Science & Tech Quote by Ibrahim Babangida

There is a quiet power move in Babangida framing books as an "enduring legacy" despite the glittering promises of information technology. A statesman isn’t just praising reading here; he’s staking a claim about what outlasts regimes, platforms, and news cycles. The line positions print as a kind of institutional memory, sturdier than the volatile infrastructures of digital information, which can be edited, deleted, or buried under the next refresh.

The phrasing is telling: "advances in information technology and strategies of information" hints at something more than innovation. "Strategies" smuggles in politics: the managed flow of narratives, the engineering of public consent, the soft power of media systems. Coming from a leader associated with an era when information control was a live tool of governance, the subtext reads as both tribute and caution. Digital information is fast, but it is also governable; it can be shaped by whoever owns the channels. Books, by contrast, distribute authority. They are harder to centrally curate, harder to make disappear once they spread, and slower in a way that protects complexity.

The sentence works rhetorically because it builds toward a refusal. It acknowledges modernity, then denies its supremacy. Babangida isn’t anti-technology; he’s arguing that permanence is a political and cultural resource, and books are still one of the few technologies designed for durability. In an age that confuses access with understanding, he’s elevating the medium that insists on time, attention, and accountability.