Who Will Carry the Vision When You Are Gone?

There is a question that has become increasingly difficult for me to ignore as I approach the tail end of my tenure at Summit University, Offa:

What happens to the things you have built when you are no longer there to drive them?

I do not ask this from a place of fear. I ask it from a growing understanding of responsibility. A Vice-Chancellor will eventually leave office. A professor will eventually leave the classroom. A mentor will eventually step aside. A community leader cannot always be physically present. Yet the people, institutions and communities we serve must continue. Perhaps the real test of leadership is not what happens while we are there, but what happens after we leave.

This question also resonates deeply with me from the Islamic perspective. Islam also offers me a powerful way of thinking about this responsibility, not simply as succession, but as stewardship. The stories of the Prophets remind us that important missions were never meant to end with one individual. Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) prayed for righteous offspring and a continuing community of faith. Prophet Zakariyya (Zechariah) prayed for an heir, while Prophet Musa (Moses) asked Allah to strengthen him through his brother Harun (Aaron). To me, these stories reflect a deeper principle: we are temporary custodians of responsibilities that are much bigger than ourselves.

I have experienced this lesson personally. At the Federal University of Technology, Minna, I was deeply involved in the establishment and development of the Department of Mechatronics Engineering. At the time, Mechatronics was still an emerging field in Nigeria. We had to build academic capacity, develop curricula, attract students, establish laboratories, encourage research and convince people that Mechatronics had a future in Nigeria’s technological development.

Then I left FUT Minna to take up leadership responsibility at Summit University, Offa. I remember wondering what would happen to the work we had started. Would the department continue to grow? Would the vision survive? Would others embrace it as their own?

Today, seeing the department continue to develop and wax stronger after my departure has given me one of the quietest but deepest satisfactions of my academic career. It taught me that perhaps the greatest evidence that you have built something is not that it needs you to survive, but that it can continue to grow without you.

The same lesson came through the PhD Clinic, which I co-established with colleagues to support and mentor postgraduate students. The intention was not simply to help students complete their PhDs. It was to create a culture of mentoring, research conversation, encouragement and shared learning. Some of those mentees eventually became Professors, Heads of Departments, researchers, colleagues, collaborators and mentors themselves. I saw the same thing through the Advanced Engineering and Innovation Research Group (AEIRG), which I helped establish at FUT Minna. Its continued activities through the contributions of mentees and other members have reinforced something I now hold very strongly:

a mentor should not create dependence. A mentor should create capacity.

There is something deeply fulfilling about seeing someone you once mentored eventually become capable of mentoring others. At that moment, your influence has moved beyond you. The chain continues.

I have also learnt this lesson through my role as Mogaji of the Aikulola-Aibinu family in Ibadan. My responsibilities as a Vice-Chancellor often make it difficult to be physically present in the community as much as I would like. Yet the community continues. People support one another. Responsibilities are shared. Others step forward when I cannot. That, too, is leadership. A community should not collapse because one person is unavailable. If our leadership is effective, our absence should reveal the strength of the people we have empowered, not the weakness of the system we created.

This thinking has become particularly important to me at Summit University, Offa. As we have established new programmes, strengthened research and innovation, pursued grants, promoted Grantsmanship, deepened our Student-Centredness philosophy and advanced the Acadopreneurship dream, I have increasingly asked myself: What happens when I am no longer here? Who will continue the work? Who will improve it? Who will take it further?

For me, these initiatives must become more than projects associated with one administration or one person. The Research and Innovation Unit must continue to generate opportunities. Grantsmanship must become part of the academic culture. Student-Centredness must become the way the University thinks and serves. Acadopreneurship must become a mindset that survives the people who first promoted it. If these ideas depend entirely on the person who introduced them, then they have not yet become institutional.

A university is much bigger than its Vice-Chancellor. The Vice-Chancellor comes and eventually leaves. Governing Councils change. Management teams change. Academic staff retire or move on. Students graduate. But the institution must continue. This is why I have become less interested in being indispensable. If everything depends on one person, then perhaps the institution has not yet been built strongly enough.

A personal idea should become an institutional programme. A personal relationship should become an institutional partnership. A personal passion should become institutional culture. And knowledge that exists in one person’s head should eventually become knowledge that others can carry.

How have I tried to ensure that the vision continues?

Perhaps one of the most deliberate things I have done throughout my leadership journey is to identify potential successors wherever I found myself. I learnt early that you cannot build something that depends entirely on you. So, I deliberately brought people close, identified those who showed commitment and capacity, and began grooming them. We developed our own language around this culture: “Second in Command (2IC),” “Khalifah,” “Coordinators,” “Commanders,” “Deputy Chair” and “Team Leaders.” These were not merely titles. They were people I trusted with responsibility, people who learned by doing and, in their own right, grew into leaders.

I brought them close enough to see not only the success but also the intricacies behind it. I opened up the processes, shared responsibilities, delegated tasks that were ordinarily mine, and allowed them to represent me at events and take leadership roles in our activities. We travelled together, ate together, sometimes shared accommodation, planned movements, managed funds and coordinated people. I wanted them to understand not just what we were doing, but why we were doing it. I wanted them to see the vision from inside, not from a distance.

And over the years, I have seen the results. Recently, I felt a deep sense of fulfilment when one of my Khalifah achieved an important submission target we had been working towards. The achievement was technically theirs, but emotionally, it felt like watching something we had nurtured together finally bear fruit. I have experienced similar moments with other mentees, and each reminds me that leadership becomes truly meaningful when the people you have invested in begin to deliver without waiting for you.

Of course, there is another reality: when you train people well, some will eventually leave. They leave for higher responsibilities, new opportunities and new chapters in their lives. Over the last ten years, more than 50 people who served as my Khalifah, 2ICs, Commanders, Coordinators and Team Leaders have spread across different parts of the world, carrying with them something of the dream, the discipline and the vision we shared. I am deeply proud of them. Yet every departure leaves a small emptiness, because each person takes away a part of the team and, in some way, a part of me that cannot simply be replaced.

But perhaps that is the price of building people.

You cannot genuinely prepare people to lead and then expect them never to leave. The goal is not to keep them around forever; it is to equip them to stand on their own, lead with confidence and build something of their own. I want them to spread their wings and fly with their own strength after they have matured. I will never clip their wings and ask them to fly. Never. My greatest joy is to empower them to fly higher than me, go farther than I have gone, and achieve what I may never have been able to achieve myself.

And when they do, I realise that perhaps they were never really leaving the vision.

They were carrying it somewhere I could no longer take it myself.

Perhaps the hardest moment in leadership is accepting that one day someone else will sit in the office you occupied, chair the meetings you chaired and make decisions about the programmes and structures you helped establish. But that should not be a source of sadness. It should be the natural progression of a healthy institution. The question is not whether they will do things exactly as we did. They should not. The question is whether we have left them something worth carrying forward.

Prof. Abiodun Musa Aibinu, Ph.D.

Professor of Mechatronics Engineering | University Leader | Innovation & AI Advocate

Author, “Notes from a Vice-Chancellor”

Sharing practical insights and lessons from academia, leadership, technology, innovation, and institutional transformation.

When I think about Mechatronics at FUT Minna, the PhD Clinic, AEIRG, the Research and Innovation Unit, Grantsmanship, Student-Centredness, Acadopreneurship, my responsibilities in the community and the work we are doing at Summit University, I see one lesson repeated in different ways:

the work must become bigger than the person who started it.

One day, I will no longer be a Vice-Chancellor. One day, I will no longer be the person driving some of the initiatives I have helped establish. When that day comes, my greatest hope is not that people will say, “He did this.”

My hope is that they will say, “What he started continued. We took it further.”

Because perhaps the greatest responsibility of leadership is not to make sure people remember that you were there. It is to make sure that what mattered continues after you are gone.

If the people we mentor become mentors, if the institutions we help build become stronger, and if the next generation inherits something better than what we received, then perhaps we have truly left something behind.

And perhaps, in the end, that is what leadership really means: not holding tightly to what we have built, but loving the vision enough to place it in the hands of others and trusting them to carry it further than we ever could.

For me, succession has never been only about who occupies an office next. It is also about who carries the knowledge, values and courage to build what comes next.

The stories are many. The lessons are even more.

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Prof. Abiodun Musa Aibinu, Ph.D.

Professor of Mechatronics Engineering | University Leader | Innovation & AI Advocate

Author, “Notes from a Vice-Chancellor”

Sharing practical insights and lessons from academia, leadership, technology, innovation, and institutional transformation.