By Theodore Opara

As part of its contribution towards developing the nation’s automobile industry, the Automobiles and Road Safety Initiative, a non-governmental organisation, has concluded plans to build a training institute for technicians in the country.

President of the organisation, Mr. Samuel Oloyed Oriowo, while disclosing this at a press conference to announce their second annual automotive award slated for the Sheraton Hotel Lagos next month, said that the institute will be located in Ogun State.

The NGO, which was set up in 2013, embarked on campaigns, seminars, and workshops for stakeholders in the automotive sector with the aim of reducing road traffic accidents.

Oriowo, who disclosed that their aim of reducing road traffic accidents has been achieved, added that it has impacted the practitioners in the automotive repair and maintenance sector to carry out their trade in ethical ways to eliminate accidents on the roads that are traceable to shoddy repair in the workshops.

He said the universities and polytechnics in the country were doing so much to train engineering graduates to manage technical challenges at the workshop, adding that the institute was established to address the obvious gap therein and to train and re-train younger people from the communities and colleges on the best and most authoritative techniques of automobile maintenance.

The Initiative’s president regretted that the Board of Trustees of the organisation has discovered that a reasonable percentage of the current automobile repair and maintenance technicians in the country were aging and not adequately equipped, education-wise, to embrace and acquire the latest automotive technology and developments to be properly fit to function as repairers of modern-day automobiles with sophisticated brain boxes.

This, he said, informed the reason behind the setting up of the West Africa Automotive Institute, whose infrastructure was launched on December 1.