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ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING, ACADEMY OF INFRASTRUCTURE
Government, industry and the academia must cooperate to see to a better world, writes Victor C. Ariole
Deacon Onosode showed us how to get the University to run in a business-like… if things don’t work well in the University then the society is finished… I am not a secretive person, I don’t hide anything… I believe in open administration and I ran one … Rahamon Adisa Bello
Professor Rahaman Bello is the predecessor of Professor Toyin Ogundipe and the current Vice Chancellor of Unilag, Professor Folasade Ogunsola. The above quote indicates his style of leadership and his successors who, all, served as Deputy Vice Chancellors before assuming the post of Vice Chancellorship attest to his team-player leadership. June 27, 2024, Professor Bello assumed the position of the 13th President of the Nigerian Academy of Engineering. Knowing who the man is, Professor Ogunsola in his welcoming address put it to the gathering of Fellows of the Academy of Engineering that it is all about the challenge of infrastructure and expects his predecessor in office, now heading the Academy to see it as such. She also acknowledged him as infrastructure leader from the University of Lagos perspective.
To the layman and the general public when academies are mentioned, what they do and how what they do affect the society is their interest. University of Lagos is a host to some Academies – Science, Letters, etc. They are expected to be strategic organs in the society with mandate to be “Think Tanks” in highly specialised endeavours and composed of intellectuals and professionals endowed, or in acquisition of a skillful culture relating to that endeavour that must not be compromised, and in constant touch with both tactical and operational accomplishment of such greatly scrupulously worked out strategy. For a management guru like Peter Drucker, it is doing the right thing as against doing the thing as you deem right, and it can only happen when your team is a combination of special purpose and self-directed team.
Academies in Nigeria must set agenda of how to initiate and plan special purpose projects that must impact on the society, now and the future. The Manhattan project that produced the atomic bomb would have happened in Germany if not for lack of special purpose team as the Jews in their midst greatly dissented for fear of their own lives but congregated in California and New York to have a special purpose environment, friendly for diversity of people that are greatly united in the science culture they share together. The same applies to the building of Large Hadron Collider in between Swiss and French border sponsored by USA lenders for the purpose of hunting Higgs Boson aka God’s particle for energy project that must endure beyond what is currently known, and some African Scholars participated in it without knowing that they were part of the team and it gulped over $3 trillion, almost 30 years budgeting capacity of Nigeria’s paltry less than $300 billion GDP as it fails to go beyond $30 billion level annual budgeting.
Professor Bello is expected to set the initiative as funding worldwide is available and requires agenda that must make the Nigerian government and global lenders see the need to support the endeavour of the Nigerian Academy of Engineering which is a body in which both Nigerian Society of Engineering and Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) associate with. Funding worldwide exists as per the experience of what happened and is happening in Cote d’Ivoire, Algeria and Morocco, energy and education infrastructure wise. It does not require annual budgeting from the nation, pension funds are used worldwide to support such long and worthy infrastructure development.
Infrastructure projects and their sustainability and how they leverage human capital for the optimum performance of Nigeria’s Natural resources for the benefit of its populace and exportable to other African countries must occupy the minds of capable Nigerians in a world in which Africa with its 30 million Km2 and 1.4 billion people and almost 1/4 of world strategic mineral resources, is valued at just $3trillion in world’s estimated $101 trillion GDP.
Like Nigerian government intends to make Nigeria $1 trillion economy, it can only happen if engineering infrastructure projects are put up in a mix that boost both immediate and long term growth and prosperity as proposed by Michael Porter’s quadrant of High High, High Low, Low High and Low Low projects, or what could be termed as approaching development with Blue Ocean Strategy mindset. It is how Chris Hughes, Facebook co-founder, sees putting in place engineering infrastructure that could make people like him who studied History and Literature in Harvard to veer into what made him earn half a billion dollars for three years of work in a USA where most Americans are still struggling to make available $400 in the case of an emergency like a car accident (see Fair Shot 2018, 4).
Hughes is saying that infrastructure is key and citizens who are desirous of innovation and serving the public will find ways of doing it as long as the infrastructure is there; because to him, it is defeatist for technologists to claim that end of work is looming and quite encouraging to hear from academics that the world is still the same looking for better ways to change it for the good of all.
The Guest Lecturer Mrs J.O Maduka, past president and Fellow of Nigerian Academy of Engineering sees it that way, nothing has changed so much so that there is more work to do to get the world in a better shape. Government, industry and the academy must cooperate to see to a better world, what she termed the Triple Helix and extended to Quadruple Helix with the Media interfacing to spread the message. According to her, having 70,000 Engineers with less than 10,000 Technologists as the worst, down the pyramid, is fewer craftsmen and artisans creating the impression that no more work to do. It is completely unacceptable as government must make deliberate policies and plans to reverse the current inverted pyramid of engineering workforce and its associates.
This is where the France’s educational paradigm – of seeing “Grandes Ecoles” where University graduates or possible drop-outs from the universities take entrance examinations so as to be admitted into “Grandes Ecoles” where professionals, technologists and technocrats are trained – becomes relevant, even when it is lampooned by the USA system. Purposeful teamwork of the entire workforce chain of engineering and infrastructure provision like inspired by Prof. Bello in Unilag is expected.
God bless Professor Bello for his input in Unilag as we wish him a successful tenure in Infrastructure Engineering at the Nigerian Academy of Engineering.
Ariole is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at University of Lagos
