Need for research-industry linkages – Punch

Results of innovative research have changed the world. Their utilisation by industries in advanced economies has promoted better life for citizens. But the story is markedly different in Nigeria, as research output often ends up on the shelves of research institutes; or in personal archives of researchers. This has retarded Nigeria’s quest for technological development in no small measure.
This waste in human and material resources will no longer continue, the Minister of Science and Technology, Ogbonnaya Onu, pledged when the Nigerian Academy of Science, led by its President, Oyewale Tomori, visited him in Abuja last month. We need to see this happen. The minister has, therefore, directed research institutes to ensure that at least one of their research results is commercialised annually for the country to break with this ugly cycle of abandoning research outputs.
Onu was dead right in underscoring the nexus between economic growth and adoption of Science, Technology and Innovation, just as he said the government was eager to strengthen capacity in these areas for the much-needed impact.
Some research agencies have some innovations, especially in the field of agriculture, for improving yield, mechanisation or processing of products, which our industries have yet to embrace for development. Nigeria has 21 agriculture-related research institutes, in addition to others in medical sciences, core sciences and technological fields.
The Minister of Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh, penultimate week, unveiled Atila Gan Atila – a new wheat variety developed by Nigerian researchers in collaboration with their counterparts from Tunisia and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan. This, he said, is expected to save Nigeria $4.6 billion in import bill annually if optimally adopted. The pilot planting in the North is expected to produce 350,000 tons in 2016. This is a piece of good news. The use of similar seedlings and agricultural processing equipment developed locally will help in altering the country’s heavy food import challenge. President Muhammadu Buhari had at the launch of the dry season farming programme in Kebbi State said that the N1 trillion spent on food imports annually was not sustainable.
In medical sciences, Andrew Nok’s breakthrough research has led to the discovery of a vaccine against trypanosomiasis. The Ahmadu Bello University professor of biochemistry was awarded the George Forster Prize, administered by the Alexander Humboldt Foundation, Germany, for his feat. Much of the funding, he explained, came from external agencies, and collaboration with researchers in Germany, Japan, the United States and England.
However, many research results in Nigeria lack industry-linkages, a matter that easily renders them irrelevant or immaterial. The Nigerian economy should be knowledge-based for the country to end its import dependency. Consequently, there is the overarching need for an effective coordination of research efforts and well-defined national policy objective in STI.
It is this missing link that killed the dream or actualisation of the first “Made-in-Nigeria car,” developed by Ezekiel Izuogu, in the 1990s. His car, Z-600, was presented to the public that also comprised ambassadors of countries in Nigeria in 1997, with Oladipo Diya, the then Chief of General Staff, representing the erstwhile Head of State, Sani Abacha.
The government at the time had set up a 12-man panel of experts to assess the worthiness of the car, which reportedly had 90 per cent locally made parts. A favourable report led to its public outing during which the government promised to provide him with a grant of N235 million for its mass production. This was five years before India’s first car, the Indi, was built. But instead of getting the grant, gunmen on March 11, 2006, invaded his Naze, Owerri factory in Imo State, and carted away the car’s design history, moulds of engine blocks, crankshaft, and mudguards, among other components. That ended a 10-year intellectual labour; it killed creativity.
Elsewhere, in the US and Europe, the Izuogu narrative would have been different. Researchers are challenged and targets are set for them; and such national projects are funded. Israel, for example, has a robust six-year STI strategy that runs up to 2017. The initiative entails 30 per cent increased funding for its universities and related research centres with the goal of enticing its scientists abroad back home.
The US spending on research and development in 2013 was in the region of $450 billion, according to Investopedia. China, Japan and South Korea are other frontliners. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development says, “Today, innovative performance is a crucial factor in determining competitiveness and national progress.”
For these reasons, Israel set up several programmes to promote interface between the research sector and industry. One of such programmes – Magnet – established in 1994, had a $57 million budget as of 2011. Nigeria has to embrace this development-driven model, and address the critical issue of under-funding of research centres, which exist mainly to pay salaries to their staff. In fact, rodents have taken over the premises of many research institutes as a result of their inactivity.
There is an urgent need to undertake growth diagnostics with a view to unravellingthe most important constraints on our national development. Already, a number of countries are looking into the future. In what was described as Eight Great Technologies, George Osborne, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, in autumn 2012, announced an additional £600 million to help support the development of big data and energy-efficient computing; satellites and commercial applications of space; robotics and autonomous systems; synthetic biology; regenerative medicine; agri-science; advanced materials and nanotechnology; and energy and its storage.
Some of our higher institutions should be upgraded to entrepreneurial universities to drive national development. Onu should, therefore, take seriously Tomori’s concern about lack of coordination of the different funds being funnelled into universities through agencies such as the Tertiary Education Trust Fund and Petroleum Technology Development Fund, for research that do not really tackle pressing national challenges, for us to achieve better results now.