By Tunji Olaopa

ON Tuesday 6th of October, the Nigerian Institute of Physics (NIP) conferred on me its coveted Award of Excellence during the NIP 38th Annual Conference held at Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye. In my acceptance speech, I had occasion to reflect on one of my heroes, the renowned Nobel Laureate and mathematical physicist, Albert Einstein and his influence on my intellectual development.

Permit me therefore to share with you how Physics and the ideas by great Physicists have  influenced my personal experiences and helped shape the person that I am today. A reflection on  how my intellectual development was shaped by lessons from the great genius mathematical physicist, Albert Einstein.

Being nominated for an award of this kind is a most pleasant surprise to me as it should be to many who are familiar with my disciplinary orientation as a public intellectual.

Just like the ancients wondered whether Saul who later became king in the era of Prophet Samuel in the Bible was also a prophet, some would rightly wonder, what has Tunji Olaopa got to do with physics? I suspect that most people in the NIP must also have wondered too.

I would never have imagined that such an illustrious gathering of theoretical beings like those who populate the Nigerian Institute of Physics would ever have the time in the world to notice mere mortals like me who are involved in the drudgery of making the wheel of the Nigerian state run. But it seems as if I had been dragged by the force of an electronic/digital policy compulsion into the hallowed company of those who have the likes of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein as forebear and the current Lucacian Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, Stephen Hawking, as contemporaries.

It was the very thought of Stephen Hawking that set me thinking when I received the notification for this award. I have received several awards, most of which have some kind of connections with what I am and what I do as a civil servant, a public administration scholar and a reformer.

In some published articles—collected in my forthcoming book, Civil Service and the Imperative of Nation Building— I raised the question of what it means to honour a reformer, and how those honours factor into what reform itself means. In other words, I asked whether rewards and honours and awards ever capture the essence of the reform business. Can a reformer credibly receive an honour when the business of reform never finishes?

However, this award affects me differently, and definitely not as a reformer. It reaches farther back into the very constitution of who I am as a person, and my evolution as an intellectual. Fortunately for me, it was my father who set me on a path of no return into the complex and exciting world of ideas.

I said ‘fortunately’ because that course of my life was not what was intended by my parents. Later events in my life, after the seed of intellectual awareness had been planted, revealed that my parents only desired a son who will make a good life decision for himself.

Reading of Plato’sRepublic

When I decided, after reading Plato’s Republic, that I wanted to become a philosopher, my parents could not see a viable job prospect attached to that “foolish” desire. Yet, he had no idea that what led to that not-so-foolish decision was his own doing. I remember that my first introduction to the word ‘genius’ was when my father used it to characterize Prof. Ojetunji Aboyade. So, hearing that he was a genius naturally sent me scrambling for the dictionary.

As an example of a genius, the dictionary cited Albert Einstein. And from then on, Einstein became my titular model of the best anyone can ever be in life, and the best I want to be. The name of Einstein and everything I finally read about him became the instigator for the unfolding of my personal temperament as a borderline introvert given mainly to nurturing the inner self.

It was in the course of such nurturing that I got introduced to Soyinka, Achebe, Bertrand Russell, Lobsang Rampa, Mandela, Dag Hammarskjöld, Albert Schweitzer, Karl Popper, Gandhi, and many others. I had met Plato earlier and I had no doubt then and now, that I want to be at the forefront of generating ideas that could be revolutionary enough to transform nations.

And I should not forget to say that I read Stephen Hawking too. A Brief History of Time, for example, stands as a classic example of how a complex idea can actually become a simple  beauty in the hand of someone acquainted with the idea. It was such intellectual companions that made it possible for me, even as a young ‘Grammar school’ boy to stand distinct amidst  my friends.

All my upkeep was always going into savings that would be spent on gathering many more books that kept me awake late into the night. Don Marquis, the US writer, once  noted that an idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it. Well, I agree but then the life of the mind is not a decision a person makes; it is already made on There are three significant lessons Einstein taught me.

The first is the potent content and  consequences of ideas. It took me a long while before it dawned on me that ideas aren’t just the simple and harmless products of a fertile mind. Ideas are dangerous! Ordinarily, the most famous scientific notations in the world—Einstein’s E=mc2—would be a mere combination of  mathematical symbols. Yet, the world became aware of its terrible force when the atomic bomb pummeled  Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a bid to end a war that was fought with the products of  the human mind.

The second lesson I learnt from Einstein is surprisingly religious. It is surprising because Einstein is taken to have dangled between atheism and agnosticism. Yet, he was noted to have made the famous statement: ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ His notion of God is a reference to a mathematically coherent being who formulated the laws of nature with  simplicity, elegance and beauty. Thus, these mathematically beautiful physical laws, according to Einstein, suggest that such a God could afford to play dice; the creation of the universe was not an act of random probability.

Random probability

Where Einstein saw a deus absconditus, a creator who abandoned its mathematically functioning universe, I see the hand of Providence at work in the  same beautiful universe. For Alfred de Vigny, the French, ‘The true God, the mighty God, is the God of ideas.’ The creation of the universe was the effect of the conglomeration of so many ideas issuing from the eternal mind of God.

I did not arrive at the idea of reform by chance. I was led, kicking and screaming to it. By temperament, I am an introspective, even philosophical, person. I am basically concerned and I dare say, compelled, by the architecture and force of ideas.  I had assumed very early in life that the university was the best place for me to mature and achieve my fulfillment.

I love some measure of comfort and the material convenience of life that  creates the ambience for learning, financial independence that confers the confidence to take up public service offers on one’s own terms, but I love ideas the more. These ideas, as Robert Pirsig argues, are patterns of value that superimpose themselves on the society. Thus, in spite of my love for the academia, Providence led me to the civil service and its matrix of dysfunction.

Here, I confront Einstein’s third lesson: ideas are equally reformatory. Despite the close affinity between the E=mc2, Einstein was rabidly pacifist. For him, we need peace and not war; nuclear fission and fusion can power the society rather than destroying it.

The Nigerian civil service forced on me the urgency of converting my thoughts into reforming dynamics that expand possibilities. And this has defined my labour for the past twenty five  years. I am definitely not a genius, like Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking.