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‘Nigeria spent N300bn on technology transfer agreements in 10 years’

By on April 6, 2011

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.

Source : 234next