At the height of its power and fame and fortune, the PDP never let a bragging right pass it by. So, it came as no surprise when, without fear, without research and without evidence of any kind, it proclaimed itself Africa’s biggest political party.
I suspect that it arrived at that conclusion by a species of deductive reason that runs somewhat like this: The PDP is the biggest political party in Nigeria. Nigeria is the biggest country in Africa. It must follow, that the PDP is the biggest party in Africa.
So, when during one of its accustomed upheavals the PDP landed a nuclear scientist as its national secretary, one expected the appointment to be announced with, at the very least, the kind of publicity that would introduce to the world stage a new Secretary- General of the United Nations, more so since that organisation has never succeeded in attracting a nuclear scientist to that post.
But the announcement was muted. It merely named the new chap in Wadata Plaza as Professor Wale Oladipo. It was totally silent on what he professes. For all the reader knew, Oladipo could have been a professor of Chinese history or a professor of lunar exploration. Nothing in it suggested, however remotely, that he is a nuclear scientist.
Not your usual home-grown bruiser, veteran of dozens of wars of intrigue, with the scars and stripes to prove that he is more than equal to the task, but a fresh-faced scientist steeped in the mores and best practices of the academy, a professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques, no less.
If they thought he was going to be a pushover, they soon knew better. He stood his ground against the previous holder of the office, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, who by sundry tactics tried to prevent him from settling in at Wadata Plaza. But he must have been hugely relieved when Oyinlola said good riddance to the folks over there, or was it the other way around?
Thereafter, little was heard of, or from Oladipo, until he dismissed General Muhammadu Buhari, then presidential candidate of the APC as a “semi-literate jackboot.” Not exactly the kind of language you would expect from a nuclear scientist, even one who has taken a break from analysing with clinical detachment and utmost precision the most elusive particles in the cosmos; you do not expect him to get down and dirty in the waters murky world of politics.
Then, attention shifted to Oladipo. Who is he, really, and where is he coming from? What positions has he held in the nuclear science establishment? What books or scientific papers has he published? Does he by any chance hold a patent? If so, for what product or process?
His formal designation is professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques, and his last known workplace address is the Centre for Energy Research and Development (CERD), at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife. CERD would therefore seem to be the appropriate starting point for learning more about Professor Oladipo.
At this writing, he does not figure on CERD’s web site. I sent an email to CERD asking for information about him. No luck. I followed up with a phone call; no luck. Perhaps it is CERD’s policy not to give out any information about their faculty and staff, for security reasons. And CERD is nothing if not a national security facility.
My Internet search turned out more information about Oladipo as PDP national secretary than about his scholarship in the arcane field of particle physics. It also yielded more information about his time in prison custody with Iyiola Omisore in the investigation of the murder of the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Chief Bola Ige, than about his scientific work.
Even his home page, such as it is, says nothing about his education and the universities he attended. There is no picture showing him at a nuclear facility, or at his study surrounded by books and scientific papers; no picture showing him with colleagues at a conference; none showing him in any scientific context whatsoever.
The only picture of Oladipo that keeps bobbing up shows him attired in a nondescript tunic made from fabric stamped with the PDP’s colours.
But this conspicuous absence proves nothing.
Perhaps Oladipo is not the type who blows his own trumpet. If his bibliography is not out there, it may be because of the sensitive nature of his scholarship, not because there is no bibliography to publish. Some breakthroughs are so sensitive that they are placed under the national security classification system. In addition, all those who came up with the breakthrough are enjoined to secrecy.
I will not be surprised that Professor Oladipo’s work belongs in that category.
At any rate, he did not appear to miss his nuclear research lab. He seemed perfectly at home in Wadata Plaza even after the PDP’s disastrous loss in the last general election. Having boasted that it would rule for 60 unbroken years in the first instance, it held power for only16 years, remembered now as an era of excess, drift, and corruption on a scale beyond belief.
When the PDP fell on hard times, unable to pay headquarters staff and carry out other functions without the hefty government handouts that had sustained it, staffers who could bale out did so. Not Oladipo. He dutifully found a way out. One-half the employees got dismissal notices. The other half would have to put up with a 50 percent pay cut.
He had not weathered the resulting storm when the PDP went into disarray. It broke up into two factions, each claiming to be the authentic one, and each with its own “national chairman” and a retinue of national officers.
Last week, a rented crowd of one of the factions invaded Wadata Plaza and flushed out its occupants. Among those chased out, according to media reports, was Professor Oladipo. He was reported to be “visibly shaken” as he pleaded with the mob to allow him go get his car he had parked a discreet distance away from his office.
But he has dismissed the report as a fabrication. And he insists that as far as he is concerned, he remains a loyal member and supporter of the PDP. Brave, loyal soul. In this age of turncoats, there is a great deal to be said for loyalty.
But his friends must tell Professor Oladipo that, by fighting to keep an identity as national secretary of the PDP – even if it is still the largest political party in Africa — when he may well belong up there with Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck, he is carrying coyness too far.
They should urge him to de-classify his bibliography, if only to awe the scoffers and turn them into admirers, to dust off his files and notebooks and start from where he took a break about a decade ago. A great deal has happened in the field since then. They have nailed the Higgs boson, the holy grail of particle physics. But there is still so much out there to discover and analyse in our expanding universe.
The nuclear establishment, I gather, is eagerly awaiting the return to its fold of one of its crackerjack analysts.
NATION
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