With Adekunle Adekoya

We are where we are because while we like ourselves, we just don’t like our country, as a result of which we labour all our lives but other nations enjoy the fruit of our labours.

Right now, the nation seems confused. The President thinks a single six-year tenure for elected executive office holders is best, but many of those he is ruling think otherwise.

Earlier, the one we were chewing was about Islamic banking; which of course attracted the fiery opposition of those who don’t like the idea.

Christians and Moslems carried on as if adherents of traditional religion and other faiths are not Nigerians. Sanusi and others should be reminded that the billions outside the banking system, which have so far refused to come in is what they really should go after.

Personally, I am neither here nor there, because I see the tenure and Islamic banking issues as diversion from matters far more critical to our existence.

I am talking about the future of our children, nay, the state of our educational system which, eleven years into the 21st century, is still mired in unproductive technologies that cannot help us.

Recently, we added another ministry — that of Information Technology, but we had the Ministry of Science and Technology as precursor, and we didn’t seem to have got anywhere with that.

We also have the National Information Technology Development Agency, a body which has undertaken many activities in furtherance of its mandate, but the problem is that the effects are yet to trickle down.

When policy implementation has not got to the ordinary man, it really has not made impact, at least, in this country.

As things stand, many original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the ICT sector are in dire straits. Their factories are operating at fractions of capacity because of a number of factors, chief among which are lack of reliable public power supply, and perhaps worse, lack of patronage locally.

If Nigerians don’t buy Nigerian, is it the Australian or Chinese that will? Why are government offices still filled with laptops and workstations with foreign brand names?

We have not a few brilliant software experts here, who can write programmes for use in any area. Yet we don’t patronise them.

Instead of our banks to grow local talent by deliberately tasking indigenous software writers for solutions to their operational issues, they simply jet out and enter the offices of the first vendor they see.

In all of this, what we are merely doing is making money for foreigners, which is what we’ve been doing more than 50 years ago. When one considers these and others, one comes to the inescapable conclusion that we just don’t like our country.

We like ourselves; I guess that’s why we work so hard and make so much money, which we then use to enrich foreigners by refusing to grow local capacity in so many areas of national life. To computerize our educational system by retrofitting our classrooms and providing computers, are we going to import everything?

Again, in the interest of our children, let’s try and comply with the UNESCO recommendation — 26% of national budget to education, and I mean education with rich IT content in all subjects.