If you have not been able to put your hands on the problem with Nigeria, it must be because you have never really put your mind to it because it is so easy to know.
It is simply that a blessed country, home to some of the best and brightest on the surface of the earth, has always been ruled by its 3rd Eleven. Period.
Please come with me as I navigate this truism.
Prof Olaniyan, Richard Adeboye is one of my university teachers I respect the most. He taught me History at the University of Ife, Ile – Ife. As I write this, I can see the cherubic looking, absolutely self – effacing young Lecturer who arrived from the United States of America my graduating year, having earned a Ph.D. from Georgetown University, Washington D.C, USA.
A President’s Scholar, and now Fellow, Nigerian Academy of Letters, Professor Olaniyan, author of several books, among them:’IFE: Holy City Of The Yorubas’, was a recipient of numerous distinctions, awards and grants at undergraduate, postgraduate and postdoctoral levels.
This piece is, however, not about my teacher but he comes in here only because he it was who sent me, the WhatsApp message which is the kernel of the piece you are reading. For him to share a post, it must carry its weight in gold, and I need not be told that it must have gone from his desk to very few people.
Let’s now see what he sent me and then go ahead to relate it to this ‘giant of Africa”, with clay legs, aka Nigeria.
Happy reading.
Smartest People, Mediocre Nation – The Irony Of Nigeria.
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“BRITISH Nobel laureate, Dorothy Hodgkin, once noted that the University of Lagos was one of the world’s centres of expertise in her field of chemical crystallography.
Ahmadu Bello University Zaria had the first world class computer centre in Africa.
The University of Ife had a notable pool of expertise in nuclear physics.
Our premier University of Ibadan had an international reputation as a leading centre of excellence in tropical medicine, development economics and the historical sciences.
The Saudi Royal family used to frequent UCH for medical treatment in the sixties.
The engineering scientist Ayodele Awojobi, a graduate of ABU Zaria, was a rather troubled genius. He tragically died of frustration because our environment could not contain, let alone utilise, his talents.
Ishaya Shuaibu Audu, pioneer Nigerian Vice-Chancellor of ABU Zaria, collected all the prizes at St. Mary’s University Medical School London. His successor in Zaria, Iya Abubakar, was a highly talented Cambridge mathematician who became a professor at 28 and was a noted consultant to NASA.
Alexander Animalu was a gifted MIT physicist who did work of original importance in superconductivity. His book, Intermediate Quantum Theory of Crystalline Solids, has been translated into several languages, including Russian.
Renowned mathematician Chike Obi solved Fermat’s 200-year old conjecture with pencil and paper while the Cambridge mathematician John Wiles achieved same with the help of a computer working over a decade. After the harsh environment of the 1980s IMF/WB structural adjustment programmes, the Babangida military dictatorship undertook massive budgetary cutbacks in higher education.
Our brightest and best fled abroad.
Today, Nigerian doctors, scientists and engineers are making massive contributions in Europe and North America. Philip Emeagwali won the 1989 Gordon Bell Award for his work in super-computing. Jelani Aliyu designed the first electric car for American automobile giant General Motors. Olufunmilayo Olopede, Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, won a McArthur Genius Award for her work on cancer.
Winston Soboyejo, who earned a Cambridge doctorate at 23, is a Princeton engineering professor laurelled for his contributions to materials research. He is Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Washington University biomedical engineering professor Samuel Achilefu received the St. Louis Award for his invention of cancer-seeing glasses that is a major advance in radiology.
Kunle Olukotun of Stanford did work of original importance on multi-processors. National Merit laureate Omowunmi Sadik of State University of Binghamton owns patents for biosensors technology. Young Nigerians are also recording stellar performances at home and abroad. A Nigerian family, the Imafidons, were voted “the smartest family in Britain” in 2015.
Anne marie Imafidon earned her Oxford Masters’ in Mathematics and Computer Science when she was only 19. Today, she sits on several corporate boards and was awarded an MBE in 2017 for services to science. Recently, Benue State University mathematician Atovigba Michael Vershima is believed to have solved the two centuries old Riemann Conjecture that has defied giants such as Gauss, Minkowski and Polya.
Another young man, Hallowed Olaoluwa, was one of a dozen “future Einstein”, awarded postdoctoral fellowships by Harvard University. He completed a remarkable doctorate in mathematical physics at the University of Lagos age 21. While at Harvard he aims to focus on solving problems relating to “quantum ergodicity and quantum chaos”, with applications to medical imaging and robotics.
Another Unilag alumnus, Ayodele Dada, graduated with a perfect 5.0 GPA, an unprecedented feat in a Nigerian university. Victor Olalusi recently graduated with such stellar performance at the Russian Medical Research University, Moscow, and was feted the best graduate throughout the Russian Federation. Habiba Daggash, daughter of my friend Senator Sanusi Daggash, recently graduated with a starred first in Engineering at Oxford University.
Emmanuel Ohuabunwa earned a GPA of 3.98 out of a possible 4.0 as the best overall graduate of the Ivy-League Johns Hopkins University. Stewart Hendry, Johns Hopkins Professor of Neuroscience, described the young man as having “an intellect so rare that it touches on the unique…a personality that is once-in-a-life-time”. There is also young Yemi Adesokan, postdoctoral fellow of Harvard Medical School who patented procedures for tracking the spread of viral epidemics in developing countries.
Ufot Ekong recently solved a 50-year mathematical riddle at Tokai University in Japan and was voted the most outstanding graduate of the institution. He currently works as an engineer for Nissan, having pocketed two patents in his discipline. This is only the tip of the iceberg. If our system were not so inclement to talent we would be celebrating a bountiful harvest of geniuses in all the fields of human endeavour. This is why the correlates between our gene-pool and national development are so diametrically opposed.
We are becoming a failed state. We punch miserably below our weight in the hierarchy of world economics and politics. None of our institutions come near the top 500 in the World Universities League Table. An estimated 50% of our people live in extreme poverty. Youth unemployment hovers around 45 percent (70% for the far-North). The poverty is heartbreaking. Our per capita GDP is less than $3,000 as compared to Singapore’s $55,252. We have the worst road carnage record in the world, with more than 20,000 lost to road accidents annually.*
We wasted over $18 billion on the power sector and our people still live in darkness. The state governments are virtually bankrupt. It is only by investing in science and in our young people that we can forge a better future.
Without science and innovation the African people will never overcome their millennial servitude.
We must incentivize talent while building a merit-based society.
In Brazil, a Nobel laureate is entitled by statute to the same pension rights as a former President. Society must adequately recognise and reward all men and women of excellence. Our government should keep a roster of all super-achievers of Nigerian origin and we should tap their brains for the building of our country”.
The first thing to note in the above is that no part of Nigeria is left out of this sheer embarrassment of riches. Yet without the likes of Professors Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, and Professor Kayode Osuntokun, the coda of whose encyclopedic neuroscientific research was neuro-epidemiology, and so many others, the list is not complete.
So why do we remain this pathetic?
As I indicated earlier, the problem lies in our political leadership recruitment process. Some may say this, governance, that is, has nothing to do with education but that will be ignorance about the fact that leadership is not only key, it is the most essential ingredient in a nation’s development. There is this apocryphal story of the Heads of state of the UK, U.S and some other developed countries going to God to remonstrate against His many blessings on Nigeria in human and material resources, whereupon God told them, after laughing heartily, to go and look at Nigeria’s leadership and the visitors left, happier than when they arrived.
Is it then by chance that not a single Nigerian Head of state was prepared for office? All that the much revered Sir Tafawa Balewa wanted to be was a teacher, perhaps a school headmaster and, even Obasanjo, to whom some development could be credited, was only an accidental military Head of state..
Is there a single Head of the Nigerian state, who will compare with Obafemi Awolowo the way he equipped himself towards political leadership: his education, authoring of books in literally every area of governance, or in his incredible diligence at whatever he put his hands on? Wasn’t that why on his death, a British Prime Minister could say that Awo could effortlessly have been the British Prime Minister?
What manner of men and women sit on literal sinecures, today, in the National Assembly, particularly the senate, where former governors who literally ruined their respective states, have now turned to an old people’s home? Or aren’t many of our state houses of assembly populated by half- educated illiterates who should, at best be no more than councilors in their local government areas?
How can Nigeria ever develop with this political architecture even if, like the Jews, Nigerians dominate the list of Nobel Laureates?
Yes, many will ask the legitimate question as to how well political appointees from within our universities have performed, or how those who get appointed Vice Chancellors or Provosts are doing?
My answer to the latter part of that question would be that higher education administration in Nigeria has worsened in direct proportion to how our political leadership has regressed, with some heads of institutions now being accused of outright corruption, with some even being jailed.
The saying: “a fish rots from the head down” fully encapsulates the Nigerian condition, thus confirming that leadership is the root cause of an organisation’s, success, failure or demise, and this is true whether that organization be a country, a company, or even a mere sales force.
The consequences of our political leadership failure are legion.
The word. “Andrew” assumed a new terminology in Nigeria when Obasanjo, as military Head of state, descended on university lecturers, ordering them to vacate their accommodation on campus, and many like Professor Isaac Adewole, the former Minister of Health, knew that they had to rapidly vote with their feet. Today, it is worse; as OPTION B has taken over. Today, not just the family head, but their entire household, are fleeing town.
A trending video of the Ikeja International airport presents the picture of a beleaguered country with its people, top earners like bank managers inclusive, together with their entire families, thronging the airport in an effort to check out before the apocalypse. This is happening particularly in areas of the country where people value their children and would neither throw them to the elements, nor leave them at the mercy of a marauding army of Boko Haram and bandits with the government looking completely helpless.
This, and much more, is where puerile political leadership, which neither “incentivises talent”, nor concerns itself with “building a merit-based society”, has landed the homeland, while her multitude of stars continue to illuminate the world outside.
May God help us.