By Felix Khanoba
Former Minister of National Planning, Professor Osita Ogbu, has called on relevant authorities in the country to engage in mass deployment of technology to boost productivity and address the level of poverty in Nigeria.
Delivering the 11th convocation lecture of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) on Friday in Abuja, Ogbu, who spoke on the theme; ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Challenge of Poverty Reduction in Nigeria’, said use of technology remains the most potent weapon to tackle the nation’s economic challenges.
“If any nation wants to reduce the population of her citizens that are poor, it must invest or create policies that encourage the use of technology to increase the productivity of her citizens,” Ogbu, who is the director of Institute for Development Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, said.
While saying that Nigeria needs to up its game in the deployment of technology in line with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), Ogbu said the government must also bridge the gap between the rich and poor to ensure a healthy society.
“This lecture is concerned that if nothing is done urgently to reverse the course, the fourth industrial revolution would further entrench the division and widening the inequality.
“The danger with most technologies, including the technologies of the 4IR, are that , through access and control they may lose their ethical and socialising character, while the benefits being appropriated by a few- widening the income gap.
“Yet, we know that economies that are more equal and stronger are more peaceful. Inequality breeds all forms of societal ill, including insecurity.”
Speaking further, Ogbu, who also served as Economic Adviser to former President Olusegun Obasanjo, described as unacceptable the report that more than 91 million Nigerians are currently living below the poverty line.
He said it was disturbing that more than 50 per cent of Nigeria’s poor are youths with the unemployment rate at an all-time high of 53 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2020, wondering how the young ones could be positioned to benefit from the more demanding future without adequate skills and work experience.
“Developing skills and cognitive ability, a culture of discipline, curiosity, inquiry and innovation, starts at childhood. Yet, about 17 million Nigerian children are undernourished (stunted and/or wasted) with the highest burden of malnutrition in Africa and second highest in the world,” he said.
While also noting that education systems in African countries are seriously underfunded with low appetite for cutting edge research, Ogbu urged universities in Nigeria to find a way to address the real problem of the society, by churning out workable solutions.
“The labour force is currently made up of mostly low skilled workers with low levels of productivity. Universities are not regarded, in Israel and other advanced countries, as centres of solutions with significant R&D and innovation roles.
“Nigeria has no single world-class engineering laboratory in any University. The curriculum is outdated and there is no inbuilt relevant practical training that aligns theory to practice,” he said.
In a remark, Vice-Chancellor of NOUN, Prof. Olufemi Peters, showered praises on the convocation lecturer for hammering on the need for the education system to focus more on science and technology as well as skills development.
He, however, said some of the issues raised are already being addressed in the ongoing review of Nigerian universities curriculum embarked upon by the Federal Government.
