At Miva Open University’s maiden convocation, the commencement keynote was delivered by His Highness Khalifa Muhammad Sanusi II, PhD, CON, Sarkin Kano, a distinguished traditional ruler, economist, banker, scholar, and one of Africa’s foremost public intellectuals.
Known for his unwavering advocacy for education, economic development, and human capital, His Highness has long argued that access to quality education is fundamental to national progress. Addressing the Miva Class of 2026, he reflected on the transformative power of education, the promise of technology in expanding access to learning, and the responsibility of graduates to build solutions that move Nigeria forward.
What follows is the full text of his keynote address, delivered at Miva Open University’s historic maiden convocation.
In This Post
The Commencement Address by His Highness Khalifa Muhammad Sanusi II, PhD, CON, Sarkin Kano
Members of the board of The uLesson Group, the Chancellor Sim Shagaya, the Vice Chancellor Prof. Tayo Arulogun, members of the faculty, proud parents, and our stars for today, the graduating class of Miva Open University, I say, welcome.
I am honoured to stand before you today because of what this institution represents and what it dares to say about the future of education on this continent
I have spent a great deal of my life arguing, in boardrooms, in palaces, and in academic halls, that education is not a privilege. It is not a reward for those fortunate enough to be born in the right city, to the right family, with the right resources. Education is a right. And when systems are built that deny it, they do not merely fail individuals. They fail nations.
That is why I accepted this invitation without hesitation. Because Miva Open University is not simply a university. It is an argument. A very loud and deliberate argument, and your presence here today confirms that it is a winning argument.
Taking the University to the Student
Let me tell you what used to be true: A girl in Kano, brilliant, asking all the right questions, inquisitive, and ambitious, who could not leave her home, whose parents would not permit the journey. There’s another man in Anambra juggling two jobs, raising a family, watching the years pass and the degree recede further into the distance. Another woman in a village in Sokoto who had the mind but not the means.
I have said before, and I will say it again here: if you educate the girl child, you deal with so many other challenges at once — poverty, mortality, nutrition, the education of the next generation. It is the single most effective intervention a society can make.
That girl in Kano? She can now graduate from anywhere.
That is not a small thing. I want you to sit with the weight of that for a moment! What Miva has done is not merely convenient. It is not simply modern. It is moral. It is a deliberate act of justice, that is, taking the education to where the student is. That is precisely what an institution like this makes possible.
Now, there are those who will tell you that online education is somehow lesser. That a degree earned through a screen carries less weight than one earned in a lecture hall. I want to address that idea directly, and I want to dismiss it completely.
Quality is not a function of geography. Rigour is not a function of architecture. And excellence does not require that you sit in a particular building in a particular city. What it requires is a learning environment that is honest, demanding, and designed around the success of the student. That is exactly what your institution, Miva, has set out to build.
This university did not take the easy path. It would have been far simpler to replicate what already existed, to open a campus, hire lecturers, build lecture theatres, and call it done. Instead, a harder question was asked by the Miva team: What does learning actually need to look like for the Nigerian student of today? And then they built the answer from the ground up.
Technology in the Service of Learning
Now I want to spend a moment on something that I think deserves far more attention than it typically receives.
Miva has developed its own homegrown Learning Management System, designed specifically for this context, for this student, for this moment in African education. What is fascinating about this intelligent system is that multiple components speak to each other in real time, offering you feedback on your progress, reminding you where you are falling behind, and suggesting where you should be pushing forward. Not a passive system you log into and then ignore. An active, intelligent partner in your learning journey.
We are living in a time of genuine anxiety about what AI means for education. That anxiety is not irrational. It’s a fear that plagues all institutions, especially online institutions. So see what Miva did; they did not wait for the crisis to arrive before building the response.
The learning management system at the heart of this university was designed with this problem at its centre. It was not built and then patched to account for AI; it was conceived from the beginning around the question of how you ensure that every student who passes, passes because they actually learned. The convenience of online learning never becomes a backdoor around the rigour that a degree demands. The door has been widened. The standard has not moved.
That is not a small engineering achievement. It is a philosophical one. It says, ‘We see the problem the rest of the world is still debating, and we have already built the answer.’
And then there is the MIND (Miva Interactive Neural Dialogue), a voice-based conversational partner that sits with a student, listens to how they reason, and then challenges them to go further. Rather than reading a case study and submitting answers into a void, a student must speak, must articulate, defend, and refine their thinking in real time, out loud, under the kind of pressure that the real world will one day demand of them. MIND listens to the quality of that reasoning, not just the conclusion, and responds accordingly. In doing so, it trains something that no multiple-choice examination ever could: the ability to think on your feet, communicate with clarity, and hold your ground when your ideas are tested.
As someone who has always been in school, this is enough reason for me to go back again to school. Miva, when is your next cohort?
We are living through a period in which the entire world is trying to understand what technology means for education. Most institutions are watching, debating, forming committees, and writing policies. Miva has been building. That is a meaningful distinction. And the degrees you hold today are the evidence.
From Students to Builders
Now let me speak directly to you, the graduating class. It is my understanding that throughout your time at this university, Miva has been cultivating something in you. Not merely knowledge, though I hope you have acquired that too. But the habit of asking questions. The instinct to look at a problem and ask, ‘How do we solve this?’ The confidence to build something from nothing. The understanding is that the purpose of education is not simply to get a job; it is to be capable of changing the conditions under which jobs exist.
In fact, I have been informed that a considerable number of you have not waited for today to begin, that even while studying, you have been building businesses, designing solutions, and creating things that did not exist before you arrived, which I find genuinely remarkable. If that is true, then I want to say something clearly: I am proud of you and proud to be addressing you.
Let me say a few honest things about the world you are entering, because I think you deserve honesty more than you deserve comfort.
The job market is difficult. It will test your patience, your resilience, and sometimes your self-belief. This is not unique to you. It is the reality of a developing economy with more talent than formal structures to absorb it.
But here is what I have observed across decades of watching this country: the people who create their own opportunities, who do not wait for a system to validate them, who build rather than apply, and who solve rather than complain, these are the people who ultimately define what the system becomes. Nigeria has always been built by people who refused to accept its limitations as final.
The Lifelong Responsibility to Learn
So my counsel to you is this: do not shrink your ambition to fit the current circumstances. Expand your capabilities until the circumstances have no choice but to accommodate you.
Invest in your relationships as seriously as you invest in your skills. The people you surround yourself with will determine the quality of your thinking, the scope of your ambition, and the speed of your progress. Find people who challenge you, who are not satisfied with half measures, and who want to build something that matters. And be that person for others.
And this, I cannot stress enough: keep learning. You are not leaving education today. You are leaving one form of it. I have said many times that kingship without education is worthless, and I meant it. Knowledge is not a phase of life. It is life itself. The world is changing faster than any curriculum can track, and the graduates who will matter in ten years are not those who know the most today, but those who are still learning on the day they retire. Miva gave you a foundation. What you build on it is entirely up to you.
Nigeria needs you.
I do not say that as a slogan. I say it as a statement of fact. We are a nation of extraordinary human capital sitting on decades of unrealised potential. Every generation has carried the burden of that gap between what this country is and what it ought to be. Your generation is not exempt from that burden. But you carry it at a moment when the tools available to you are unlike anything any previous generation has had.
You are educated. You are connected. You are, by the very nature of the institution that trained you, comfortable with technology, with change, with the idea that the old way of doing things is not the only way. That combination is rare. And it is precisely what Nigeria needs at this moment in its history. I have long believed that addressing education and gender equality together is the most effective path to addressing all of our other national challenges. Your presence here is a step in that direction.
I began by saying that Miva Open University is an argument. You, this graduating class, are the proof of that argument.
To Chancellor Sim Shagaya and the leadership of this university: what you have built is significant. Not merely as a business, not merely as an institution, but as a statement about what African education can be when those who build it refuse to accept the limitations of what it has always been. I hope you continue to dare.
And to the graduating class of Miva Open University:
Go. Build. Solve. Lead. Embrace failure; you gather a lot of data and learnings from failure, so use it. Carry the name of this institution with the same pride with which it has carried you.
Nigeria is waiting. And for the first time in a long time, I believe it will not be disappointed.
Congratulations.
Conclusion
His Highness Khalifa Muhammad Sanusi II‘s keynote was a fitting reflection on the significance of Miva Open University’s maiden convocation—not only as a celebration of academic achievement but also as a statement about the future of higher education in Africa.
His message challenged graduates to embrace lifelong learning, create opportunities where none exist, and lead with courage, integrity, and innovation. It also affirmed the role of institutions like Miva in expanding access to quality education without compromising excellence.
As the Class of 2026 begins its next chapter, his words remain both a charge and a reminder: the future belongs to those who are willing to build it.