 |
| MODERN
BUT UNABLE TO POWER INDUSTRIALIZATION: Former President Goodluck Jonathan
(middle) joggling the "Socket Football to Electricity" (invention)
presented to him by the Uncharted Play Group during their visit to the
Presidential Villa in Abuja in August 2013. Others are: Former Vice-President
Namadi Sambo (2nd left); U.S.-based Nigerian inventor, Miss Jessica Mathews (3rd
right), her father, Dr Mathews Idoni (L), and Former Minister of Works, Mr Mike
Onolonemen (R). Image credit/Photo: News Agency of Nigeria |
By Kenneth Nwachinemelu David-Okafor
Revised and
Updated August 5th, 2020
 |
| K. N. David-Okafor |
I
am going to share what I have learned from over 10 years of researching into
the topics of inventions, innovation, inventive skills, and technological innovation.
Inventing is important for both individuals and for countries. I want to
support and encourage as many people as possible to embark on inventing. And
the first object lesson is to teach that inventing is not something that only
special people can do; everybody so willing can invent (or learn to) as long as
there is desire, accessible guidance, and keen interest.
PS. This post is written under my pen name, however this book is under my given name - KENNETH NWABUDIKE OKAFOR
Please let me pointedly ask if you are you
following the ongoing serialization of the blog post "How to Become a Successful Inventor in Nigeria"?
I hope you have read through this series as
it represents one of the most interesting treatise on invention and inventive
thinking thus far on NAIJAGRAPHITTI BLOG.
IF NO, you may join in right after reading
this with the next links (CLICK HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE,
HERE, HERE & HERE).
In this present post I thought I should take
a break and share telling stories, to give my take on the wide spread
recurrence of dearth of inventive thinking among Nigerians, from a perspective
formed from lived experiences and bitsy incidences of life which many Nigerians
and other Africans can relate to. Thus I am going to attempt to illustrate the
story of Nigeria’s under-representation on the Hall of Fame of inventive nations
with anecdotal vignettes from my childhood to adulthood and substantiate how I
came to my own conclusions long before I could back up my opinion with hard
facts. The stories, by their morals and by inference, capture cause and effect as
they paint vivid pictures as clearly as data.
I have deliberately excluded two stories
from the earlier version of this write-up; you may wish to read the first version
in full (CLICK HERE).
And, yes, of course, this is a comparative
assessment. How I would have wished that the Nigeria Institute for Social and
Economic Research (NISER) had studied the incidence of low innovativeness and
inventive capacity amongst Nigerians as a sociologic research.
Nevertheless, in the absence of any
systematic study, we are as liberty to use anecdotal evidence; Mpofu et al. (2006) noted "anecdotal
reports are an important source of information on sociocultural practices that
are under researched, or from settings that are underrepresented in the
literature" (Mpofu et al., 2006
p.477).
The first vignette I would share out of four
is drawn the period covering ten to fifteen years as I grew up in southwest
Nigeria, around (at one point) and inside (at another point) a university community.
Growing up as the child of a full-time civil
servant and later part-time large-scale subsistence farmer father, I witnessed
firsthand the arduous nature of rain-fed subsistence farming bereft of an iota
of mechanization: little has changed from those days decades ago.
My father was not alone. There was a whole
scale community of full-time civil servants who regularly moonlighted as
part-time farmers among which number could be counted lecturers from the
university. The goal of these men was fairly straightforward: to augment low
wages by producing certain cash crops and thus reducing food bills. Many of
them typically cropped yam, cassava, cocoyam, maize, vegetable (especially fluted
pumpkin), peppers, tomatoes and okra. The average farm size was just under a hectare
but was usually in broken-up holdings, leased from the village land-owners (we
would later learn that the land did indeed belong to the university from the
original gifting from government but the villagers took advantage of their
ancestral claims). They produced more than their families could consume, sold
off the excess and reserved seed stock for the next farming season from their
own yield (once there was not plant pest/disease outbreak). These men, their
families and, occasionally, paid farm hands worked laboriously from dawn to
dusk with sparse breaks for refreshments and banter in between. My father
specialized in yam, cassava, and maize (he kept livestock separately as well);
combined, he farmed one of the biggest land holdings.
Naturally, my mind wondered why none of these
civil servants moonlighting as farmers did not attempt to figure out better and
faster ways to do some of the more arduous tasks farming the land after long
hours behind the desk and on weekends?
Do not get me wrong, I acknowledged these
were conscientious breadwinners who took what role they played as family and dependants’
providers seriously. I thought highly of men, they, like my father, labored
that I should have a better life. Of course, they consulted fellow part-time
farmers should they have a knotty issue to tackle. At any given opportunity of
a break, you could see them gathered, swapping tips on farming, family affairs,
political developments, wicked bosses who denied them due promotions and even
share coarse jokes. Usually, they discussed, huddled in groups by tree shades
or whatever sun-cover they could find, dissecting topics as wide ranging as
handling seedlings, fertilizer application, where to source the best crop
seedlings, crop rotation options, weed control methods and the tactic of hiring
farm hands at the cheapest rates. But in terms of the mechanics of saving time,
energy, resources, through greater efficiency and less stress than their
forebears did in order to exponentially improving yield per acre, they
discussed nothing.
As I preferred not to toil this hard to make
a livelihood, I got thinking: was this soul-gutting manual labour the only way
to do this? From my reflections as a teenager I had learned enough even from
snatches of ideas I saw in the movies to figure out that clever improvisations
were close relatives to inventions. Improvisations on farms, I truly imagined,
certainly could help expedite bush clearing/ground preparation, save time and,
generally, multiply crop yield in the long run. I wondered at the conundrum and
kept my eyes peeled to observe if I would discover even one person who failed
to conform to the same mold; I did not find one. Gradually I was gripped by an
ominous thought: perhaps it did not
really cross their minds to figure out alternatives.
On the other hand I observed something else:
whenever they came across someone with a clever idea or contraption which they wished
to copy at no cost, they could take to it. Other than this happenstance, they
seemed to accept the back-breaking work as their lot in life and they squared
their shoulders and bore the burden with equanimity!
The real irony was that these men all worked
the land around the very first university in Nigeria, a great store of
knowledge with a reputed Department of Agriculture & Extension Services,
where some world renowned scholars came to research and produce knowledge in
agricultural science and agricultural economics. As a matter of fact the
institution’s history is steeped in agriculture pedigree, for the first campus
was located on an agricultural research station outpost.
The second vignette I would share is partly from
my work in and partly from my involvement with an NGO which aspired to raise
world class entrepreneurs in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. I was involved with this
NGO as a facilitator and a mentor roughly between 2008 and 2014.
After a detailed appraisal of the graduating
aspiring entrepreneurs’ business plans and business ideas, I noted an emerging
trend: innovativeness and inventive thinking played very little part in the
concepts most of the NGO’s graduating aspiring entrepreneurs imagined to pursue.
Yet several researchers and professional have reached a consensus that there
are probably more people trying to invent things now than at any time in
history. Over the long haul, I realized that almost all of graduating aspiring
entrepreneurs never submitted business plans espousing ideas from "safe
bets" areas with fairly certain/predictable outcomes rather than new
frontiers and other notions enriched by inventive thinking and invention activities.
From all available resources I deduced that
there are some countries such as Great-Britain, France, USA, Germany, Japan,
Switzerland, South Korean and Australia which have grown a culture which
engendered and fostered inventive thinking and invention activities.
Three main ways in which these countries
have managed to grow innovations include through, firstly, through good old
trial and error of individual inventors; secondly, building on scientific
breakthroughs; and thirdly, the growth and evolution of inventive corporations.
These countries support their innovative
capacities through policy support, a variety of funding (from government,
non-state as well as private sources) for research and development (R&D),
building formal and informal institutional support, motivational/personal
incentives, promotional programmes/projects and education.
Chris Woodford who blogs at explainthatstuff.com
noted that:
Some inventions appear because of scientific breakthroughs. DNA fingerprinting (the process by which detectives take human samples at crime scenes and use them to identify criminals) is one good example. It only became possible after the mid-20th century when scientists understood what DNA was and how it worked: the scientific discovery made possible the new forensic technology. The same is true of many other inventions.
Marconi's technological development of radio followed on directly from the scientific work done by Lodge, Hertz, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, and numerous other scientists who fathomed out the mysteries of electricity and magnetism during the 19th century. Generally, scientists are more interested in advancing human knowledge than in commercializing their discoveries; it takes a determined entrepreneur like Marconi or Edison to recognize the wider, social value of an idea—and turn theoretical science into practical technology.
Woodford also wrote that:
Think of inventions in the 19th century and you'll come across lone inventors like Charles Goodyear, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Eastman (of Kodak)—and many more like them. But think of inventing in the 20th and 21st century and you'll come across inventive corporations instead—such companies as DuPont (the chemical company that gave us nylon, Teflon®, Kevlar®, Nomex®, and many more amazing synthetic materials), Bell Labs (where transistors, solar cells, lasers, CD players, digital cellphones, commercial fax machines, and CCD light sensors were developed), and 3M (pioneers of Scotchgard textile protector and Post-It® Notes, to name only two of their best-known products). It was Thomas Edison who transformed the world of inventing, from lone inventors to inventive corporations, when he established the world's first ever invention "factory" at Menlo Park, New Jersey, in 1876.
The third and final vignette comes my
experiences with electric power in Nigeria.
If there was something which truly united
Nigerians across all known sociologic and developmental parameters, even more
than soccer, it was the incessant poor supply of electric power. (Now I am re-writing
this blog in mid-morning with my laptop powered by a petrol-engine power
generator).
If there was ever a cause which gets the
goat of the average Nigerian it was inevitable shortage of electric power which
leaves people needing to generate their own electricity. Nigerian leaders appear
completely clueless when it comes to improving Nigeria’s poor electricity
supplies.
Understandably, a great majority of electricity users are incensed
and dismissive of government spokespersons assurances; several promises from
the authorities about the goal to improve access to electricity has never been
realized. People resort to speculations; some point to conspiratorial "electric
power sector cabal/saboteurs/generator importers" intent on malfeasance
and others allege "corruption" while the pious intone the problem is "spiritual".
Everybody holds their own viewpoints religiously and yet Nigeria still has electric
power problems.
When three successive administrations within
16 years, from 1999 to 2016, from the Obasanjo to the Jonathan administration,
tried to partially plug the electric power supplies shortfall with the vaunted
NIPP, almost nothing changed.
The Nigerian National Integrated Power
Project (NIPP) is an integral part of Federal Government’s efforts to combat
power shortages in the country. The NIPP was conceived in 2004 when Olusegun
Obasanjo was the President of the Federal Government of Nigeria. It was formed
to address the issues of insufficient electric power generation and excessive
gas flaring from oil exploration in the Niger Delta region.
It was conceived in 2004 as a fast-track
public sector funded initiative to add significant new generation capacity to
Nigeria’s electricity supply system along with the electricity transmission
and distribution and natural gas supply infrastructure required to deliver
the additional capacity to consumers throughout the country.
In 2005, the Federal Government
incorporated Niger Delta Power Holding Company Limited (NDPHC) to serve as the
legal vehicle to contract for, hold, manage and operate the assets developed
and built under the NIPP using private sector best practices.
The NIPP is being implemented jointly by
the federal, state and local governments through the corporate vehicle of the
NDPHC, a government agency owned by the three tiers of government but which
operates strictly on the private sector business model. The NDPHC Equity
Structure are as follows: Federal Government 47 per cent; 36 states, 35
percent; 774 local governments, 18 per cent.
The scope of the NIPP covers the entire
value chain in the power sector, namely generation, transmission and
distribution, including building from the scratch a national gas
infrastructure to power 10 gas-fired power plants across the country.
The primary reason for the impotence of the
NIPP? Lack of gas. Why lack of gas in an oil and gas-rich country? The primary
reason is due to a lack of investments in the downstream sector by the oil
majors with the financial pull/muscle to execute such capital-intensive
ventures.
I will quote directly
from the work titled "The
Opportunity Costs of Militancy in the Niger Delta, An Exposé" (CLICK HERE) which makes allusion to partly explain the core reason for the lack of
investments in the downstream sector by the oil majors and because of the
sensitivity of his subject matter the author signed off his work published on
the Nairaland Forum website on
Monday, May 30, 2016 only with his initials, LRNZH.
He wrote,
I was privileged to have a conversation with a high level executive in one of the international oil majors. My question to him is why we do not have the majors investing in massive industrial complexes to be located in the Niger Delta that will provide gas or power to manufacturers in places like Aba, refine crude oil and supply petrochemicals. Such projects will have a huge market in the West African sub-region. Shell has one in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, ExxonMobil has a few in Singapore and in the US, Marathon also has one in in Los Angeles, USA to mention a few.
His response is that his company, like other companies recognized that potential in Nigeria and did some feasibility studies. The risk to such project is too huge considering that it requires several billion dollars investment and a long time to bring to fruition. He blatantly opined that the market is not the issue. In fact, it will change the Niger Delta and West Africa. Gas flaring will become history with such complexes.
It is apparent that the lack of peace in the Niger Delta due to militancy will never allow such projects to be considered. The business case is just not there. Ironically, even the fuel stations that are owned by the majors like Total and Mobil are being considered for divestment by their owners.
Of course, the corruption really rankled the
most.
I am reminded of Nnamdi Awa-Kalu in his work
"The Energy and the Elegy: The
Tragedy of Nigerian Innovation" (CLICK HERE) where he wrote,
Of course, let us not forget that some innovation flows from the restiveness that the lack of electric power causes. 419. In Western depictions of Nigeria, the fraudster caricature dominates the larger narrative of a corrupt state held back by its own greed. Some Nigerians have found the will to profit from the innocent and from the state, through internet-based scams and every other form of cheating. Even when this corruption is not online, it is ever present. All signs point to a ruling class that is happier to get fat on the public purse than to spend on development. The reasoning seems to be that there is no harm in budgeting inflated amounts on infrastructure while spending a fraction of that on actual projects. So, vast millions are skimmed off and put in offshore accounts while the work is eventually carried out with money that is not enough, if it is done at all. In that small but crucial way, Made in Nigeria has emerged as a byword for shoddy design and poor execution, to be avoided wherever possible. Which makes it all the more ironic that the newly-elected government swept into power using the traditional broom, that most backward of implements, as its symbol of change.
During a recent interview, Bill Gates, founder of MicroSoft and co-chair of the Belinda and Bill Gates Foundation gave an interview in which he opined that
Africa has less electricity than 30 years ago. Many Nigerians know that his remarks are not wide off the mark.
Poor power supplies stared hard at the
intrepid Nigerian spirit and won.
Little wonder the lofty dreams of rapid
industrialization seem grandiose and far-fetched.
Why are Nigerians not inventing and innovating
their way out of darkness and inventing off-the-grid solutions to the parlous
state of electric power supply in Nigeria?
Now everybody knows there are recurring
problems with the system, yet nobody invests the commonsense required to tackle
the problems resolutely.
Of course, there are a handful of individuals
as well as tech start-ups such as Arnergy, trying their hands on renewable
energy. This blog has carried stories on some of them. However, Nigeria
requires robust power supplies for long-term industrialization efforts.
What is even more baffling is the attitude
of the higher institutions of education, particularly those concerned with
science and technology, of which Nigeria has a few, which behaved aloof and
disinterested in the electric power conundrum. As a matter of fact, the reason
for the perennial closure of universities in Nigeria has been the lack of
electric power supplies on campus.
Of course, there are people we could readily
finger who people look up to — like
the scientists, the PhD holders, the engineers and others in their cadre who
otherwise ought to cater to societal challenges by virtue of knowledge they
possess.
On September 30, 2008, the VANGUARD
newspaper wrote,
Mrs. Grace Ekpwihre, Minister of State for Technology, recently pronounced one of the enduring truths we have evaded telling ourselves when she announced that doctorate degree holders have failed Nigeria.
Indeed, if one were to take an inventory of a modern home or office and itemize all the things that have made life worth living for mankind — computers, telephone sets, television, internet, automobiles, aircraft, motor boats and the ubiquitous generator sets, to mention a few — one would be appalled by the fact that Nigeria's vast number of advanced degree holders have made next to no contribution to these inventions. Even those who have studied abroad and stayed there have made negligible contributions to mankind.
Many people may not remember Chief (Mrs) Grace Ekpwihre’s tenure as the Honourable
Minister for Federal Ministry of Science and Technology but her strong albeit
apt critique of doctorate degree holders having failed Nigeria are now
immortalized by VANGUARD Editorial titled "Nigeria: Encouraging
Inventions".
This leads to the fourth and final vignette
I would share to demonstrate the main reason(s) why there are not many Nigerian
inventors.
This leads to the fourth and final vignette
I would share to demonstrate the main reason(s) why there are not many Nigerian
inventors. This derives directly from an ongoing assessment of the
contributions of Nigeria’s tertiary education in solving contemporary societal
challenges.
One of the key measures of education which
is the relevance to the socioeconomic aspects of life indicates a very low score
for all tiers of Nigeria’s education. The
primary goal of education has become growing knowledge and increasing skills
for every country that wishes to exponentially multiply its global capital for
the 21st Century. Several key indicators give credence to this tilt.
In his 2005 book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century,
Thomas Friedman, the respected New York Times columnist wrote,
"Knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st century- economic driver. . . if you really want to know how a country is going to do in the 21st century don’t count its oil reserves or gold mines, count its highly effective teachers, involved parents and committed students."
Traditionally, of course, educators and leaders have long
been concerned about ensuring the goal of education is attained and that
education provides value for the learner. So they are always checking progress
along this line and weighing results through various metrics.
To
take one instance, in 1990, the United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF)
undertook a massive study on education around the world and produced a landmark
report. The Secretary General at the time described the importance of the work
as he remarked "The State of the World’s Children 1999 reports
on the efforts of the international community to ensure that all its children
enjoy their human right to a high-quality education — efforts that are
resulting in an ‘education revolution’. The goal of this worldwide movement:
Education For All. Towards that end, the work of governments, non-governmental
organizations, educators, communities, parents and children is informed by a
definition of education that includes, but goes far beyond, schooling." A
section of 1999 report states, "Going to school and coming out unprepared
for life is a terrible waste. Yet for many of the world’s children, this is
exactly what happens."
Nigeria is certainly one of the countries in
which its own education system and its educators have yet to fully internalize
the lessons of the epoch-making work. Several evaluations of Nigeria’s
education system and its achievements/outputs show that many learners from this
system are going to school and coming out
unprepared for life.
My preliminary findings in the assessment
include that fact that Nigeria’s tertiary education does not score highly when
viewed through the measure of educational outcomes which is relevant to the
socioeconomic aspects of Nigerian life. By inference, Nigeria’ higher education
falters on the criterion of effectively generating creative leaders for the
country’s drive for the goals of innovativeness, wealth creation and
international competitiveness. Additionally, the findings strongly indicate
Nigeria’s tertiary institutions have not begun to position themselves to meet
the needs of an innovative society nor has Nigeria itself positioned to become an
innovative society.
This is as a direct result of the fact that
the creativity crisis in Nigeria is additionally predicated on the fact that
Nigeria higher education system has not integrated creative thinking skills into curriculum
as a crucial need for shaping future orientations and actualizing reforms in
political, economic, and cultural areas.
In the abstract of his 2006 study, Creativity
of Turkish Prospective Teachers, Günseli Oral, Turkish scholar and Professor at Akdeniz
University, Turkey, observed, "For
developing countries, integration of creative thinking skills in university
education is a crucial need for shaping their future orientations and
actualizing reforms in political, economic, and cultural areas. For many
developing countries, creativity remains neglected, whereas in developed
countries, educational philosophy and goals rely on learners' enhancement of
creativity and self-actualization" (Oral, 2006). He wrote as though he had
Nigeria in view.
Another finding is that Nigeria’s tertiary
education does not even have immediate future plans of effecting the integration of creative thinking skills in higher
education. The system is entrapped in the stale and inflexible drill-and-kill
approach which several countries have walked away from. For Nigerian tertiary
institutions,
they, at the current stage, seem to be an afterthought in every stakeholders’
plans. Thus the system appears like a bad product which has come to disappoint
everybody’s expectations and from which nobody has finally come to expect much.
Some scholars and practitioners through their
research and writings have established what role an effectual and responsive higher
education, in particular, could play in qualitative and cutting-edge education.
An example that would be cited here is drawn from the United States of America.
In a paper published by Peer Review, an industry journal, titled, "The Creativity Imperative: A National Perspective", Deborah
L. Wince-Smith, the president of the United States Council on
Competitiveness, gave a forceful argument highlighting the new role educational
institutions have to play in a changing scheme of things to facilitate and
foster creativity and innovations. She wrote,
"…the growing importance of innovation for our national prosperity and the changing nature of innovation itself—have opened up exciting opportunities, they also challenge existing institutional structures. Our educational institutions were created in a world defined by boundaries that are now dissolving—disciplinary boundaries, organizational boundaries, national and regional boundaries, even boundaries between teachers and students or professors and entrepreneurs. While they have evolved significantly from their origins as seminaries and professional schools, few colleges or universities today see their role as the education of truly creative, entrepreneurial innovators.
"And yet, while our colleges and universities perhaps were not designed for the tasks that lay ahead, they are better positioned than any of our other institutions to meet the needs of an innovative society. They are the institutions that we rely on for nurturing talent, performing frontier research, and generating breakthrough ideas. They serve as the epicenters for regional innovation hotspots, linking together small and large businesses, state and federal initiatives, entrepreneurs, and researchers. Critical to their ability to play this role—both in their local communities and at the national level—will be the degree to which creativity can become a central value in a liberal education."
The crucial question is why is Nigeria’s
higher education not populated with institutions
that [Nigerians] rely on for nurturing talent, performing frontier research,
and generating breakthrough ideas? Yet
Nigeria’s tertiary education had actually gotten off to an auspicious start,
with the huge promise of safeguarding the citizens’ right to quality
education.
When I took all the above stories together,
over time, the overarching inference came to me as clear as glass: when people live long enough with certain
handicaps they deign to tolerate and cope with then the handicaps disappear by
merging with their way of living as a sort of coping strategy and thus become
just part of what makes life what/how it is; they learn to live with handicaps,
eventually. They finally never make
any effort and gradually get stuck in the rut; eviscerated but helpless;
challenged but appallingly risk averse.
The handicaps in Nigeria are so
overwhelming, so rampant and so intractable that the will to dare for change is
gradually ground down, lack of trying thus becomes culture.
Is the main reasons why there are so few
inventors with even fewer inventions in Nigeria due to under-exercised
imagination/poor use of the imagination, lack of inventive thinking, not
thinking in the problem solving mode, neglect of knowledge, misapplication of
resources and being risk averse?
Now I am sure you have your own stories with their own inferences; I do not mind swapping stories, do you?
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