Professor Seth Sunday Ajayi (1943-2026) was a visionary scholar who left a legacy of transforming Africa’s relationship with its natural heritage. As the continent’s first professor of wildlife conservation, he was more of an institutional architect than a bureaucrat. From founding pioneering academic departments to designing Nigeria’s National Parks framework, his life was defined by a rare ability to translate bold scientific ideas into permanent, nation-building structures. To him:

“Ideas are perishable as vegetables. If you don’t pursue them immediately, they will just go. So you have to have that vigour and the zeal to pursue the ideas and make them a reality.”

The Boy from Mopa

On the morning that would define his destiny, a small boy stood before the missionaries at Sudan Interior Mission Day School in Mopa, Kogi State, and stretched his arm across his head. The arm did not reach his ear. By the standards of that colonial-era school admission test — the crude but widely used benchmark for determining whether a child was old enough to begin formal education — he had failed. His father reluctantly took him home.

But the man who walked away that day was not the kind of man to accept a closed door. The very next morning, he returned with his son and told the missionaries plainly: “I can’t keep this boy. He is a different person entirely, you better take him.” After repeated appeal, the missionaries magnanimously relented. That quiet, stubborn act of a Kogi father — refusing to let an arbitrary test extinguish his son’s future — would eventually reverberate across an entire continent.

The boy was Seth Sunday Ajayi, born on 16 May 1943, in Mopa, Kogi State. He would go on to become the first African Professor of Wildlife and Fisheries Ecology, the fourth in the world; a recipient of Nigeria’s highest intellectual honour; and an architect of the conservation policy infrastructure that governs Africa’s relationship with its natural heritage to this day.

“It is God Himself that did it for me without anybody’s help.”

A Mind That Could Not Be Slowed

Ajayi moved through his education with a velocity that alarmed even those tasked with evaluating him. He attended Titcombe College, Egbe, on a Northern Nigerian Government Scholarship and went on to obtain his B.Sc. Honours degree in Zoology from the University of Ibadan in 1968. He then proceeded to the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where he earned his M.Sc. in Wildlife Management on a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Fellowship in 1970, before completing a practical course at the College of African Wildlife Management, Mweka, Tanzania, in 1971.

Yet it was his doctoral journey that would cement his legend. He registered part-time for a PhD at the University of Ibadan on a programme designed to span four years. He completed it in under two years. Twelve months were spent gathering materials for his thesis, six months writing it, and another six months finding an examiner worthy of the task.

“They had to look for an external examiner who has a double PhD to come and examine me in Nigeria to make sure that this man truly deserves a PhD in less than two years,”

he later recalled with characteristic directness.

The examiner found was Professor Beverly Halstead, himself a holder of a DSc at age 33, simultaneously a professor of geology at the University of London and a professor of zoology at the University of Reading. The date of Ajayi’s PhD conferment was September 29, 1974. Six years later, on October 1, 1980, he became a full professor at the age of 36, the first African to hold a professorship in wildlife conservation and only the fourth human being in the world to do so. During those six years, he was promoted every single year without interruption.

“I was getting promotion every year, every year, every year.”

Building Institutions From Nothing

Ajayi joined the University of Ibadan as an Assistant Training Fellow in Wildlife and Range Management in 1968, the same year he finished his undergraduate degree. He was not merely climbing a ladder; he was building one. When he looked around the African academy and found no dedicated institutional home for wildlife and fisheries science, he created one.

In 1981, he founded and became the pioneer head of the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Management at the University of Ibadan, the first such department on the African continent, complete with its own independent degree programme in both wildlife and fisheries management. He went on to serve as pioneer dean of the College of Environmental Resources Management at the University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, and pioneer director of the Centre for Environmental Protection and Natural Resources at the University of Ibadan.

These were beyond appointments; they were acts of institutional architecture, the deliberate construction of frameworks, curricula, and governance structures where none had previously existed. He understood that if Africa was to manage its extraordinary natural inheritance with competence and sovereignty, it needed to train its own experts, design its own policies, and establish its own centres of excellence. He set out to provide exactly that, singlehandedly institutionalising wildlife conservation education and policy across Africa for the first time.

“Nigeria has given me so much; Nigeria has given me a lot. I should be ready to give a lot back to Nigeria.”

Science That Fed a Continent

While Professor Ajayi’s academic achievements alone would have secured an enduring legacy, it was the practical, life-sustaining dimension of his research that separated him from the extraordinary and placed him in the exceptional. He pioneered the domestication of the African Giant Rat, the Grasscutter (also known as the greater cane rat), and the Nigerian Helmeted Guinea Fowl, three species with enormous potential as sustainable protein sources for sub-Saharan African households.

This work, in a continent plagued by protein deficiency, where wild animals were being hunted to near-extinction to feed growing populations, was not just an academic abstraction; it was Professor Ajayi’s domestication research, offering a scientifically sound, ecologically responsible, and economically viable alternative. By demonstrating that these animals could be bred in controlled conditions, he simultaneously addressed food insecurity and prevented the collapse of their species. President Bola Tinubu, in his tribute, noted that these

“globally acclaimed breakthroughs created sustainable pathways for increased animal protein supply in Africa while safeguarding biodiversity and preventing species extinction.”

He also produced Nigeria’s first Action Plan for the Conservation of Renewable Natural Resources, a policy document that became the foundational blueprint for how Nigeria would govern its natural heritage. He advised the UN FAO, UNDP, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the World Bank and was instrumental in the establishment of Nigeria’s National Parks Service.

“In the area of the environment, if you look at it in Africa, the deterioration of the environment and the decimation of natural resources are going on at an alarming rate; it’s going on too fast that something has to be done urgently to arrest it.”

Recognised by Presidents, Honoured by the World

In 1994, the United Nations Environment Programme inducted Professor Ajayi into its Global 500 Roll of Honour, one of the world’s most prestigious environmental recognitions, in a ceremony held in London where his medal was presented by British Prime Minister John Major.

“For me to be recognised at that level, I felt that I had got to the climax,” he said.

It was a statement of satisfaction, not complacency.

In 2013, President Goodluck Jonathan conferred on him the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) for Science, Nigeria’s highest intellectual honour, awarded only to scholars of transcendent national and global significance. As he walked to the dais at the banquet hall in Aso Villa to receive his insignia, his thoughts returned, characteristically, to his father.

On his 80th birthday in May 2023, President Muhammadu Buhari paid a formal tribute, praising his contributions to conservation and environmental sustainability. Governors of Kogi State across different administrations celebrated him publicly as a son who brought global distinction to their land. When he passed peacefully on January 5, 2026, at the age of 82, tributes poured in from Presidents Tinubu and Jonathan, from state governors, from international conservation bodies, and from the academic communities he had shaped across two generations.

“For me to be recognised at that level, I felt that I had got to the climax.”

What His Life Teaches Us 

Professor Ajayi’s career is perhaps the most instructive case study in Nigerian history for what serious institution-building looks like. He did not simply occupy positions, he established them, defined their mandates, recruited their first cohorts, and embedded them in the academic and policy architecture of the nation before moving forward. His approach to governance was marked by disciplined creativity: identifying a gap, designing a response, funding it strategically, and executing it with what he described as the necessary “vigour and zeal.”

He understood that ideas, like vegetables, are perishable. “It is the Holy Spirit that gives you the ideas — go and do this, go and do that — and ideas are perishable as vegetables,” he once said. “If you pursue them immediately, they will just go. So you have to have that vigour and the zeal to pursue the ideas and make them a reality.” This is the ethic of every successful institution-builder: the discipline to translate vision into structure before the urgency fades.

His career also demonstrates that genuine corporate governance is not merely about managing what exists, it is about imagining, creating, and sustaining what ought to exist. The Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Management at the University of Ibadan did not exist before Professor Ajayi. Nigeria’s National Parks Service policy framework did not exist before Professor Ajayi. Africa’s first systematic, university-based conservation curriculum did not exist before Professor Ajayi. He was not a bureaucrat. He was a builder.

“Ideas are perishable as vegetables. If you don’t pursue them immediately, they will just go. So you have to have that vigour and the zeal to pursue the ideas and make them a reality.”