SMARTEST PEOPLE, MEDIOCRE NATION

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 Awojobi 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. 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 structural adjustment programmes, when government undertook massive cutbacks on funding for higher education and research, some of our best scientific minds emigrated abroad. Philip Emeagwali won the 1989 Gordon Bell Award for his work in the field of 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 the 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; Washington University biomedical engineering professor Samuel Achilefu received the St. Louis Award  for his invention of cancer-seeing glasses; the distinguished Kunle Olukotun of Stanford did work of original importance on multi-processors; Merit laureate Omowunmi Sadik of State University of Binghamton has patented new 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” that were awarded postdoctoral fellowships by Harvard University. He completed a remarkable doctorate in mathematical physics at the University of Lagos at 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 graduated with such stellar performance at the Russian Medical Research University, Moscow and was feted the best graduate throughout the Russian Federation.

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. Unfortunately, Nigeria has a way of dealing with gifted people. If they don’t kill you they will drive you mad. 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. We don’t even have a foreign policy. 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). I have travelled through much of the rural savannah of my birth. 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.

Criminality, Boko Haram, rampaging herdsmen, rural banditry, kidnapping, grand larceny, brigandage and nihilistic violence have become the symptom of a systemic, terminal decay. We have lost our moral compass. It beggars belief that such a frightful anti-civilisation as ours is possible in the midst of such affluence and embarrassment of riches.

This is the puzzle that haunts my every waking dream; a nightmare that, like an incubus, refuses to go away.

Science, as the philosopher Thomas Kuhn famously noted in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is an organised human enterprise. Scientists are a tribe that operate within an organic community with their own norms, lingo and rituals. The mansions of science will never willingly be open to the African people by the gatekeepers of the world Babylonian system. We will have to take the fire of the Egyptians by force. We must do it ourselves.

British wartime leader Winston Churchill prophesied that “the empires of the future will be the empires of the mind”. Without science and innovation the African people will never overcome their millennial servitude. And the African Renaissance of our dreams will become a mere phantasmagoria. We must create an ecosystem that enables science and innovation to flourish. And we must incentivise talent while building a merit-based society. I’m told that in Brazil a Nobel laureate by statute is entitled to the same pension benefits as a former President. This sends the message that we do not all have to be politicians in order to be considered great. Society must adequately recognise and reward all men and women of excellence.

At the same time people of talent should be encouraged take up politics as a vocation.  In the words of the Greek philosopher Plato: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”