The Bank of Industry (BoI) said it has partnered with the Nigerian Academy of Engineering towards using science and technology for economic growth and development.
The managing director of BoI, Rasheed Olaoluwa, said this recently during a visit of the Institute to BoI’s office in Lagos.
Olaoluwa said that it was clear that there is a correlation between technology and development, saying, “The more technology you have, the more rapid your development will be as a country.
“We discussed areas of collaboration in terms of possibility of linking industry to centre of innovation, like academia, research & development institute, among others. I must say the rest of the world is moving deeply in terms of technology”.
According to him, “Technology makes work more efficient, reducing cost and generally making life better. As a nation, we need to rethink our strategy for development. We have being pursuing technology transfer for too long, it doesn’t give us sufficient amount of results. No country will willingly give you their technology you need to build your own scientists and engineers who will be well supported and funded to come up with their own bright ideas”, he said.
He added further that, “The only shortcut is what is called reversed engineering where you take technology that have been developed from elsewhere and take a particular devise and get very bright young minds to disassemble those items and see if they can understand the nitty-gritty of the composition of the items and try to put it back independently. These are what Asians have done independently. Revised engineering happens every day in China and Korea, we should also do something like that”.
He pointed that, “As a country, if we must sustain our current economic growth in the future, we need to take technology very seriously”, he said.
The president of the Nigerian Academy of Engineering, Prof. Raifu Salawu, said that economic growth can no longer be attained by taking resources away from technology or innovation.
Source : Leadership