On at least two different occasions, the rumour was rife on social media that he was dead. To be falsely deceased, I teased, meant that he, like Alfred Nobel, had had the chance to read his own obituary. In one particular instance, a family rebuttal revealed that he was in intensive care at the University College Hospital, Ibadan. I made for the Intensive Care Unit at UCH the next day, a Saturday morning.
I was not going to disturb their care or protocol—I just had to be there in case he needed me.
Expectedly, and rightfully so, the nurses barred visitors from seeing him. I wrote my name on a sheet of paper and gave it to a nurse to hand over to him, just so he would know I was outside in case he needed anything.
The nurse came rushing back and said that he wanted to see me immediately.
As I got to his bedside, he held my hand tightly and, to the amazement of the medical staff around, quoted the melancholy words of Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts…”
Right there, I stopped him in his tracks and told him he should quote no further. Instead, to his smile, we both said in unison that the exit was not now.
He lived another three years after, but poorly. Finally, with every man inevitably heading to his exit, death, not wholly unexpected, came calling on April 6, 2025, after he had played many parts following an innings of 89.
The preparation for these many parts began at Government College, Ibadan, in 1948, although he was a scion of an illustrious family, the first educated elite and early Christians in Ibadan.
When David and Anna Hinderer, the first CMS missionaries, came to Ibadan in 1853, they were placed in the care of Balogun Olunloyo, a warlord and high chief of Ibadan.
Balogun Olunloyo’s children, Akinyele (male) and Yejide (female), found play and school with the Hinderers.
Akinyele became the first male literate of Ibadan, while Yejide became the first female literate. Yejide Girls’ Grammar School, Ibadan, is named after her.
The Olunloyos prominently took up early church, civil, and administrative roles in Ibadan. The Akinyele line produced Horatio Vincent Olunloyo, who was Victor Omololu’s father.
The brilliant signs of Horatio’s first son, Victor Omololu Olunloyo, were there even precociously from primary school. He took the common entrance examination, which was a global examination for all primary school leavers, and he was first in 1946 and 1947 in the whole of the Ibadan District Church Council schools, from Ibadan to Gbongan, Ikirun, and Osogbo.
It was while at St. Peter’s Aremo Primary School that he was introduced to mathematics by an impressionable teacher, J.A.F. Sokoya, in a remarkable and inspiring way. He saw early and clearly the relations of integers and that there was a concrete connection between mathematics and real life.
Here, foundational mathematics was planted to flourish in him for the rest of his life.
In 1948, he entered Government College, Ibadan, from Standard Five, as the youngest in his class, when most of his classmates came in from Standard Six.
It took him some time to rally. Once he found his stride in the second year, he never let go of the first position in Mathematics. To be first meant not just to score high but to get everything. Two illustrations will suffice.
A Mathematics examination was to be administered by the teacher, Mr W.H. Browne. The teacher intended to write the questions on the board, head off for tea in the staff room, and return later to collect the students’ scripts.
As he wrote the first question, he asked the students to begin. There were five questions, and they were to answer all of them. Just as he finished writing the fifth question and was gathering his papers to leave for tea, Olunloyo raised his hand.
“What is it, Olunloyo?” the teacher queried.
“I have finished, sir,” Olunloyo replied.
The teacher initially thought it was a prank. He remonstrated with Olunloyo, then collected his script to mark it, only to find, indeed, that he had completed the exam and got everything right.
There was an ‘unsolvable’ problem in the Mathematics textbook by C.V. Durell. At the time, it was common practice to tackle every problem in a textbook to gain mastery of the subject.
This particular question had become a generational challenge—no one in the annals of GCI who had used Durell’s textbook had been able to solve it.
It centred around a billiard table and was so complex because it required a spatial understanding beyond the students’ experience—they had never seen a billiard table before.
Then, Mr A. Long, the principal, was scheduled to visit a friend at the University College, Ibadan, and took some boys along.
One of them was Olunloyo. During the visit, they stopped by the Senior Staff Dining Hall and Recreation Centre, and for the first time, the boys saw a billiard table—and a game was on. Olunloyo took a careful look, his mind immediately entering a conjectural state.
He could hardly wait to return to school to tackle the intractable Durell problem—the one that had confounded his class and their seniors.
Back at school, he settled down to the problem and finally solved it. In a moment of sheer exhilaration, he threw off his uniform—some said he went completely nude—running wildly around his house, Grier, shouting:
“I have solved it! I have solved it!! I have solved it!!!”
It was a momentous occasion in schoolboy mathematics. His brilliance and escapades at GCI became legendary.
He went on to record a Grade 1 in his final year at GCI, with an A1 in Mathematics.
Following GCI, he dazzled with remarkable academic performances. He spent just seven months preparing for his HSC Examinations, a programme that would ordinarily take two years, and passed with AAAC.
He spent three months at the University College, Ibadan, and passed the Intermediate BSc, another two-year programme.
Though brief, his stay at UCI left lasting records. In tests and examinations, when students were asked to solve three out of five mathematical problems, Olunloyo would solve four within the allotted time and write on his script: “Mark any three.” He got them all correct. His fellow students fittingly nicknamed him Mark Any Three.
His brilliance drew attention from far and wide. Adegoke Adelabu and Emmanuel Alayande saw in him a special Ibadan poster boy, a source of pride. M.S. Sowole, Ambassador and Agent-General for Western Nigeria in the UK; his father’s contemporary and close friend; Lady Kofo Ademola; and others saw in him a national academic prodigy. They leaned towards sending him abroad for university training.
Olunloyo’s heart, however, was set on the University of Manchester. Why? Manchester was, at the time, one of the leading institutions in the UK offering Technology.
Ademola Banjo was already there, making waves, having just earned a First Class in Mechanical Engineering.
But Lady Kofo Ademola had different ideas. She wanted Olunloyo to attend Cambridge University, to become part of the prestigious institution that had produced some of the finest minds in Mathematics: Isaac Newton, Alan Turing, Carl Gauss, among others.
She also desired it for sentimental reasons—it was where her husband, Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, had studied.
Cambridge, however, offered only a deferred admission, as the academic session had already begun. Olunloyo was not inclined to wait idly for a year. Lady Ademola was challenged to find another prestigious university that offered immediate admission. That quest led him to St Andrews College.
The University of St Andrews is no pushover. It is the topmost and oldest university in Scotland. It is a university much favoured by the British royalty. It was established in 1413, and it is as renowned as the University of Oxford, founded in 1096, and the University of Cambridge, founded in 1209.
Coming with only three months from the University College, Ibadan, Olunloyo was placed in the first year to study Mechanical Engineering. He kicked against his placement because he wanted to be placed in the second year, and he was adamant about this.
By precedent, this was not done, but Olunloyo was obstinately insistent. He took his case to his Head of Department, Prof Caldericks. Finally, Caldericks took the matter to the Senate, whereupon they reluctantly agreed to put him in the second year on the condition that he took a test in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry.
Olunloyo pleaded for a week of preparation before the tests were served. When the tests were served—three hours per subject—and marked, he scored 98, 88, and 84 per cent in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, respectively. St Andrews immediately placed him in the second year.
In that second-year class, he led in all the subjects he took. He became a unique academic specimen, and this time, it was the Senate pressing to meet him.
Prof Caldericks took his student to the Senate to the amazement of all the dons. Olunloyo got their bow. One of the amazing things he did in an examination of 150 questions, in which they were expected to do 100, was to do all, and he scored 132 per cent.
The next student to him scored 89 per cent, while the third scored 66 per cent. At graduation in 1957, six academic medals were available in his department; Olunloyo won five, and the sixth was won by Ifedayo Oladapo, both Nigerians, both old boys of Government College, Ibadan, and both classmates at GCI. Olunloyo recorded, of course, a first class in Mechanical Engineering. So did Ifedayo Oladapo, who went on to do his PhD at Cambridge.
At the end of the graduation year, the best results from the top ten universities in the UK, the Ivy League institutions, are pooled, and the very best of them get the most prestigious prize, the 1939 Prize, and to also dine with the monarch.
It was Olunloyo who won the British Association Prize for the Most Distinguished Student in the Faculties of Science, and so dined with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 1958.
Olunloyo was exempted from a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mathematics and instead went straight on to do a PhD—a four to seven-year programme. He did it in a record time of two years with outstanding merit, finishing in 1959. He was 24.
Let us not debate: he was one of Nigeria’s most brilliant men. His brilliance was proudly extolled both overseas and in Nigeria.
He returned to Nigeria, and marriage soon followed. I point this out just to relate it to brilliance.
For his honeymoon, he and his first wife, Funmilayo, flew to the UK. On their return from Liverpool, they hitched a ride back on the Prime Minister’s yacht that had gone over for repairs. It was going to be a new adventure—returning home by sea.
Early one morning in the middle of the journey, Olunloyo looked to the sun and to his shadow on the deck and used both to plot a mental compass, enough to determine that the ship was headed in the wrong direction.
He asked for the captain to come to the deck. He shared his mental calculations, and the captain laughed.
A disdainful laugh followed, and then silence fell, followed by a reflective sigh. At the captain’s command in his cabin were dials pointing directions, knots showing speed, scopes indicating the depth of water and coordinates—and here was Olunloyo without a tool other than a phenomenal brain telling him he was taking the ship in the wrong direction.
Olunloyo asked that he should go back to check his controls. The captain went back to his control and checked his dials and his consoles, and when he returned this time, there were sweat beads on his eyebrows.
He found that the ship was headed in the wrong direction on the mighty sea. The captain, speechless, motioned that Olunloyo should go back to his cabin. He was going to do a right-about-turn with the ship, the kind, if you are familiar with the sea, that brings about instant sea sickness. Well, better be sick than dead.
Olunloyo, armed only with his brain and the rays of the sun, saved the ship, the crew, and the passengers from imminent disaster.
On a flight home from London on one occasion, Olunloyo ran into Prof Wole Soyinka on the plane as he was putting his carrier bag in the overhead compartment.
‘Hello, editor of Mustard Seed.’
Wole Soyinka instantly turned and smiled. Soyinka was editor of Grier House magazine, Mustard Seed, in their school days at GCI and was two years Olunloyo’s senior.
Both Soyinka and Olunloyo were in Grier House, both now academics, both sideline activists and politicians, both Ibadan ruminants who knew its nooks and crannies for all its notable culinary joints.
So there was plenty to share and to heartily reminisce about before they took their seats on the plane.
Watching quizzically as they engaged were two students from the Middle East. Nervously, they went to Olunloyo.
‘Sir, is that Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, that you were talking to?’
Olunloyo answered in the affirmative, and both students nodded to themselves as if to say, I told you so. Soyinka, with his mane, is unmistakable.
The students summoned courage and approached Soyinka to pay their respects and admiration.
They were mathematics students, so they asked Soyinka if Nigeria also had mathematicians of his stature. All Soyinka did was look back from his seat and point them to Olunloyo, who led them to him.
The students returned to Olunloyo and laid bare their mathematics problem. They wanted a simultaneous equation problem involving three unknowns solved.
Olunloyo asked for a sheet of paper and solved the problem with three approaches: substitution, matrices, and moulds, to arrive at the same answer. It left the students with their mouths hanging open. Suddenly, they exclaimed:
‘Nigeria is full of geniuses.’
Perhaps so; who knows?
When Lekan Are, his friend and classmate, was going to be 80, I teased him that Lekan’s GCI school number was 514, ahead of his at 546, making Lekan a quasi-senior boy.
His mind went in a different direction. He said to me, ‘Lekan’s number at 514 is very interesting. That is, two to the power of nine (512) plus two to the power of one (2), making 514, which in binary language is 1,000,000,010 for the computer.’
Anyone who thinks like that must be crazy. Olunloyo was crazy about mathematics.
I once had a week-long programme in Oxford. Somehow, I finished by Friday and now had the weekend to myself.
To occupy the weekend, I needed a handy book to engage me, and so I went to Blackwell’s bookshop for one. I found none, until I ran into a mathematics book. So captivated was I that I read the book to the bookshop’s till, through the bus ride to my hotel, and by the next day, I had finished reading the book. Excitedly, I called my wife with élan about my read, and she asked, as women are wont to do, whether I was under the influence.
She declined to share the book with me and instead suggested that I give the book to Olunloyo.
As soon as I returned to Nigeria, I went to Olunloyo with my new find. Unsurprisingly, he sat me down and gave me a fuller lecture on Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian mathematician who took a mathematics chair at Cambridge without a university degree.
Olunloyo just simply knew mathematics. When integers stood alone or together, he saw ascension or descension; he could make their evenness or oddities; when placed on top of one another and fractionated, he could make sense of them all; when a full stop was thrown around numbers, the decimals were his companions; seeing figures, he could make an apparent or inherent meaning from them; he could see figures when sequenced or looped; even when numbers were chaotic, he could make sense out of chaos.
Given any figure, he saw a deeper meaning, and with several figures, he could interpret where, under the same circumstances, the rest of us drew a blank.
So, for him, there was maths and beauty everywhere around us—in literature, in music, and in horticulture.
Three years ago, he introduced me to the maths in graphic arts through the works of the genius E.C. Escher.
Olunloyo was just simply phenomenal—a wondrous make, a mathematical head, pure and simple. But he was humble enough to acknowledge the vastness of knowledge, and he made it a daily assignment to learn continuously.
And so he spent endless hours in his study and paid weekly visits to the bookshop. Even when he suffered a stroke, he put his head to the test, and when the faculty was still fully operational, he said the legs could go as long as the head was intact.
He rode around in a wheelchair in his study and made regular visits to the bookshop. On his penultimate visit, he sent me a note… He wrote that the bill be given to ‘Kolade, whatever his surname’, and this was coming from ‘Olunloyo, the man with constitutional authority’.
Sometimes, at public functions, he was bewitched by his thoughts. He would bend over a sheet of paper to solve some mathematical problems.
In this mood, I knew better than to disturb his train of thought. When admirers, friends, and relations stopped by to say hello, they found him vacant—he was in a different realm.
Surprisingly, though, and almost magically, he still followed the proceedings of the function. You knew this because, at the end of the event, he could engage by giving a blow-by-blow account of all that had transpired.
In his professional life, he took up an academic position as a lecturer at the University of Ibadan, then at the University of Ife.
He was later appointed Rector of The Polytechnic, Ibadan, and briefly served at The Polytechnic, Kwara.
He held variegated positions within government and academic institutions, 55 in total, spanning 45 years of service.
He served as Commissioner for Economic Planning and Community Development, and Commissioner for Education in the Western State.
At one point, he held two portfolios concurrently, Commissioner for Education and Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs.
In many of these institutions, regardless of his title, he functioned as a troubleshooter, an ombudsman, a fixer of intractable problems—an interventionist minister.
It was against this background that he set his sights on politics and was briefly drawn into serving as the Governor of Oyo State.
I did not think much of his foray into politics and never hid that from him. He was a mass of contradictions. Once, he told me that the politics of Oyo State operated on a tripod: Lamidi Adedibu provided the brawn; Azeez Arisekola and Yekini Adeojo, the money; and Olunloyo, the brain, to formulate ideology and strategy.
I was never impressed. I thought he had aligned himself with men whose quest for power knew no bounds. But he countered that political parties are made up of angels and devils, less of one than the other. I have since come to see the truth in that statement.
Often, when he spoke of politics, I listened intently but with dissimulation. I believed he had started his mathematical journey brilliantly, but it had stalled the moment he veered into politics.
I wish he had stayed true and exclusively focused on mathematics and engineering. His wealth of intellect and profound faculty would have resonated globally far more than his political legacy ever did.
But he strayed into politics and remained mercurial in it—because he attempted to solve it using equations and theorems. It was a struggle that consumed him till the very end.
For all his brilliance, he lacked financial intelligence. This dogged him in his twilight years, largely due to the huge expense of prolonged medical care.
His family’s healthcare costs were also exorbitant over many years. People like him ought to have been retained in the financial courts of government or academia, never to be disturbed by mundane matters such as finances. Their focus ought to be scholarship, morning, noon, and night.
He was on scholarship throughout his academic career. He could have been a national scholar for life.
I am certain Olunloyo would not mind my mentioning his indebtedness to his family and to the late Abiola Ajimobi, late Lekan Are, late Alaafin Oba Lamidi Adeyemi, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, Rasheed Ladoja, Governor Seyi Makinde, Chief Bode George, Dr Wale Babalakin, Pastor William Kumuyi, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, Professor Gabriel Ogunmola, Chief Kola Daisi, Lekan Ademosu, and General Ibrahim Babangida.
Friends do not often reveal what friends do, but he repeatedly sang their praises for the support they extended to him.
Given the portrait I have painted in this essay, one must ask: where truly lay his talent—in scholarship, particularly mathematics and engineering, or in politics? I cast my lot with scholarship.
He knew I spoke little and wrote even less, but when I did, I was free in my expression. That was the foundation of our bond.
I was one of his sounding boards. He was a great friend, senior, and mentor. I will miss his endless stream of conversation, from Beethoven to Newton, Einstein to Awolowo and Akintola, and of course, Euler, Ramanujan, Hawkins, and Archimedes—his fellow mathematicians.
He was a polyglot, a polymath, an iconic and itinerant teacher, a maverick, and a restless politician. Such was the ease with which he could move from Pythagoras through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Shakespeare. He was, indeed, deeply cultured.
I recall a tale he once told me. Chief Obafemi Awolowo had written a letter to him in which he stated categorically, ‘…When I become 80…’ Olunloyo returned the letter the following day, having read it, and added two words to make it read, ‘…if and when I become 80…’ Awolowo accepted the correction. The Good Lord called Awolowo home at 79.
Man’s limitation and language must always make provision for divine will—deo volente, an ablative absolute expression meaning God willing.
On Saturday, April 5, 2025, Dr Olunloyo called me not once, but four times. On the fourth call, he asked me to undertake an assignment.
I sent a note to the mutual friend he directed me to, and added, ‘By the way, Dr Victor Olunloyo will be 90 on April 14, 2025.’
Suddenly, I remembered his tale and quickly corrected myself to write, ‘…Dr Victor Olunloyo will be 90 on April 14, 2025, God willing.’
In divine providence, the Good Lord called him home the next day, April 6, 2025.
When death finally came, even though prior rumours and hospitalisations had prepared me, I shed a tear.
…Last scene of all
That ends this strange, eventful history
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII
- Dr Kolade Mosuro is a publisher, bookseller, and trustee of the Government College Ibadan Old Boys Association.
