Dr. Obadiah Mailafia

He was one of the towering intellects of the 20 th century; as well built and handsome as the Greek god Hercules. At age 20 he went into an argument with the aged Albert Einstein about his theory of relativity at the ornate Princeton Institute of Advanced Study. He was then a graduate student at the highly select Princeton Department of Mathematics, where he completed his doctorate at the unusual age of 22. In that debate with Einstein, the old sage gave the young man the fatherly counsel to go and “read a little more physics”. Einstein’s advice was spot-on. The young man in question was rarely ever seen with a book. He did not believe in reading, taking the line that it would distort his thinking with the wrongheaded ideas of others. His approach was to think out mathematical theorems from scratch by himself. His entire life had been a massive thought experiment. He did not believe anyone had a right to deploy a mathematical formula without working it out by himself first ...

An Oxford don once surprised me by remarking that Nigerians are “the most brilliant people in the world”. Strangely enough, I felt more embarrassed than flattered at the compliment -- embarrassed because our reputed brilliance has little or no correlation with our collective performance on most of the indices of national development. I ask myself, “If we are so smart, how come we are such a mediocre country?” British Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin once noted that the University of Lagos was one of the world centres of expertise in her specialist field of chemical crystallography. Ahmadu Bello University Zaria had the first world class computer centre in Africa. The University 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. We are told that the Saudi Royal family used to frequent UCH for medical treatment. The engineering scientist Ayodele Awojo...