BY EMMANUEL ELEBEKE

ABUJA — The Supervising Minister of Science and Technology Dr.   Omobola Johnson yesterday warned the Directors-General of all the parastatals in the ministry not to sacrifice the nation’s interest in research and development for commercial venture.

The Minister gave the warning in Abuja at a meeting she held with the DGs.
Apart from embarking on commercialisation of their research results, she also warned them to steer clear of setting up industries.

“Let me be frank with you. You don’t have to be in business. Don’t say you want to commercialise your research outputs; you don’t really have that mandates.
“Is not that you can’t make money through your research outputs, you can but through patenting and intellectual property; not by going into commercialization of those outputs, not by setting up businesses that we don’t really know how to do”, she told the DGs.

She said the quest for Internally Generated Revenue, IGR was distracting the parastatals from doing beneficial researches.

“There are certain I have seen that I think we should address in today’s meeting. The first I noticed is that our quest for Internally Generated Revenue, IGR is hampering our vision for doing researches that are innovative”, she said.

At the bi-monthly ministerial meeting, the minister also accused the DGs of abandoning the Science and Technology Innovation, STI policy which contains how to marry research outputs with industrialization using public private partnership.

“Our prioritization of capital projects over research: building more offices, building schools and acquiring this and that. All these things to me do not add up; it is simply going beyond our core mandates…
“But upon all these we have a very little link with the industry; and that should really give us a big concern,” she added.