In 1962, John D Rockefeller Foundation’s grant of almost $250,000 enabled the creation of School of Drama at the University of Ibadan. The School of Drama eventually became a major reference point in training, instruction and performance arts.

The billionaire American steel magnate never set foot in Ibadan but his resources most significantly provided the manure in which the creative juices and energies of a wide array of brilliant Nigerian mixed perfectly, and took root. They set sail from the shore of the School of Drama and never returned to the obscurity that might have been their lot, had the intervention not come.

What difference could similar gestures make today?