By Emmanuel Elebeke
As Nigeria ibids to actualize Vision 20-2020, an industry expert, Mr. Olanrewaju Samuel has identified capacity building as the only sure way to actualize the set objectives.

Olanrewaju, Managing Director of the Nigeria Digital Bridge Institute, Oshodi, Lagos, stated this in a chat with CyberLIFE on the journey of the Nigeria ICT sector in the recent past.

He contended that the sector has remained underdeveloped due to the inability of the country to build and develop individual capacity of the citizens, particularly the youth, saying that the nation’s dream of attaining Vision 20-2020 cannot be realized if attention is paid only to the private sector and government parastatals.

He noted that there are huge potentials in the industry waiting to be tapped, which can only be realized when the individual capacities of Nigerian youths are enhance and empowered to explore the large market of ICT.

To make this happen, Olanrewaju revealed that his institute had put a machinery in motion to introduce an innovative enterprise programme for young school leavers.

According to him, the idea is to make them self sufficient and reliant without  depending on anybody to survive, adding that the strategy would also  help discourage Nigerian youths who have taken to piracy and counterfeiting other peoples’ work to make their living.

“The reason why we are not developing at the right pace is that individuals are not empowered. For us to experience the type of rapid development as we can see with India and China, we have to go back to the grass-roots and empowered the Nigerians as an individual.

You can imagine a family where only person is empowered and everybody in the family will look up to him for survival. He will eventually become the poorer in the family. But if we are able to develop every individual by coming up with different programmes, trainings in ICT, we are going to have a buoyant economy, in which every body will be able to do one thing or the other and be self sufficient.

“To achieve this, we have concluded plans at Digital Bridge Institute  to have an innovative enterprise programme and is targeted at people who do menial jobs such as those repairing phones, laptops, routers etc. Our aim in doing this, is to develop individuals in which every body can be able to make a living on his own. Until we go back to the drawing board and empower each and every Nigerian, then we should not think we are developing, let alone realizing the Vision 20- 2020 objectives,” he stated.

The DBI Director who described the sector as  an evolving market, regretted that the sector  had been dormant for years until about ten years ago, maintaining that the industry is still majorly an untapped sector of the Nigerian economy.

He assured that the IEP programme will help reduce piracy in Nigeria. The problem Nigerians have now is that they are being held down because of lack of exposure and empowerment.

Once you have creative minds that are not engaged, they tend to engage in negative things. If these people who go to China to manufacture fake products have people in Nigeria who can manufacture the original brands, they would not go out to import the counterfeits again.