Some businessmen build monuments of glass and steel. Adisa Aliu prefers to build futures. The oil-and-gas executive, whose Matrix Group once cracked Nigeria’s top 100 businesses, has now turned his gaze toward chalkboards, laboratories, and lecture halls. His newest project is not pipelines, but scholarships.
At Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, a program quietly unfurled this year. Fully funded master’s and PhD slots in Materials Science and Engineering, complete with tuition, research grants, laptops, housing, and stipends. The Abdulkabir Aliu Foundation, backed by Matrix Energy, foots the bill. For a few lucky students, education has just become free.
The details sparkle with intent. Two years of support for master’s students, three for doctoral candidates. Access to advanced research facilities. Industry exposure designed to ease the leap from theory to practice. In a country where postgraduate dreams often crumble under cost, it feels almost radical.Aliu himself studied metallurgical and materials engineering before carving his empire across oil, finance, and logistics. Now, perhaps remembering the boy he once was, he funds the next generation of Nigerian engineers. It is philanthropy with a trace of autobiography, an investment rooted in lived memory.
The Abdulkabir Aliu Foundation has already spread its wings into healthcare, food security, and clean water. Its creed is simple: human dignity, without discrimination. The scholarship, though, seems different. It reads less like charity and more like a wager—a bet that Nigerian research can still yield wonder.
Numbers tell part of the story: over 1,600 scholarships awarded, more than 180,000 lives touched by foundation projects. Yet numbers can’t capture the texture of a student unsealing a laptop for the first time, or the hush of relief when rent and fees vanish into thin air.
In a nation where oil wealth has too often pooled in private vaults, Aliu’s gesture lands with unexpected brightness. Perhaps tomorrow’s breakthroughs will bear his fingerprints. Or perhaps the real victory is simpler: that somewhere in Ife tonight, a student studies without fear of interruption.
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