The tragedy of genius and failure of the Nigerian university system

By Obadiah Mailafia

A FEW days ago, I found myself hinking of Elephant. Elephant was a friend and senior at my old missionary boarding school in the defunct Benue-Plateau State. Elephant was not his real name.

He was so nick-named because he was a rather fat lad with a reputation for being the school clown. Although I was by far his junior, we were best of friends. What united us was the fact that we both represented the school in inter-school quiz tournaments.

•University In the manner in which the Almighty Creator dishes out talents to his creatures, some people are good general all-rounders while others have talents only in specific areas. Albert Einstein, for example, was in the latter category. He was poor in most subjects, the only exception being mathematics.

Only a few are blessed with all-round knowledge. Bertrand Russell was a mathematician, a philosopher and a lord. Leibnitz was a mathematician, scientist, philosopher and statesman. Blaise Pascal was a mathematician as well as a religious mystic. Fermat was a career lawyer who pursued mathematics as a past-time.

And yet he posed a mathematical theorem whose proofs he had discovered but kept as a secret. It took 358 years for John Wiles to successfully solve Fermat’s mathematical puzzle in 1994. My friend Elephant was blessed with just one talent – figures. He was a mathematician’s mathematician in the sense that he was not only good at proofs, he had the type of mind that would re-derive independently the formulae underlying the proofs.

And like all one-eyed geniuses, Elephant had a big problem. He excelled in only three subjects and perennially flunked everything else. Those three were: General Mathematics, Additional Mathematics and Physics. During his WAEC he scored A’s in all three subjects and got F9 in everything else. His performance also sadly meant that he could not proceed to A-Levels. Then as now, the rules require that you pass a minimum of six credits, including English. It also meant he couldn’t proceed to university. I have no doubt in my mind that my friend was a genius. His was a very intense mind.

His creativity with figures was way beyond the level of even the best of his peers. I have met a few geniuses in my life. Like beauty, you don’t need to be told – you know it when you see it. Like my Oxford friend, G.G., a Russo-Canadian Jewish Rhodes Scholar. He got his first degree in Physics and Mathematics. He then developed curiosity about the things of God and switched to Biblical studies.

He had mastery of 10 languages: Russian, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic and Latin. When we were graduate students he used to earn extra money by working part-time as a computer programmer. He currently works as a professor of theology at a top American university. There is also my friend Iqbal from Pakistan. We are still expecting him to be announced as a Nobel Prize Winner in the field of theoretical physics.