Nigeria, Feb. 1 -- Twenty-six years later, the story of the 49 lecturers that were sacked at the University of Ilorin for disrupting an ongoing examination during ASUU strike still lingers. Even though the lecturers were later reinstated in 2009, after ten years of prolonged litigation, the story is still very fresh in the minds of Nigerians. Sadly, three of the sacked lecturers had died before the long-awaited and much-celebrated victory eventually came from the Supreme Court of Nigeria, which ordered their immediate reinstatement. The story was everywhere in the media and it still oscillates within the circle of Nigerian academics.

The empathy elicited by the sudden death of the three professors in the course of the struggle, and how o...