A professor, a podium, and a promise to the poor: How Yilwatda turned a convocation lecture into a national wake-up call

Convocation lectures are usually remembered for polished grammar, polite applause, and the ritual dash for refreshments. The one delivered at Federal University of Wukari was remembered for something else entirely: it stirred the head, touched the heart, and then, most unexpectedly, opened a notebook and wrote a cheque to the future.

When Professor Nentawe Goshwe Yilwatda, National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress and former Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Reduction, mounted the podium to deliver the Convocation lecture, he did not arrive merely as a party leader or former cabinet member. He arrived as a witness, one who had walked through displacement camps, listened to widows with no ID but plenty of pain, and seen farmers whose greatest tragedy was not hunger alone, but invisibility.
He also came with something rarer in academic halls: proof that ideas mean little unless they are funded, tested, and set free.

When Technology Stops Being Smart and Starts Being Kind
Professor Yilwatda wasted no time dismantling the comfort of abstraction. Nigeria’s poverty figures, he reminded the audience, are not PowerPoint decorations. According to national data, over 133 million Nigerians live in multidimensional poverty. But what gave the figures flesh was how he translated them into faces: the widow in Gusau locked out of microcredit because she has no formal ID, the Taraba graduate with talent but no bandwidth, the Borno farmer whose farm disappeared before government even noticed his name.
He spoke not like a distant policymaker, but like someone who had dust on his shoes: from displacement camps in Borno to widows in Sokoto and Zamfara, from farmers in Benue plains to the hills of Plateau. At one point he joked that technology, like power, is useless if there is no socket to plug it into, eliciting laughter before delivering the punchline: millions of Nigerians are unplugged from opportunity, not by laziness, but by invisibility.

Behind Nigeria’s shocking poverty figures, he insisted, are real lives stalled by the absence of identity, connectivity, and access. Poverty, he said memorably, is not gender-neutral, “it wears a woman’s face in rural Nigeria.” The room laughed, then nodded, then went quiet.

From Global Lessons to Nigerian Reality

With the ease of a seasoned lecturer, Professor Yilwatda travelled continents in minutes. Brazil showed how welfare becomes efficient when built on integrated digital registries. India demonstrated how identity transforms the poor from ghosts into citizens who cannot be ignored.
His recurring refrain became a moral equation: where identity exists, visibility follows; where payments are digital, corruption loses its hiding place; where data is analysed early, disasters are prevented rather than mourned.
Technology, he argued, is cheaper than sorrow and infinitely more humane when it arrives before tragedy.

His takeaway was memorable, almost poetic:
“Where identity becomes digital, governance becomes humane. When cash moves through code, corruption loses its shadow.”
This was not theory for theory’s sake. He made the economics plain: digital social protection systems save money, reduce leakage, and expand trust. Inclusion, he argued, is not charity, it is fiscal intelligence with a human face.

Nigeria’s Digital Compassion in Action
Turning home, he peeled back the curtain on Nigeria’s own digital experiments: the National Social Register linking millions of households to identity and financial systems; community-driven rural targeting sitting side-by-side with satellite-powered urban mapping; and conditional cash transfers that have moved relief beyond pity into productivity.

The most gripping story came from Ngala, Borno State, where displaced persons no longer queue like beggars but buy food like customers through e-wallets. Local farmers sell, vendors profit, families eat with dignity. “Aid,” he implied, “finally learned to behave like an economy.”

*Floods, Silence, and the Cost of Not Sharing Data*
His tone darkened as he recounted Nigeria’s flood disasters. The problem, he argued, is not absence of warnings but absence of coordination. Agencies gather forecasts, but systems do not talk. Data sits idle while water rises.

He contrasted this with Pakistan’s anticipatory action model, where early warnings triggered early cash transfers and relocation, proving that preparation is not just cheaper than response, it is more humane. In a line that hung heavily in the hall, he observed that “silence between agencies often becomes suffering for citizens.”

Universities as Rescue Laboratories
Then came the pivot that made the lecture personal for the audience. Universities, Professor Yilwatda declared, must stop being observers of national pain and become designers of national solutions. If ministries are engines, universities must be the foundries.

Federal University of Wukari, he noted, is ideally positioned, surrounded by flood-prone and conflict-affected communities, to become a national hub for humanitarian innovation.
Addressing the graduating students directly, his voice softened: their degrees, he said, are not certificates of escape but licences for service. “You are the generation,” he told them, “called to build systems that feel, algorithms that care, and policies that see the poor not as numbers but as neighbours.”

He urged students and scholars to build systems that care as much as they compute, insisting that Nigeria’s greatest untapped resource is not oil, but youthful intelligence.

From Words to Wallet: A Donation That Spoke Louder Than Applause

And just as the audience thought the lecture was drawing to a dignified close, Professor Yilwatda did what few speakers ever do: he moved from rhetoric to resolve.

In a moment that drew a standing ovation, he announced a ₦20 million donation to the university, turning philosophy into funding and vision into velocity.

₦10 million was committed to humanitarian analytics research, to help scholars transform raw data into life-saving insights.

₦5 million was earmarked to provide solar solutions for the university thereby powering ideas that align sustainability with development.

Another ₦5 million went directly to the Faculty of Social Sciences, tasked with developing practical solutions to Nigeria’s humanitarian and development challenges.
It was not charity, he made it clear; it was an investment. An investment in intellect, innovation, and institutions that must outlive political tenures.

Data as Redemption, Youth as Builders

In his charge to the graduating students, Professor Yilwatda sounded less like a politician and more like a mentor. Degrees, he said, are not passports to comfort but call-up letters to service. This generation must build algorithms that care, dashboards that warn, and policies that remember the poorest first.

He closed with words that felt both hopeful and demanding: data, when guided by compassion, becomes redemption; technology, when married to empathy, becomes conscience.
Long after the gowns were folded and the hall emptied, one takeaway lingered in Wukari: this was more than a lecture. It was a reminder that nations do not fail for lack of ideas, but for lack of courage to fund them, test them, and trust their young people to carry them forward.
And on that day, compassion did not just speak, it signed, sealed, and invested in the future.

Tooki is a founder/editor, communication strategist and public relations expert. He can be reached via [email protected]