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In this interview, the director general of the National Office
for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP), says billions of naira are
spent annually not only on imports but also on technology transfer agreements,
adding that indigenous technologies can be veritable job creation tools.
Excerpts:
Educational institutions
should give Nigeria better technologies
No country that is modern, productive and has got visibility
that is not strong in science and technology. Nigeria cannot be different. All
the classification you have like first world, second, third world countries or
least developing countries is actually geared on the energy of science and
technology. Poor countries are those that cannot utilise their mental capacity
to take advantage of the opportunities available to them.
In our hospitals most medicines are imported, the equipment are
imported; in the banking sector most of our software is foreign software from
Oracle, Microsoft, Finacle and based on the work of others. Also if you look at
our industries, nearly one hundred per cent of the facilities, the machinery,
the know-how, the processes are all based on foreign technology. Therefore, it
is important for us to ensure that internally too, we domesticate these things.
We have the knowledge
infrastructure
Nigeria has a lot of universities, about 104 universities, 125
polytechnics and 500 research, development and implementation institutions at
federal government level, alone with over 100 colleges of education, yet we do
not have the technological capacity to drive our industries. We are not able to
feed our country with our own rice. We have land; we have water but do not have
the technology to produce our own rice. Even if we have, we are not using the
skill and know-how we need to look at our own herbs medicinal roots and process
it to drugs is what we do not have. So this office (NOTAP) is the one that
looks at all these.
If you open your gate as a country for people to bring in their
technology, money and know-how to come and make more money in your country and
depart, you are not doing well. What you should do is to use a magnate to
capture their technology and managerial know how and be made better. The
graduates from our institutions are those magnates, but if the magnates are bad
what can we do? So the education system has to push it. By now it should be Nigerians
exploring our oil, designing our refineries. By now we should not allow one
drop of crude to leave; let us refine them in this country. That is where the
jobs are but we are not taking this opportunity. NOTAP tries to reduce the gap
between our industries and our knowledge system. As we speak now, the gap is
too wide. Industry is looking at a different direction; hardly will you go to
our industries and see they are employing PhD holders. Here we are on the
consuming mode, consuming the research and output of other people. We have to
reverse.
NOTAP-Industry Research
Fund
NOTAP has this year made it absolutely clear to industries that
every industry operating in Nigeria, local, multinational, enterprises having a
fair amount of shareholding by foreigners must also have the interest of
Nigeria technologically. And therefore, I am happy to report to you that after
the conference we had in Lagos with manufacturing industries, we have decided
to establish NOTAP-Industry research fund. This is fund whereby industries will
now contribute money into so that we can use it to train PhDs. We believe that
is the innovative population that we need: practical, highly skilled manpower
for Nigeria, so that we too can start looking at technology we require to move
our country forward.
I have gotten commitment of about N200 million. With this we can
train more than 400 PhD holders. We are targeting first class honours that will
research in areas that are important to industries. Contributions have started coming
gradually. Secondly, for every manufacturing company that we are working with,
we have also an attempt to narrow the gap between the industry and the academia
and launched what we called Industry Educational Technology Programme. One of
the things we would do on this is to go to an industry, understudy what they do
and then produce a process graphics.
For example, we all eat Maggi from Nestle but do not know what
it is made of. The major ingredient for Maggi is soya beans. Our children know
soya beans, on the other side they see Maggi but do not know the link so we
told Nestle (Maggi producers) to give us the process pictorially from cleaning
the soya beans using machines, to formation, drying, grinding, mixing and
wrapping. These pictures are taken to primary schools and we will use them to
educate our children. The same we did with Nido. Children cannot connect cow
with Nido. We are doing the same with cement companies, the plastics,
Friesland, all the branded companies in Nigeria, we have requested the
companies to produce them for us. We will produce one million copies of each
and distribute to our primary and secondary schools free of charge. We make
sure that we train the teachers, so that we can now breed them from the bottom
that science is the way to go. We want to see kids in primary school say I want
to be a rich man because I can produce Maggi. I know how it is being done.
Technology transfer
agreement costs
Based on our registration process for these technology transfer
agreement, we have saved this country N25bn in ten years. There are some
companies that will come and would want to operate in Nigeria and take hard
currency for technology in a very shoddy manner. Sometimes the technologies are
not that costly but they are charging Nigeria high, so in this office we cut
it. There are some technologies that are old that we are not even supposed to
pay for and when we see it in the agreement, we cancel those agreement. Through
this process of reduction and cancellation, in the last ten years alone we have
saved this country billions, monies that would have left Nigeria to pay for
technologies we don’t even need. We are continuing on refining this process,
that we can only pay for technology that we require and we can gradually ensure
that as Nigerian engineers become better, this agreement will be less because I
can tell you that by law, any job that can be done by Nigerian is not supposed
to be done by anybody coming from outside.
From our record Nigeria has also spent over N300bn on technology
transfer agreement fees in the past 10 years also. This is primarily on
consultancy and software transferred to Nigeria. We are trying to digitise the
whole process so that at the punch of a button I can tell you not just what has
been remitted and how much but only sector by sector.
