interventions, and periodic alumni fundraising dinners. 

Universities become great when capital accumulates. When institutions become financially durable. When donors think beyond monuments. When wealth is turned into knowledge-producing machinery.

That is the real divide.

The United States has spent generations converting private fortunes into universities. Nigeria has spent generations converting private fortunes into lifestyles.

One society says: 

“How can my wealth strengthen an institution after I am gone?” 

The other too often asks: 

“How can everyone know I have arrived before I am gone?”

There is your endowment gap. It is not merely financial. It is philosophical. It is cultural. It is institutional. It is civilizational.

And until Nigeria’s billionaire class begins to understand that the highest expression of wealth is not consumption but institution-building, our universities will continue begging for crumbs in a country overflowing with private fortunes.

The depressing irony is that Nigeria has already produced enough wealth to transform its universities. What it has not produced in sufficient quantity is wealthy people willing to think in centuries.

Private jets will eventually become scrap metal. Mansions will decay. Luxury cars will become obsolete. Political titles will evaporate. Social-media applause will disappear.

But a properly managed university endowment can still be educating students, funding discoveries, paying professors, and advancing knowledge a hundred years after the donor has become a name in an archive.

That is legacy. Everything else is expensive noise.