Commencement Address
Delivered by Stephanie Busari
It is a real privilege to stand before you today, Class of 2026.
Thank you to President Dwayne Frazier and the faculty for the invitation, and for everything you have done to bring these students to this moment. I have been truly impressed by the calibre and quality of students graduating from this institution today.
Every person in this room receiving a degree today has had to push through something. The circumstances may be different but the effort is real. Your class valedictorian lost both parents during her time here, yet she is graduating summa cum laude. Some of you can relate, because you faced challenges that were visible, and others among you carried things that nobody around you could see. Some of you had responsibilities outside your studies that made this journey harder than it should have been. Some of you questioned whether you belonged here and chose to stay anyway.
You did not arrive here by accident. You kept making the decision to continue when stopping would have been easier. That is the thing you should hold onto when this day is over and the ordinary demands of life come back.
The world beyond this room will not always recognise what it took to get here. You will hand over your CV and it will be reduced to a line. You will share an idea and watch it travel further in someone else’s voice. You will find yourself in spaces where you are underestimated by people who have not taken the time to understand you.
When that happens, do not internalise it. Do not let someone else’s limited imagination become your limit.
Your degree is only the first rung on the ladder you will climb in your lifetime. It does not fi x everything. But what it represents, the proof that you can stay with something difficult long enough to find your way through it, that does not expire.
Now, there are twelve women in this room I want to speak to directly.
They are among the hundreds of Chibok schoolgirls who were abducted from their dormitories in 2014, and they are graduating today.
In May 2017, I stood in a room at the Presidency in Aso Rock and hugged some of them. I had spent years covering their story as a journalist. The year before, I had obtained a vital proof-of-life video that showed these young women were still alive at a time when the world had started to forget about them. I would later learn that the video helped to kickstart negotiation talks that led to their eventual release. At the time, we did not know if the work would make any difference. We did it because the alternative was silence, and silence felt like complicity.
After the initial coverage, the story began to fade. The news cycle moved on, the way it always does. There were moments I wondered whether continuing to push the story mattered at all.
Standing here today is the answer to that question.
When I walked into that room in Aso Rock, they were thin, painfully so. But they were wearing bright and bold ankara outfits that had been quickly and lovingly sewn for them. The kind of clothes you give someone when you want them to feel seen again, when you want them to know they matter. And they were smiling, not politely, not for the cameras, but genuinely, with their whole faces, in a way I was not prepared for and have never forgotten.
I am a woman of faith, and there is a verse from the Book of Psalms that I believe is fitting to this moment today.
When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream.
People who could not believe their own deliverance was real. Who had waited so long, in such darkness, that when the morning came they thought they were still asleep.
That is what I saw in that room. Something more fragile and more extraordinary than relief. The slow recognition that this was real, that they were out, that the nightmare was over. They were like those who dream.
You were taken from your hostel in the middle of the night by people who believed your education was a threat worth eliminating. They understood that education has power. What they failed to understand is that once that power takes root in a person, it cannot be removed by force.
When I saw you after your return, what stayed with me was not what people often call resilience. It was something else. It was refusal. A refusal to be forgotten. A refusal to bend. Something that held its ground even under pressure that most of us will never be asked to bear.
You held.
And the Psalm was right. You were like those who dream. Delivered from a darkness so complete that standing in daylight must have felt impossible to trust.
Now you are here, with degrees in your hands and your lives ahead of you, in a moment that was specifi cally designed never to happen. You are not merely survivors of a story. You are authors of what comes next. What you do from here will matter, not only for yourselves, but for the girls who are watching to see what is possible. I hope you do not see this as a burden. Carry it as a form of power that belongs entirely to you.
To everyone in this room, I want to close with this.
Look around you. These are your people. Your journeys may not be the same, but you made the same decision. To stay. To push through. To fi nish. You share a way of thinking, a way of approaching diffi culty, the knowledge that you have already done something hard and found your way through it. That stays with you. It is the thing you will reach for in the hard moments that are still ahead, and it will be there.
I have spent my career in rooms where stories shape decisions and decisions shape lives. I chose journalism because I believed that the right
story, told to the right people at the right moment, could change what happens next. I still believe that.
But I once believed the power was only in telling the story.
Now I believe the greater power is in living it forward.
That is what I watched happen in this room today. Twelve young women who were told their story was over, sitting in gowns alongside every one of you who made your own quiet decision to keep going.
Class of 2026, that part belongs to you now.
Congratulations.