Onu says investment in science and technology key to Africa’s economic growth

The Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, has said that investment in science, technology and innovations are essential for Africa’s socio-economic development.

Onu said this on Monday when the Country Operations Manager of the African Development Bank Group (ADB), Mr Lawson Zankli, visited him in his office in Abuja.

Onu, who identified science, technology and innovations as the bedrock of any developed nation, expressed worry that Africa had yet to utilise the potential to its own advantage.

He therefore called for the adoption of the emerging global technologies and innovations in the collective efforts to eliminate poverty and disease in the continent.

He said: “We have seen a lot of development and improvement in some African countries.

“But generally we feel very disturbed that if you want to show the face of hunger, poverty and disease, it is the African face.

“As Africans, we are very disturbed about this and we do not want this to continue.

“We believe that this will change and all of us must work very hard to ensure that we don’t allow this to continue.”

The minister further said that Africa could leverage on science and technology to create jobs and stem the movement of youths to developed continents in search of better opportunities.

“We are aware of the problem so many Africans pass through in their efforts to move away from the continent in search of better life and good job opportunities.

“And we have seen how many young Africans that have died trying to cross the Mediterranean. This is very disturbing to us.

“We are determined as Africans to make sure we take our destiny in our own hands and build a new future for Africa.

“A continent that will be more peaceful, more developed and, above all, able to utilise the enormous resources that God has endowed it with.

“There is no part of the world that has developed without using resources from Africa,” Onu said.

He therefore asked, “Why can’t Africans use the same resources that people from other continents come here to exploit in order to develop Africa?’’

The minister also said that the successful implementation of Federal Government’s Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) 2017 to 2020 could be facilitated by science, technology and innovation.

He said that the development had given tremendous responsibility to the ministry to utilise science, technology and innovation to convert the nation’s resources to ensure that Nigeria would no longer import things that could be produced locally.

According to him, “Our interest is also to make sure that we provide job opportunities for Nigerians and Africans and also defeat extreme poverty.

“And the best way to achieve this is to ensure that you can give skills to people,’’ Onu said.

Earlier, Zankli said that the visit was part of the consultations in Nigeria toward developing a document that would guide the interventions of ADBG in Nigeria from 2020 to 2024.

He said that the group would be reviewing its previous strategy, achievements and lessons that could be drawn from the implementation and how to build in the lessons to develop a new strategy.

“Nigeria’s mid-term plan is the ERGP. So our strategy is supposed to help the government to achieve the objectives of its own strategy.

“We will be looking at the ERGP and eventually the successor plan and identify areas that are also in line with our own priority objectives.’

“And we will be selecting those areas where we will focus on during the period 2020 to 2024.

“These are priority objectives that the government itself has already selected. We will just be helping the government to implement those objectives,’’ Zankli said.