How Nigeria can operate a technology driven economy– Dr Bindir

You have been the Director General of National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP) for over one year now, how do you find this new experience?The National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP) was established by law back in 1979 as National Office of Industrial Property and later in the early 80s the […]

You have been the Director General of National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP) for over one year now, how do you find this new experience?
The National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP) was established by law back in 1979 as National Office of Industrial Property and later in the early 80s the name changed to NOTAP and moved up to Abuja from Lagos.
The main responsibility of NOTAP is to ensure that we monitor the inflow of foreign technology into Nigeria through the process of technology transfer agreement registrations. We are also expected to develop viable models for commercializing the research and development outputs that are viable from Nigerian institutions. Before coming here, I was the Director of Technology Acquisition and Assessment in the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology and I was shouldered with the responsibility of coordinating the activities of this agency, to help the minister know what is happening here. So coming here as a director general of the agency in January 2009 it was not a new terrain.

Looking at issues of technological development in Nigeria, there are a lot of challenges for Nigeria. How have you decided to tackle these challenges?
Theoretically, the aspect of acquiring technology comes in two blocs. The first bloc is that you can effectively acquire technology if you have got skillful people, well trained, well disciplined to be engaged in research and development. So the research activities—getting data processed in our universities, polytechnics, and our research institutions are all activities of indigenous technology acquisition. The second bloc is that you can acquire technology through technology transfer, meaning that other people have perfected the technology which you require and therefore you deploy the strategies that are standard and use them effectively for your own survival.
Under this bloc, you can transfer technology first, by just buying the technology from somebody and transfer it for your use. If that is not an easy one you can also transfer technology by licensing. You can go to a place where they have perfected some techniques and you say ‘well you have it and we want to use it,’ and then you pay some amount either yearly or monthly. And in the process of using the technology you have learned, that means you have transferred the knowledge. The third one is that you can have a local venture, thereby you can bring your technology and I bring money and then you establish facilities locally to utilise that technology.
Looking at these blocs in technology transfer, the challenges in this country are that, first, science and technology in itself being a very abstract sector presents a huge challenge. We like physical things, we like immediate things, in most cases, we don’t plan for the long term.   We like short term plans. Science and technology doesn’t work like that. Science and technology requires you to invest heavily, plan, predict, forecast and then do the work—that is the first challenge. The second challenge is that if you look at the scientists, the specialists who work in the fields are very highly skillful people, very well trained globally, operate at the comparative performance level with anybody in the world. To produce these people you probably, in 200 years, can produce only one person. So, unless you have that attitude of long term planning, discipline and good commitment coupled with heavy investment, it becomes a very difficult situation.
If you look at our science and technology institutions in the present day, for instance, Nigeria has 104 universities, out of these, none of them is among the top 30 universities even in Africa. That is not a good environment for science and technology to evolve.
If you look at companies that are rated in the continent and are operating in Nigeria, the top 10 or 15 are all banks and therefore we are more of managing finances rather then producing things, and again, it is an index that our technology got challenges.
Three, if you look at the big companies whether it is Dangote, PZ, Julius Berger or Uniliver you will find that nearly 100 percent of the technology operated by these companies are actually foreign. Again this is another challenge.

But Nigeria is known to have some best scientists in the world. Are these people not contributing towards the development of the sector?
Anybody who tells you we are known with best scientists and engineers I don’t think he has facts and statistics to back his argument.

But some of them are doing wonders in US, UK and rest of the world  
Nigerians with nationalities of other countries are actually the nationals of those countries. It is the resources that Nigeria has in-house that can be used effectively and it is only by taking correct steps that can be achieved. Some of these people can only work in the advanced universities there, they cannot come and work with the kind of the universities that we have here. That has to change.
Some of them are industrialists, though they have Nigerian roots, they cannot come back and work within the environment of lack of power, bad roads, unrests and all sort of things. That has to change. These are some of the challenges if addressed we can now harvest the resources we have and then we can be able to call them Nigerians.  

One thing a lot of people are complaining about in Nigeria is the weak institutions, most of them not capable of handling some good initiatives. NOTAP is 31 years old, what impact has it made so far?
The basic mandate of this agency is that any Nigerian company that requires to enter into an agreement with a foreign technology service provider has to be registered by this agency for that agreement to be honoured by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). And the process of the registration is that the indigenous companies will bring their agreements here. NOTAP will then look at the technologies on two sides, first, is the type of the technology scope within the agreement, what is this foreign company coming to Nigeria to do? We try to decode this and know exactly where you are coming from. In some cases we found out that they have genuine packages but in some cases you found that Nigerians are taken for granted, the technology is not clear, some of the things they have claimed to have are in the public domain or they are old and some of these agreements are just agreement to take money out of this country. In the last 10 years, NOTAP intervention just in looking at these agreements critically has resulted in saving this country nearly N100 billion which would have left the shores of this country.
The other thing we look out for in the agreement is what are the technology elements that will favour our country to also develop? Are these companies bringing the experts to come and work with Nigerian experts, or are they coming with the designing skills, are they going to do all the drawings and the scales all in Nigeria? Because there are many companies that will come to Nigeria and bring technology, install it and go back with their skills, if anything happens to the technology, you have to look for them to come back and fix it. That we believe is not fair, we are harping on these very strongly but it is very difficult to do because most of these companies will try to blacklist you. They will tell people that you are bureaucratically interfering with their businesses. They will tell government that you are stopping foreign direct investment but the button line is that it is coming to this country so we have to do our job. Our country literally domesticated consumption and some people see this window of opportunity to rip this country off. When they come here, they connive with other people, in that regard we say no. And by doing so these companies have now started to understand that we are serious and they started to correct such agreements. At the third level, to ensure the implementation of the agreements where  they said they will do this and that ,we follow them to the fields to see the new technologies they bring, the expatriate they bring, we check their CVs to ensure that they are the real people we need. These are what we do here.
But the major challenge for NOTAP is on the domestic side. The technologies coming into this country, do we have the right environment to absorb them? Are our institutions ready to partner with right agencies to make sure that we are stronger? The biggest challenge is that every agency is operating like an island, every agency is operating separately. This is a very difficult terrain for NOTAP to bring the local resources together to understand what we are trying to do with a view to capturing and domesticating these technologies. It is a big challenge but we are making progress in that regard. Some agencies don’t want to talk to you at all, they don’t want to listen to your statistics, they think they know it all and that is not true.  In the last one year that I joined NOTAP, first thing I had done was to get my own staff  to work as a team which is very important factor if you want to move forward, before now many of them were highly  prostrated, there were no promotion exercise in the last 12 years and there were a lot of misunderstanding  whether this agency is a research agency or not. There were so many policies plotting around, you cannot be promoted from one level to another unless you have a Ph.D, all these affected the morale of the staff. So I had to bring new initiatives to be able to portray to them that working in NOTAP you must see it as an opportunity not a means to an end. I encourage them to have a target and let’s say in the next 10 years I will have some experts in the technology transfer agreement, processes and assessment.   This is how you will look at it, even if you did not get a promotion you have got a skill that money cannot buy. This is how we managed to roll the ball and today I am happy to announce to you that all the staff that are here we are working as a team. The second thing that I managed to drive forward was to bring this technology transfer to the surface for my own team to understand that the main reason why this agency was established was to ensure that Nigeria also changes to a technology and knowledge economy, we become global operator not just by consuming. Today, people are saying we have the fastest growing telecommunication industry, is literally consumption, they even give statistics that we have 90 million active subscribers, if that is true it means that 90 million handsets in Nigeria, no single one is produced in Nigeria, to us in NOTAP, it is a challenge. Yes, now we have test this enough now let block this, we have to produce some of these things internally, this is how the education has to improve, research and development institutions have to improve, this is how our engineers have to improve. This is what will bring back the Diaspora people. When you say no, we must do it inside and the market is available.