Technology: why Nigeria is backward-Bindir

Bindir said this as a guest speaker when the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP) launched the Industry Technology Transfer Fellowship (NITTF) in Abuja on Tuesday. He also said the country may not be able to industrialise its cities and villages without technology. Lack of technological capacity, not corruption, is Nigeria’s greatest albatross, according to Bindir. “The greatest problem we have in this country is lack of industrialisation. And we can’t industrialise without technology and we have to domesticate technology before we can make any impact in industrialisation. So lack of indigenous capacity in technology is Nigeria’s biggest problem not corruption”, Bindir who was the immediate past Director General of NOTAP said. He added that establishment of research institutes and universities as well as polytechnics have not served Nigeria any good as they have failed to proffer solution to the country’s problem, 55 years after its independence.  “After 55 years of independence there is still widespread poverty, we don’t even have a globally acclaimed finished product to showcase to the world apart from oil. We have not yet understood how to produce a globally acclaimed product because of lack of local technology. “We had established big industries in the past but many of them, if not all, have closed shops. It is not because we don’t have dreams; every Nigerian leader has had his dream and theoretical approach to development but the problem is that we often fail to connect all these together: our research and development with our innovation and with industry”, he lamented. He said over 60 percent of Nigerians are still poor because past leaders had paid little attention to technology and industrialization.