By Job Osazuwa
National Agency for Science & Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) said it has designed and manufactured an electronic voting solution with capacity to solve voting and coalition challenges in the nation’s political system and other innovations.
It has also carried out research and design in areas of manufacturing of first made-in-Nigeria helicopter, first unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for agricultural purposes and security surveillance.
NASENI Executive Vice Chairman/Chief Executive, Muhammed Sanni Haruna, who made the disclosure in Lagos on Wednesday when he received award from the Nigerian Academy of Engineering, noted that the agency is bridging infrastructural gap through home sustained industrialisation.
He said during COVID-19, NASENI was the first institution of government which carried our research, design and successfully manufactured disinfectants used in curtailing the spread of the disease.
Group Managing Director, Niger Delta Exploration and Production Company, Adegbite Falade, also stressed the need to build more critical infrastructure that would allow domestic consumption.
He said there was need to be proactive about it. To him, the configuration of the nation’s oil and gas has been around monetizing “our resources by export sales and this was done to underpin the interest of International Oil Companies (IOCs) that needed our industry more for energy security in their own countries.”
With the theme: “Ownership Changes in Nigeria’s Oil and Gas Assets: Trends, Implications and Outlook,” he suggested the need to impose “our own national energy security in the agenda of how we drive the industry. So, we must take charge of what we own as resources. We do have the population but there is a massive energy deficit. We must build critical infrastructure that will allow domestic consumption of what we own as resources.”
He added that the initiative must be government-led but private sector owned.
According to him, “we should, as engineers and professional bodies, make it a central theme of how we contribute to energy and national security because anything that has to do with the economy invariably affects national security.”