Two LASU Graduates Got N20 Million Each, And The Timing Says Everything
Lagos · Friday 21 August 2026
At Lagos State University's combined 29th and 30th convocation on Wednesday, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu announced a personal gift of N20 million each to the two overall best graduating students. Ayilara Lawal Olawale finished the 2024/2025 session with a 4.96 CGPA in Project Management Technology. Adebanjo Samuel Oluolamide finished 2025/2026 with a 4.97 in Aerospace Engineering.
Two young Nigerians became millionaires in an afternoon for being the best in their year at a state university, and the video of it went round the country within hours.
The numbers are worth pausing on
A 4.96 CGPA on a five-point scale is close to the ceiling. Sustaining that across a full degree in Project Management Technology, or a 4.97 in Aerospace Engineering, at a Nigerian state university, through the strike calendar, the power supply and the cost of transport to Ojo, is a genuinely rare achievement.
| Student | Session | Course | CGPA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ayilara Lawal Olawale | 2024/2025 | Project Management Technology | 4.96 |
| Adebanjo Samuel Oluolamide | 2025/2026 | Aerospace Engineering | 4.97 |
Announced at the LASU combined convocation, Buba Marwa Auditorium, Ojo campus.
The argument this lands in the middle of
It arrives in a month when Nigerian social media has been running an argument about exactly this: what the country actually values, and who gets called stupid.
The shorthand for it is the olodo uprising. Olodo is Yoruba for a dull or unintelligent person, and it has become the standard dismissal aimed at a particular kind of successful young Nigerian: the content creator, the comedian, the skit maker, the small business owner who built something from a phone. The people using it are frequently graduates. The people it is aimed at are frequently earning considerably more than the people using it.
The defence of that group is not complicated, and it has been made forcefully. Young Nigerians are building businesses on smartphones, exporting creativity to audiences that did not exist a decade ago, earning foreign exchange through digital platforms and creating employment in industries that were not there twenty years ago. Calling that person olodo because they did not finish a degree is a category error dressed as a judgment.
The country is having two conversations at once. One says the certificate is worthless. The other just paid N20 million for two of them.
Both sides of this are right, which is the difficulty
The anti-intellectual read is real and it is corrosive. A society that treats formal learning as a joke ends up short of the engineers, doctors and researchers it needs, and the people who suffer first are the ones who cannot buy their way around a broken system.
The counter-read is also real. Nigeria has produced a very large number of graduates with excellent results and no employment, and told them for years that the certificate was the path. When it visibly was not, the resentment aimed at people who found another route was predictable. It is easier to call a skit maker olodo than to accept that the deal you were sold did not hold.
What Sanwo-Olu did on Wednesday is a data point in favour of the first argument, and a demonstration of the second. The two graduates are being rewarded for academic excellence. They are being rewarded with money, publicly, by a governor, because money is the only signal the argument currently responds to.
What a structural version would look like
Personal gifts from governors are a familiar Nigerian instrument and they have an obvious limitation: they depend on the governor. The N20 million is real for these two students and does nothing for the next cohort unless somebody chooses again.
The version that would matter is boring and permanent. A funded, published, rules-based award attached to LASU itself, with a fixed value and criteria set in advance, so that a first-year student in Ojo knows today what finishing top of the year is worth. That converts a gesture into an incentive, which is the whole point.
It would also settle, for at least one institution, the question the olodo argument keeps failing to resolve: whether Nigeria is prepared to put money behind academic excellence as a matter of policy, or only as a matter of mood.
For the two of them
N20 million is not life-changing capital in Nigeria in 2026. It is roughly the cost of a serious start: a postgraduate place, a deposit, or the working capital for a small business that does not need to borrow at Nigerian interest rates in its first year.
What the money mostly buys is time, and time is the thing Nigerian graduates generally do not get. Most finish and immediately need income. These two get a window in which they can choose. On the evidence of two CGPAs at the very top of the scale, that is a reasonable bet for a state to have placed.
Reporting: The Sun Nigeria, Pulse Nigeria, Legit.ng, BusinessDay and TheCable.
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