By Ebele Orakpo
That the world is now a global village is no more in doubt thanks to developments in science and technology and many developing countries, especially in Asia, are benefitting immensely from it and Nigeria can benefit too if we get our act together as Ghana employs about 800 people in one station where they are doing IT returns to transfer medical records back to the US.

In a chat with Vanguard in Lagos, Mr. Chris Uwaje, an information technology specialist with over three decades of on-the-job practice as computer scientist, defined Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) as subcontracting a job to a third party company primarily to cut costs and save time and energy. Companies in the developed nations outsource jobs to developing nations thereby boosting the economies of such nations.

Chris Uwaje

Some of the commonly outsourced jobs include medical and legal transcription, medical billing and coding, proofreading/editing, data entry etc. Mr Uwaje who studied  Information Networks and Informatics in Germany and London, is the Chief Executive Officer of Connect Technologies and is very passionate about science/technology and youth empowerment.

He spoke on several issues ranging from his job, science/technology, saying that just as there were human colonies in the past, software people within the powerful knowledgeable world will be able to control other nations by building digital colonies remotely through intellectual capacity and IT utilisation.

Excerpts.
According to him: “Science/technology is the process and the concept to be able to create and innovate from what we have within. It is about the observatory lens of everything that happens within the universe and within the legal spectrum of human beings so we should be able to persevere, observe and use them as a research element to create the products that are needed in the society,” he said, noting that in Nigeria, “we look at science and technology from the product realm.

We call products of science and technology such as the automobile, airplane, and train science and technology, but it is a fallacy. Those are not technology, they are products of technology. The technology is really the concept and the process that led to the product but because we have not been entrenched in creative research and innovation, we see more of the physical realm.”

The man who pioneered the national policy for information technology development for Nigeria which gave birth to an arm of government called Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), said there was need for Nigeria to embrace science and technology if it must compete favourably with other nations.

“A Nigerian would prefer to pay N10m for a generator than to pay N12m for the blueprint used in making the generator because to him, it is an ordinary paper, not realising that the content of the paper produced the generator and could produce millions of it,” This mindset, he attributed to what he termed Nigerian/African technophobia, and the erroneous belief of what science and technology is and what it is not, adding: “We are more or less afraid of technology.

We are not friendly with technology so we want to use our might of appetite to buy technology as a product whereas that is the product of technology.”

Continuing, Uwaje who is a member of the board of NITDA said: “One critical thing is that we have not understood how technology works, and until we do that, our environment will  remain an environment of what I call capital merchandising. If you look at how other countries are planned and how they function, take a capitalist state like the US for example, you have individuals, capital and the factories, the manufacturing domain.

So people with capital invest and those without capital are made to work in the factories and produce. It means entrepreneurs and capital create employment which reflects in the GDP and nation-building.

That is why when you go to those countries, you don’t see a lot of people on the streets because they are in the factories but here, we have a capital  merchandising environment where finished goods change hands with capital.You take those finished goods and exchange so people are many on the streets trying to buy and sell. It means there is no much creativity, no much science circulating in the domain. Until we can have more science and technology injected in that domain, the people will continue to cluster.”

To be able to take advantage of the BPO industry, Uwaje advocates the creation of information technology and knowledge parks: “You must be able to build information technology and knowledge parks. Lagos is a city of about 19m people according to UN statistics.

We don’t have an information technology park in the city. Mumbai in India has more than 17 so how can you compete with them? We need knowledge parks where people can go in and be creative and be self-employed. We need science parks where people can do research and develop and innovate. Nigeria should create a knowledge corridor which is where you say from Street A to B, anyone who works there is a knowledge worker and you have light there 24/7.

That is what they do, it is not rocket science. Then you have facility park managers who can manage the parks effectively and then you have investors who can come in and invest and take the commercial content out. You need to have market protection to some extent, to be able to ensure that grants would be given because what is really debarring software development in this country is lack of grants, no incentives. We have the resources to do that.

“ It doesn’t make sense that a child born today in Africa compared to a child born today in Europe, that after 7 years, the child born in Europe is in class while the child born in Africa is on the street selling pure water. It doesn’t make sense.

They can never compete and it is not fair because there has to be a fundamental right and Nigeria should make information technology a fundamental human right. That is what obtains in Europe, America and Asia,” he said.

The outfit with 16 people in its employ, is mainly a research centre which has trained a lot of people from the universities in its bid to transfer knowledge to the younger generation because according to Uwaje: “You cannot compete with the rest of the world until you master technology.

All our schools should be computerised from kindergarten to the university. Let us spend all our oil money in computerising our schools and making it mandatory for everyone to go to school and not sell pure water on our roads or ride okada.”