Retail Development and Investment Company (RDIC Africa) has announced the appointment of Prof Andrew Haruna as Board Chairman of Iwemi, described as Nigeria’s first national Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered academic publishing, research archiving, and knowledge commercialisation platform.

The appointment marks a shift in Iwemi’s development from a technology platform to a nationally recognised academic institution with governance leadership at board level.

The company described it as a tripartite digital ecosystem designed to address three challenges in Nigerian tertiary education: the loss of academic research output, the absence of a commercial publishing pathway for Nigerian lecturers, and limited access to locally authored academic content for students.

According to RDIC Africa, Nigeria’s 313 universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education produce between 40,000 and 60,000 original research papers every academic year.

The company stated that fewer than five per cent of that output is permanently preserved, globally indexed, or financially rewarded, while the remaining is printed once and discarded.

The company noted that Iwemi will permanently archive every research paper, thesis, and dissertation uploaded to the platform, ensure global indexing, and provide royalty income to authors on every subsequent download.

The platform will also provide a commercial pathway for Nigerian lecturers to publish locally authored, curriculum-matched textbooks.
Students will be able to purchase the textbooks at affordable prices, with financing available through the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND).

The firm further stated that the platform will provide universities with a direct, automatically generated internally generated revenue stream from their own academic output, at zero capital cost to the institution.

Haruna is a Professor of Linguistics and Nigerian Languages. He served as Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University, Gashua from 2016 to 2021, and currently serves as Pro-Chancellor of Bingham University.

RDIC Africa stated that his research in Linguistics has been conducted in partnership with the University of London, the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Institut, the German Research Foundation, and the Austrian Science Fund.

As Board Chairman, Professor Haruna will provide strategic academic governance to the Iwemi platform, chair the Academic Oversight Board, and preside at the INARIC 2026 Grand Award Ceremony in Abuja on December 8.

Iwemi is currently in active engagement with the National Universities Commission (NUC), the National Commission for Colleges of Education, (NCCE), the Nigeria Education Repository and Data Bank (NERD), the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF), the Federal Ministry of Education, and Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund).