As soon as he could talk, he began asking his parents and everyone around him all interminable whats, whys, whens, and wheres. His strangely inquisitive, inattentive, and rebellious character also meant growing up and doing things — and annoyingly — his own way. That too made him a difficult and uncontrollable child. Little wonder, his expulsion from kindergarten was done to prevent further collision with a world that never prepared to receive this rare mind.
Thomas A. Edison, therefore, had no option but to be taught at home — and luckily by his own mother, who happened to be a teacher herself. Learning things his way brought out the very best in him. While other boys played, Tom remained intensely bookish. So immensely absorbed was he in intellectual curiosity that a sudden deafness striking him at the age of 12 was rather received by him as advantage, especially because it allowed him to completely concentrate without distraction. Enjoying his long loneliness meant having to learn everything learnable.
Having to fend for himself made him a wanderer, daily travelling to Detroit on his own device also meant taking refuge in the library, where he read the entire books. Given that many of the books and laboratory apparatus were out of his reach, saving for them meant starving, and wandering with broken shoes and tattered winter overcoat as if an insane teenager.
But did what people say and believe ever mattered to him? In fact, the more he failed the more resolute and fanatical he remained toward his life’s mission. This was because he knew it from the outset that his ambitious life adventure was going to first get messier before it could get better.
In other words, not only had hard times toughened him. Having learned so in such a short period of time not only reinforced his rare individualist traits. They also turned him into a virtual thinking machine, a machine obsessed with reinventing the world. Capturing flashes of ideas as they came made him to always have his notebook and pen handy.
Besieged by all sorts of strange ideas, he began seeing many mysterious things other humans could hardly see. It was these mysteries that soon turned Tom into an inventor maniac — from lightening the world with his bulbs to telegraphic evacuation of data electronically.
Soon, this starved, insane and ruined-looking, bankrupted and exploited wanderer had to leave Boston for New York City where he arrived hopeless and penniless. And without any option but to sleep on dirty floor of Western Union equipment workshop, he remained for months forgotten until an extensive electrical failure of Western Union’s stock printer equipment forced the world to discover his rare gifts.
Consequently, Western Union not only hired him as its master technician, overseeing maintenance, but also agreed to pay this curiously ego-driven inventor-scientist more money than anyone had ever earned before working for an organisation. Such a huge earning meant that, finally, Edison’s time had come, including having money to establish an Edison Menlo Park Laboratory. Besides electrical bulb technology perfected here, the entire generating dynamos and electrical wiring systems to light the world were invented and engineered.
Even with such a huge successes, Edison still had neither a home of his own other than his workroom, nor a wife. And even when he eventually married his secretary, Edison never stopped working as long as 20 hours daily, spending most of the entire night in his laboratory. Knowing work as his only hobby, his wife, Mary, never bothered him with matters that bordered on domesticity.
From one wonder to another wonder, soon his Menlo Park Laboratory gave birth to a new giant company, ‘General Electric,’ a world leader in electrical appliances and equipment manufacturing. Now, an increasingly international scientific celebrity, Edison began to speak out, disliking nonscientific men, and publicly arguing, “I wouldn’t give a penny an ordinary college graduate, except those from institutions of technology like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…”
As far as he’s concerned, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, were merely places people went to learn “executive gossiping” which would never move America forward. Little wonder, rather than allow his children attend these so-called gossiping universities, Tom decided that it’s either the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or they forgot a university education, since as he argued, it’s the only university where people went focusing on transforming the world scientifically and technologically.
What the story of this great American inventor entrepreneur teaches us is that for any country to become great, it must have among its citizens, men and women born to defy all odds in their selfless drive to catapult their beloved nation to economic and technological stardom. The depth of Tom’s story is that such a gifted citizen doesn’t necessarily have to be business inventor-entrepreneurs. He or she could be a patriarchal economic inventor-entrepreneur such as Deng Xiaoping of China, Franklin Roosevelt of America, General Park Chung-Hee of South Korea, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (Emir) of Qatar. He could be God-sent liberators such as Moses, Jesus, Prophet Mohammed, Mahatma Gandhi of India, Martin Luther King of America, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Mother Theresa of India, and Nelson Mandela of South Africa.
With our kind of shortsighted public leaders and business barons, there is no way Nigeria should expect to emerge as a great nation navigating the tough road to greatness that requires a tough leader to show the way. Looking at Edison, we saw a man who denied himself comfort so that he could give light to the world, not just in its literal sense. What we have in Nigeria are business barons who are stealing from our commonwealth with the help of their partners in crime in government to quickly enrich themselves.
But look at Nigeria, what have we had all these year, selfish goons; men and women who use power to enrich themselves and their families. These were called men of thumos by both Plato and Aristotle, who argued that’s the thumos in them that prevents them from having feelings for the weaker members of their society. It’s the brute presence of thumos that made them not only excessive selfish and arch-promoters of dog-eat-dog society rather than a modern society driven by communitarian solidarity.
The habitual wantonness and excesses of men who easily hand their nation’s commonwealth to the highest bidders made Plato and Aristotle to conclude that these are men who truly need our sympathy for theirs is really a genuine sickness deserving everyone’s pity rather than despise them for as a result of inner disharmony and psychological fracture that destroy their moral appetite, they hardly have a feeling of guilt or remorse for their wrongdoings. But how could we blame men and women who regard morality in public speech always as a nuisance, an annoying brake on their freedom of action?
Are Nigerians asking too much from their so-called leaders than simply to make life better and allow justice and fairness to reign? For how long should our leaders be unpertubed with their childish behaviour which makes them to be only preoccupied about western toys like the latest cars? Is that all their ambition and mission in life? Just to steal from all of us to meet endless and insatiable needs? Conquering consumption but production? To say it is mind-boggling is to be mild about it. But at the end of the day, we need a savior-leader for Nigeria to be truly saved from our enemies both external and domestic.
That is why we should be looking elsewhere in our midst in search of true patriots, men and women who when in power should spend their entire time seeking how best to maximise our common good while minimising their personal comforts. We should be looking for our true Edisons not those pretending to be leaders. Going up on our search is giving up on Nigeria and the future of our children.
The search for this exceptionally gifted Nigerian should never come to an end until he or she emerges from his or her hiding place, or else who other than he or she would bring to an end the people’s sufferings, the plundering of our commonwealth by foreigners and their local agents, the helplessness of our crying people because our current bunch of self-serving rulers have refused to take responsibility? It is our duty to continue this search for our nation’s rescuer, or else giving up on the search is giving up on Nigeria.
Nigerians are looking for you to save Nigeria from the hands of the agents of the west, whose sense of nationalism is zero, whose only joy is that the country in their hands is in a serious coma.
Our hiding savior, why not you ask yourself these questions: Why am I still hiding while the people suffer? Am I here to save them from the hands of the west the same way Moses saved the Israelites from the Pharaoh and his Egypt? Is my life not a mission to lead Nigeria out of its present darkness to greatness? How can I justify being sent on a rescue mission and I ended up in hiding? What will be my place in the history of Nigeria if I fail to accomplish what I was born to accomplish? If other great men and women, born with more disadvantages than I, including little education and little material inheritance than and they’re able to rise to their rescue responsibilities, what justifications do I have for avoiding to rescue Nigeria? When can I take up my life’s challenge, using my leadership ingenuity to free my people from this endless wanton destruction of a highly endowed nation before it’s too late? My failure is the failure of Nigeria; it is the failure of a giant.
…It is not who is right, it is what is right that matters!