ABUJA -The Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Abdu Bulama, has said that adequate funding of science and technology would strengthen research capabilities of the country.
Bulama said this when Mr Umar Bindir, the Director-General, National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP), and his management staff visited to brief the minister on the activities of the agency.
“No nation can be technologically self-sufficient, if researchers do not carry out industrial need-based research that will metamorphose into goods
and services,” he was quoted as saying in a statement signed by NOTAP’s Public Relations Officer, Mr Raymond Ogbu, on Thursday in Abuja.
The statement, made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), said that the minister stressed that NOTAP’s mandate was key to the country’s development and promised to work closely with the agency to actualise it.
“Youth unemployment could be curbed, if science, technology and innovation are harnessed to develop the mass of skilled manpower that will be the catalyst for job creation.
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“As the world has become a global village, there is an increasing need to strengthen and reinvigorate science, technology and innovation as vital instruments for job creation, especially in the developing countries,’’ Bulama said in the statement.
He said that with the kind of enthusiasm and professionalism exhibited by Bindir, Nigerians would soon witness the kind of technology revolution that took place in China, Korea and some other developed countries.
Responding, Bindir said that NOTAP was collaborating with Nigerian universities and multinational companies to implement some schemes like NOTAP Industry Technology Transfer Fellowship (NITTF) and the Technology Story Board initiative.
According to him, the NITTF is a Public Private Partnership (PPP) programme designed to create indigenous critical technological competencies of elite applied knowledge through special PhD programmes tenable in Nigerian universities.
The statement said that the director-general further informed the minister that NOTAP was also collaborating with some companies to demystify production processes through a programme called “NOTAP Technology Story Board”.
He explained that the programme was designed to produce pictorial processes of production from the raw material processing to the final product..
Bindir stated that his major focus was to leverage on the partnerships and leapfrog Nigeria from being a technology consumer nation to a globally recognised technology giant before 2020.
Bindir solicited the assistance of the minister to improve the budgetary allocation to the agency, to ensure that its mandate was actualised. (NAN)
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