Saturday Punch Nov 30th 2013 #Nigeria
Has any of your children taken to mathematics the way you did?
Well, not to mathematics but to other things. My daughter who has just been made Special Adviser is an artist; she’s an all-rounder. She was a prize girl in mathematics here and in England, did 11 A Levels, including Spanish and Greek. She does interior décor and so many things as tiny as she is. She did drawing in O Level and A Levels. One member of the family who seems to be the most brilliant was made bed-ridden by the ‘Alli must go riots’. He has been on the sick bed for 34 years. He was just eight years old then. He’s 42 years old now. When Obasanjo saw him sometime back, he wept. But he’s gifted. He’s Akintayo Olunloyo. Then we have an engineer who graduated in 2000 from the University of Ghana with a second class upper. I have one who has a doctorate, though she’s interested in very many things. She’s interested in social networking, she’s interested in criminology. Many people count me as a mathematician in Nigeria but what I used government money for was to study engineering. I’m an engineer, qualified in both civil and mechanical engineering, aeronautics, oil and all these things and I’m a registered engineer, a member of the Nigerian Society of Engineers, a member of the American Mathematics Society, so I decided to diversify. I’m not interested in acquiring knowledge for its sake, I think it should be for mankind.
What about one of your daughters, Ms. Kemi Olunloyo, who’s seen as controversial. What’s your opinion of her?
Kemi is an independent-minded person and she is not the kind of person you can suppress. She believes what she believes. Some of them may be wrong in other people’s system. For example, in America, she always fought against crime and drugs and all these things. But I like her condemnation of religion- very bold. Where did these churches come from? There are three or four churches that should be wiped out of the Lagos –Ibadan expressway. All you have to do is build a barb wire or walls along that express, they were there originally but they cut it. When people were more godly in this country, there weren’t so many churches.
