There is a peculiar disease that afflicts my beloved Nigeria, and it is not oil theft, not banditry, not even the corruption we write about so often. It is vanity. The desperate, insatiable hunger to be called something rather than to be something. We have become a republic of titles, a nation where the business card is longer than the resume and the honorific is louder than the achievement.

Consider the sheer absurdity of what Nigerians now attach to their names. Chief. High Chief. Double Chief, for those who collected one in the village and another in the wife's village. Otunba. Asiwaju. Baale. Eze. Igwe. Obong. Then the academic costumes, Dr and Prof, most of them honorary, many of them purchased. Then the professional prefixes we alone on this planet insist upon, Engr for engineer, Arc for architect, Barr for barrister, Pharm for pharmacist, Surv for surveyor, Tpl for town planner, as if a medical doctor in London ever introduced himself as Surgeon Smith. Then the religious regalia, Alhaji, Alhaja, Evangelist, Apostle, Prophet, Bishop, Archbishop, Most Senior Apostle, Pastor Mrs. Then the imported nobility, Sir, Lady, Dame, JP. Then the political incense, His Excellency, Right Honourable, Distinguished Senator, Comrade, and my personal favourite, Ambassador of Peace, a title handed out at hotel conference halls by organisations nobody can locate the following morning.

And Nigerians do not choose among these. They stack them. A single man will be announced at a wedding as High Chief Dr Sir Engr Alhaji, followed at last, almost as an afterthought, by his actual name. Half of those prefixes were purchased, one was inherited, one was awarded by a church, and none was earned in the manner the words suggest. The master of ceremonies needs a deep breath and a glass of water just to introduce one guest. We are the only people on earth who can turn a weekend ceremony into a doctorate and a donation into a knighthood. And we wonder why the world does not take our institutions seriously.

The scale of the fraud is no longer a matter of anecdote. An investigation by the National Universities Commission identified thirty two honorary degree mills, a mix of unaccredited foreign universities and unlicensed local entities, exploiting the public hunger for titles. Thirty two factories of vanity, printing prestige the way counterfeiters print naira. By 2024, the Committee of Vice Chancellors was lamenting that as many as twenty honorary degrees were being handed out at a single convocation, sometimes awarded in absentia to proxies. Think about that. Grown men sending drivers to collect their doctorates. This is not honour. This is theatre.

The rot goes back years. In 2012, the vice chancellors issued the Keffi Declaration, barring honorary degrees for serving political office holders and restricting awards to those with genuine, groundbreaking contributions to society. Enforcement proved weak, as enforcement always proves weak in Nigeria when the powerful are the customers. The ICPC and NUC review of the university system exposed degree mills selling certificates and honorary titles for financial gain, leading to the forced closure of sixty two unaccredited degree awarding institutions. Sixty two. And still the appetite grew, because the appetite is not academic. It is psychological.

This year the government finally acted. The Federal Executive Council approved a sweeping policy prohibiting recipients of honorary doctorates from using the title Dr in official settings, citing the growing abuse, politicisation and commercialisation of honorary degrees. The government has even warned that falsely claiming or misrepresenting an honorary degree may amount to academic fraud and could lead to prosecution. The Education Minister put it plainly, saying honorary awards had become instruments of political patronage and financial gain, including conferral on serving public officials. I welcome the policy. But let us not pretend a circular from Abuja can cure a sickness of the soul. You cannot legislate away a national inferiority complex.

Because that is what this is. The title obsession is the outward symptom of an inward emptiness. In societies that work, a man is measured by what he builds, what he writes, what he cures, what he teaches. In Nigeria, a man is measured by what he is called at the owambe, by the length of the megaphone introduction, by how many prefixes can be squeezed out before his actual name. The chairman of the occasion must be a Chief. The father of the day must be a Sir. The special guest of honour must be a Double Chief Dr. We have inverted the natural order. The substance chases the shadow.

And the national honours system, the highest recognition the state can bestow, has been debased in exactly the same way. GCFR, GCON, CFR, CON, OFR, OON, letters that should represent a lifetime of service, now dangle from the names of politicians under corruption investigation, individuals with no tangible contributions and business moguls with opaque wealth, all of whom have made their way onto the honours roll. The non statutory tradition of conferring automatic honours on public office holders simply because of the position they occupy continues, even as many of these same beneficiaries are dragged before the courts by the EFCC. Not one honouree responsible for our socio economic ruin has been stripped of his honours to serve as a deterrent. In Britain, disgrace costs you your knighthood. In Nigeria, disgrace is no obstacle to acquiring three more titles and a bigger agbada to carry them.

Our greatest minds understood this long ago and voted with their feet. Chinua Achebe, Gani Fawehinmi and Wole Soyinka famously turned down national honours, citing corruption, misgovernance and the lack of transparency in the process. As Achebe put it, a government that fails its people cannot in good conscience bestow honours. Achebe needed no medal from Aso Rock and no Chief before his name. His name was already written where it matters, in the minds of millions. That is the lesson our title chasers refuse to learn. Real honour cannot be conferred. It can only be recognised.

There is a deeper cost to all of this, and it is paid by the young. Nigeria's educational decay did not begin with empty laboratories. It began with the erosion of respect for merit and intellectual discipline. A nation that fails to distinguish between earned excellence and purchased prestige eventually hollows out its institutions. What does a young Nigerian scientist conclude when she watches a politician who cannot construct a paragraph being robed as Doctor of Letters, while she cannot fund her laboratory? She concludes, correctly, that in Nigeria the shortcut beats the road. And then she boards a plane to Toronto or London, and we call it brain drain and shake our heads.

I write this from Stockholm, in a country where the Prime Minister is addressed by his first name and the greatest scientists carry no chains of office. Sweden gives the world the Nobel Prize, the one honour on earth that cannot be bought, and its citizens feel no need to gild themselves. Confidence is quiet. Insecurity is loud. Nigeria is very, very loud.

So here is my challenge to my compatriots. Retire the borrowed feathers. Drop the Engr, the Barr, the Surv. Refuse the weekend doctorate. Decline the chieftaincy that comes with an invoice and the Ambassador of Peace certificate that comes with a buffet. Let the universities honour only the truly exceptional, let the state strip honours from the convicted, and let the rest of us learn again the oldest truth our grandfathers knew, that a good name is worth more than silver and gold, and infinitely more than a plastic plaque and a rented gown. When Nigerians finally crave achievement the way we now crave acknowledgment, this country will be unstoppable. Until then, we remain a nation of High Chief Doctors presiding over ruins.