Former Nigeria captain Sunday Oliseh believes the glory days of the country's national team will not return unless they "get their house in order".
Nigeria have been on a downward spiral in the past year and failed to qualify for the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations.
Oliseh told BBC Sport: "We have got technical problems and administrative problems - it is too much for one nation, even if you are Nigeria.
"At the moment it is bleak. We need to face up to the job and get organised."
Oliseh knows what it takes to achieve success, having been part of the Nigeria squad that won the Africa Cup of Nations in 1994 and the Olympic gold medal two years later.
He also played at the World Cup in 1994 and 1998, helping the Super Eagles to the last-16 at both tournaments and in the latter he scored a memorable winner as Nigeria shocked Spain 3-2 in a group match.
Those teams were filled with players referred to as the "golden generation" of Nigerian football; among them were Jay-Jay Okocha, Nwankwo Kanu and Finidi George.
But Oliseh cannot see where the next generation is going to come from.
"During the 1990s a lot of the players were products of the Nigerian league. Those who were playing in Europe had only left two or three years before. Myself, I had moved to Europe only four years before the 1994 World Cup.
"It was not as if it was Europe that made us - the Nigerian league produced us;, it was so competitive then, it was viable and credible.
"The national team does not create players - you select your best players from your clubs to play in the national team.
"But now our attention is more focused on the national team and we have neglected the domestic league, that is the major problem in Nigerian football.
"If we cannot get the league in order we will never have another golden generation."
The former Ajax and Juventus midfielder, who played 63 times for his country, is also concerned about the issues off the field.
Nigeria's Football Federation is in disarray because of in-fighting over the presidency - ongoing battles that have led Fifa to ban the team for governmental interference in football matters.
In decline
And there has been instability in management, with coach Stephen Keshi removed from his position only to be re-appointed following intervention by President Goodluck Jonathan before being released again after his side were eliminated from Nations Cup qualifying.
It was only in 2013 that Keshi led Nigeria to the Nations Cup title in South Africa and he also steered the team to the last-16 at this summer's World Cup in Brazil.
Nigeria's fall since then has been rapid. And Oliseh believes there needs to be consistency as well as clear boundaries over roles.
"To fix it we have to get our house in order," he said. "And it is not too far fetched, the solution to this. For example, if we have a Football Federation president who is doing well, let's leave him in the job.
"It is great that Nigerian are passionate about football, that they have opinions like a coach. But in reality, everybody thinks they know football - not because they play football but because they know football. It doesn't work like that.
"We need to let people who are technicians do the technical work. If you are going to talk about tactics or physical, let that be somebody who has that expertise."
BBC
Related story: Nigeria Super Eagles can't land kit sponsors after failure to qualify for AFCON 2015
Monday, December 8, 2014
'Phenomenal' medical staff in Nigeria cut Ebola fatality rate in half
When the World Health Organization declared Nigeria officially Ebola-free in October, most of the fanfare centred on how Africa’s most populous country had managed to keep the virus from spreading.
But there was another, less heralded aspect of Nigeria’s success story that a Canadian doctor and her colleagues wanted to explore in more depth: How had 12 of Nigeria’s 20 Ebola patients beaten the virus?
“The hospitals in Nigeria weren’t maybe to the standards of a Western hospital in terms of equipment, but the staff were phenomenal. They managed to get a very high survival rate,” said Eilish Cleary, a New Brunswick chief medical officer of health who travelled to Nigeria to provide epidemiological support to the World Health Organization during the outbreak. “Case fatality rate for Ebola can be up to 70 to 90 per cent. In Nigeria, it was 40 per cent.”
Dr. Cleary conducted detailed, videotaped interviews with six of the Nigerian patients to learn more about their treatment and recovery. The key to their survival seemed to be guzzling a stunning amount of water with oral rehydration solution [ORS] to fend off the cascade of internal failures typically caused by the virus.
Some of the survivors drank as much as five or six litres of ORS a day, an impressive feat considering Ebola can cause persistent vomiting and leave patients too weak to lift a bottle to their lips.
Only one of the six interviewed patients received intravenous fluids, another intervention that has been shown to increase the odds of survival, but which is not always available at poorly resourced treatment centres in West Africa where patients often arrive too late in the course of the disease for ORS to be effective.
“I was really encouraged to drink,” nurse Tochi Anunobi, one of the survivors, told Dr. Cleary in an interview shared with The Globe and Mail. “I was even drinking if I was sleeping. When I wake up to urinate, I will drink.”
Although the sample size is small, Nigeria’s experience is part of a larger body of treatment evidence that is growing – sadly – because of the sheer volume of cases and starkly varied health-care settings in which patients have been treated during the worst Ebola outbreak in history, which has killed more than 6,200 mostly West Africans, according to the WHO’s most recent official figures.
This outbreak marks the first time Ebola has been tackled outside of poor, remote pockets of Africa, and the results have shown the wider world that Ebola need not be a death sentence.
Of at least 22 Ebola patients cared for in the United States and Europe so far, five have died, a death rate of just 23 per cent. (Some of the surviving patients are, however, still in treatment, including an Italian doctor who was airlifted out of Sierra Leone late last month.)
Some of those patients received experimental therapies, and all received intensive care that is not available on a wide scale in Africa.
But the irony, experts say, is that the Western cases appear to reinforce what veterans of past Ebola outbreaks already knew about what works and what does not in helping patients defeat the virus.
The keys are still intervening as soon as possible after symptoms start, keeping patients hydrated, and keeping electrolytes in balance, all basic treatments that could be delivered in West Africa with adequate staff.
“The feedback I get from them [doctors in the West] is their big intervention is the delivery of IV crystalloid and management of the electrolytes,” said Armand Sprecher, a hemorhaggic fever specialist withMédecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders.) “There’s been a little bit of dialysis, a little bit of ventilator therapy … things we’re not able to deliver in the field [in West Africa] right now. None of them have said that that makes a big difference.”
Rob Fowler, a critical care physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto who has worked for the WHO in West Africa during the outbreak, echoed that.
“For the most part,” he said, “most patients are able to be adequately treated with IV fluids and commonly available medications. If we can prevent the complications that can often arise because of the inability to treat supportively, then I think most patients would not get critically ill and the survival rate, I think, would be much higher.”
A commentary in The Lancet last week made that point more sharply. “It is often stated that there are no proven therapies for Ebola virus disease but that potential treatments, including blood products, immune therapies, and antiviral drugs, are being evaluated. This view is inaccurate,” the authors wrote, before urging that clinical trials be conducted in the field to better determine what regimen of fluid and electrolyte replacement saves the most lives.
The trick for doctors and relief agencies has been figuring out how best to deliver that supportive care in the field, where conditions are far from ideal.
In a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine last month, Dr. Sprecher and his colleagues described how difficult it was to deliver basic supportive care at Liberia’s largest treatment centre, which saw more than 700 moderate to severely sick patients between Aug. 23 and Oct. 4.
Responsible for 30 to 50 patients each, physicians confined to personal protective equipment in stifling temperatures could devote just one to two minutes per patient to “evaluate needs and establish a care plan.”
The sick had to be divided into three categories: Patients with organ failure who could not be saved; patients with low blood volume who were not in shock but could no longer care for themselves; and patients with low blood volume who were not in shock and could still care themselves.
The outlook was brightest for the last group, whose members had a good shot at recovery if they took anti-nausea and anti-diarrheal medications and, like the Nigerian patients, drank four to five litres of oral electrolyte solutions per day, ideally beginning the moment fever set in.
Dr. Sprecher said MSF’s treatment centres are already achieving a case fatality rate of roughly 50 per cent; Dr. Fowler said the WHO’s more recent internal figures show the overall case fatality of 70 per cent released earlier in this outbreak is beginning to come down as well.
“Simple, but rigorous supportive measures have a disproportionate impact on disease if you can apply them early enough,” said Simon Mardel, a British relief physician who helped arrange Dr. Cleary’s interviews with the Nigerian survivors.
“When we say drink ORS, I don’t mean, did they have some ORS that day? What quantity did they get down? If they just drank a cupful, a few cups, I’m sorry, that’s not treatment.”
The WHO’s guidelines on this are unsparing. Ebola patients need to drink four to five litres of ORS a day or, by day five of the illness, it will be too late to drink – they’ll require IV support to keep their organs from collapsing.
Drinking so much fluid while stricken with Ebola was extraordinarily difficult, the survivors told Dr. Cleary.
She marvelled at their will to live.
“I was careful to try not to prompt any of the responses and the two things that amazed me [were] the fact that all of them identified for us – they brought it up themselves – the determination to survive,” she said. “They recognized that they could survive and they would … the second thing was the rehydration and how it was hard to take it. But they knew they had to take it.”
The Globe and Mail
But there was another, less heralded aspect of Nigeria’s success story that a Canadian doctor and her colleagues wanted to explore in more depth: How had 12 of Nigeria’s 20 Ebola patients beaten the virus?
“The hospitals in Nigeria weren’t maybe to the standards of a Western hospital in terms of equipment, but the staff were phenomenal. They managed to get a very high survival rate,” said Eilish Cleary, a New Brunswick chief medical officer of health who travelled to Nigeria to provide epidemiological support to the World Health Organization during the outbreak. “Case fatality rate for Ebola can be up to 70 to 90 per cent. In Nigeria, it was 40 per cent.”
Dr. Cleary conducted detailed, videotaped interviews with six of the Nigerian patients to learn more about their treatment and recovery. The key to their survival seemed to be guzzling a stunning amount of water with oral rehydration solution [ORS] to fend off the cascade of internal failures typically caused by the virus.
Some of the survivors drank as much as five or six litres of ORS a day, an impressive feat considering Ebola can cause persistent vomiting and leave patients too weak to lift a bottle to their lips.
Only one of the six interviewed patients received intravenous fluids, another intervention that has been shown to increase the odds of survival, but which is not always available at poorly resourced treatment centres in West Africa where patients often arrive too late in the course of the disease for ORS to be effective.
“I was really encouraged to drink,” nurse Tochi Anunobi, one of the survivors, told Dr. Cleary in an interview shared with The Globe and Mail. “I was even drinking if I was sleeping. When I wake up to urinate, I will drink.”
Although the sample size is small, Nigeria’s experience is part of a larger body of treatment evidence that is growing – sadly – because of the sheer volume of cases and starkly varied health-care settings in which patients have been treated during the worst Ebola outbreak in history, which has killed more than 6,200 mostly West Africans, according to the WHO’s most recent official figures.
This outbreak marks the first time Ebola has been tackled outside of poor, remote pockets of Africa, and the results have shown the wider world that Ebola need not be a death sentence.
Of at least 22 Ebola patients cared for in the United States and Europe so far, five have died, a death rate of just 23 per cent. (Some of the surviving patients are, however, still in treatment, including an Italian doctor who was airlifted out of Sierra Leone late last month.)
Some of those patients received experimental therapies, and all received intensive care that is not available on a wide scale in Africa.
But the irony, experts say, is that the Western cases appear to reinforce what veterans of past Ebola outbreaks already knew about what works and what does not in helping patients defeat the virus.
The keys are still intervening as soon as possible after symptoms start, keeping patients hydrated, and keeping electrolytes in balance, all basic treatments that could be delivered in West Africa with adequate staff.
“The feedback I get from them [doctors in the West] is their big intervention is the delivery of IV crystalloid and management of the electrolytes,” said Armand Sprecher, a hemorhaggic fever specialist withMédecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders.) “There’s been a little bit of dialysis, a little bit of ventilator therapy … things we’re not able to deliver in the field [in West Africa] right now. None of them have said that that makes a big difference.”
Rob Fowler, a critical care physician at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto who has worked for the WHO in West Africa during the outbreak, echoed that.
“For the most part,” he said, “most patients are able to be adequately treated with IV fluids and commonly available medications. If we can prevent the complications that can often arise because of the inability to treat supportively, then I think most patients would not get critically ill and the survival rate, I think, would be much higher.”
A commentary in The Lancet last week made that point more sharply. “It is often stated that there are no proven therapies for Ebola virus disease but that potential treatments, including blood products, immune therapies, and antiviral drugs, are being evaluated. This view is inaccurate,” the authors wrote, before urging that clinical trials be conducted in the field to better determine what regimen of fluid and electrolyte replacement saves the most lives.
The trick for doctors and relief agencies has been figuring out how best to deliver that supportive care in the field, where conditions are far from ideal.
In a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine last month, Dr. Sprecher and his colleagues described how difficult it was to deliver basic supportive care at Liberia’s largest treatment centre, which saw more than 700 moderate to severely sick patients between Aug. 23 and Oct. 4.
Responsible for 30 to 50 patients each, physicians confined to personal protective equipment in stifling temperatures could devote just one to two minutes per patient to “evaluate needs and establish a care plan.”
The sick had to be divided into three categories: Patients with organ failure who could not be saved; patients with low blood volume who were not in shock but could no longer care for themselves; and patients with low blood volume who were not in shock and could still care themselves.
The outlook was brightest for the last group, whose members had a good shot at recovery if they took anti-nausea and anti-diarrheal medications and, like the Nigerian patients, drank four to five litres of oral electrolyte solutions per day, ideally beginning the moment fever set in.
Dr. Sprecher said MSF’s treatment centres are already achieving a case fatality rate of roughly 50 per cent; Dr. Fowler said the WHO’s more recent internal figures show the overall case fatality of 70 per cent released earlier in this outbreak is beginning to come down as well.
“Simple, but rigorous supportive measures have a disproportionate impact on disease if you can apply them early enough,” said Simon Mardel, a British relief physician who helped arrange Dr. Cleary’s interviews with the Nigerian survivors.
“When we say drink ORS, I don’t mean, did they have some ORS that day? What quantity did they get down? If they just drank a cupful, a few cups, I’m sorry, that’s not treatment.”
The WHO’s guidelines on this are unsparing. Ebola patients need to drink four to five litres of ORS a day or, by day five of the illness, it will be too late to drink – they’ll require IV support to keep their organs from collapsing.
Drinking so much fluid while stricken with Ebola was extraordinarily difficult, the survivors told Dr. Cleary.
She marvelled at their will to live.
“I was careful to try not to prompt any of the responses and the two things that amazed me [were] the fact that all of them identified for us – they brought it up themselves – the determination to survive,” she said. “They recognized that they could survive and they would … the second thing was the rehydration and how it was hard to take it. But they knew they had to take it.”
The Globe and Mail
More than 200 prisoners escape in mass prison jailbreak in Nigeria
Armed men have freed more than 200 prisoners from a jail in central Nigeria, in the third mass prison break in the country since November, police said.
More than 200 inmates were freed in the attack in Tunga, 250km northwest of the capital Abuja. At least 10 were recaptured by Sunday morning, Deputy Superintendent Ibrahim Gambari told the Associated Press news agency.
Saturday's incident was the third of its kind in the past two months in Nigeria, where jailbreaks are frequent and police only find a fraction of those who escape.
More than 300 inmates broke out of a prison bombed by gunmen in southwest Ekiti state this month and 144 escaped from south-central Kogi state on November 3 when gunmen bombed a prison wall.
Blame for many of the attacks has been levelled at Boko Haram. It is not known how many hundreds of Boko Haram suspects are held in Nigerian jails.
Herman Cohen, former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, told Al Jazeera it was what unlikely Boko Haram were behind the raid, and since it was outside of the groups geographical area of operations, it was most likely orchestrated by corrupt officials and involved pay-offs.
"It looks like a standard prison break, organised from within," Cohen said.
"Ever since the civilian government came to power in 1999, the military and police have been neglected, with salaries not being paid... there needs to be a re-organisation otherwise the security situation will continue to deteriorate," he added.
Only 18,042 of 56,785 inmates have been convicted of a crime, according to statistics dated June 30 and posted on the website of the Nigeria Prisons Service.
Officials have said how appalled they are about conditions in the jails, where inmates often sleep on cement floors without mattresses or bedding, food is in short supply and most medical services are non-existent.
The vast majority of people held in Nigerian jails are awaiting trial, some of them for many years, even though it is illegal to hold someone for more than 48 hours without bringing charges or presenting them to a magistrate.
Aljazeera
Related story: More than 2,000 prisoners have escaped over the past five years in Nigeria
More than 200 inmates were freed in the attack in Tunga, 250km northwest of the capital Abuja. At least 10 were recaptured by Sunday morning, Deputy Superintendent Ibrahim Gambari told the Associated Press news agency.
Saturday's incident was the third of its kind in the past two months in Nigeria, where jailbreaks are frequent and police only find a fraction of those who escape.
More than 300 inmates broke out of a prison bombed by gunmen in southwest Ekiti state this month and 144 escaped from south-central Kogi state on November 3 when gunmen bombed a prison wall.
Blame for many of the attacks has been levelled at Boko Haram. It is not known how many hundreds of Boko Haram suspects are held in Nigerian jails.
Herman Cohen, former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, told Al Jazeera it was what unlikely Boko Haram were behind the raid, and since it was outside of the groups geographical area of operations, it was most likely orchestrated by corrupt officials and involved pay-offs.
"It looks like a standard prison break, organised from within," Cohen said.
"Ever since the civilian government came to power in 1999, the military and police have been neglected, with salaries not being paid... there needs to be a re-organisation otherwise the security situation will continue to deteriorate," he added.
Only 18,042 of 56,785 inmates have been convicted of a crime, according to statistics dated June 30 and posted on the website of the Nigeria Prisons Service.
Officials have said how appalled they are about conditions in the jails, where inmates often sleep on cement floors without mattresses or bedding, food is in short supply and most medical services are non-existent.
The vast majority of people held in Nigerian jails are awaiting trial, some of them for many years, even though it is illegal to hold someone for more than 48 hours without bringing charges or presenting them to a magistrate.
Aljazeera
Related story: More than 2,000 prisoners have escaped over the past five years in Nigeria
Friday, December 5, 2014
Nigeria cuts oil price benchmark due to falling global oil prices
The Nigerian naira weakened slightly on Thursday, staying below the central bank's new target band, as the government slashed the oil price assumed in its 2015 budget for the second time in a month.
The naira is under pressure as falling global oil prices have depressed Nigeria's foreign reserves and the central bank is struggling to keep the currency in a new target band set last week when it devalued the currency by 8 percent to protect its reserves.
On Thursday, the finance ministry said it had cut its oil price forecast on which its 2015 budget is based by 11 percent to $65 a barrel from $73, in light of lower world oil prices.
The naira closed at 180.10 naira to the dollar, staying outside the new target range of 160-176 naira to the dollar, and weakening slightly from 179.90 at Wednesday's close.
Dealers said trade was calmer on Thursday after the central bank intervened three times on Wednesday to lift the currency nearer to the target band. For the first time since the devaluation on Tuesday last week, the central bank did not intervene on Thursday to support the naira, but dealers said that did not necessarily mean that pressure on the currency was easing.
Nigeria, Africa's top oil producer, counts on oil sales for 95 percent of its foreign reserves, which fell to $36.8 billion by Nov. 28 from $44.6 billion a year earlier, according to latest central bank data.
The cut in the government's oil benchmark was the second in a month, from an original estimate of $78 a barrel. Brent crude continued to fall on world markets, slipping below $69 a barrel on Thursday.
A much lower oil price will make it harder for Nigeria's government to meet its spending plans next year, stretching its already shaky finances.
Other oil exporting countries including Russia and Mexico have also said they expect oil prices to be lower next year than assumed in their budgets, which may be revised.
For Nigeria, fiscal problems risk reigniting inflation, which has been relatively stable at around 8 percent, and are a headache for President Goodluck Jonathan as he seeks a second term in a presidential election in February.
Nigeria depends on oil for around 75-80 percent of government revenues and its finances have been hammered by a more than 30 percent drop in oil prices since June.
Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has said Nigeria still has funds to pay salaries and keep debt obligations, but with crude likely to fall, the government would increase taxes on luxury items and ban non-essential government travel to cut expenditure.
Analysts, however, said Nigeria's new oil price benchmark of $65 a barrel was workable. A Reuters poll forecasts Brent will average $82.50 a barrel in 2015.
"It ($65) is definitely more realistic," said Bismarck Rewane, CEO of Lagos-based consultancy Financial Derivatives, adding that at about $12 lower than the actual "gives them more headroom."
"But the next question is: what are you going to give up, from a long list of expenditure items, especially in the run up to the election? That's where the real trick will be."
The allure of Africa's biggest economy to foreign investors has been growing, especially for buyers of its attractively priced debt, but they worry about its tendency to squander its oil windfall in bloated government spending and patronage.
Nigeria's oil money is distributed between three tiers of government -- local, state and federal. The federal budget usually assumes a conservative benchmark price, so money over and above that is deposited into an oil savings account.
Okonjo-Iweala has sought to keep the benchmark low and accumulate savings, but the Excess Crude Account (ECA) has nonetheless declined by billions of dollars to around $4 billion over the past two years even while oil prices were at record highs, partly because of distributions to powerful governors.
Reuters
The naira is under pressure as falling global oil prices have depressed Nigeria's foreign reserves and the central bank is struggling to keep the currency in a new target band set last week when it devalued the currency by 8 percent to protect its reserves.
On Thursday, the finance ministry said it had cut its oil price forecast on which its 2015 budget is based by 11 percent to $65 a barrel from $73, in light of lower world oil prices.
The naira closed at 180.10 naira to the dollar, staying outside the new target range of 160-176 naira to the dollar, and weakening slightly from 179.90 at Wednesday's close.
Dealers said trade was calmer on Thursday after the central bank intervened three times on Wednesday to lift the currency nearer to the target band. For the first time since the devaluation on Tuesday last week, the central bank did not intervene on Thursday to support the naira, but dealers said that did not necessarily mean that pressure on the currency was easing.
Nigeria, Africa's top oil producer, counts on oil sales for 95 percent of its foreign reserves, which fell to $36.8 billion by Nov. 28 from $44.6 billion a year earlier, according to latest central bank data.
The cut in the government's oil benchmark was the second in a month, from an original estimate of $78 a barrel. Brent crude continued to fall on world markets, slipping below $69 a barrel on Thursday.
A much lower oil price will make it harder for Nigeria's government to meet its spending plans next year, stretching its already shaky finances.
Other oil exporting countries including Russia and Mexico have also said they expect oil prices to be lower next year than assumed in their budgets, which may be revised.
For Nigeria, fiscal problems risk reigniting inflation, which has been relatively stable at around 8 percent, and are a headache for President Goodluck Jonathan as he seeks a second term in a presidential election in February.
Nigeria depends on oil for around 75-80 percent of government revenues and its finances have been hammered by a more than 30 percent drop in oil prices since June.
Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has said Nigeria still has funds to pay salaries and keep debt obligations, but with crude likely to fall, the government would increase taxes on luxury items and ban non-essential government travel to cut expenditure.
Analysts, however, said Nigeria's new oil price benchmark of $65 a barrel was workable. A Reuters poll forecasts Brent will average $82.50 a barrel in 2015.
"It ($65) is definitely more realistic," said Bismarck Rewane, CEO of Lagos-based consultancy Financial Derivatives, adding that at about $12 lower than the actual "gives them more headroom."
"But the next question is: what are you going to give up, from a long list of expenditure items, especially in the run up to the election? That's where the real trick will be."
The allure of Africa's biggest economy to foreign investors has been growing, especially for buyers of its attractively priced debt, but they worry about its tendency to squander its oil windfall in bloated government spending and patronage.
Nigeria's oil money is distributed between three tiers of government -- local, state and federal. The federal budget usually assumes a conservative benchmark price, so money over and above that is deposited into an oil savings account.
Okonjo-Iweala has sought to keep the benchmark low and accumulate savings, but the Excess Crude Account (ECA) has nonetheless declined by billions of dollars to around $4 billion over the past two years even while oil prices were at record highs, partly because of distributions to powerful governors.
Reuters
Thursday, December 4, 2014
Nigeria plans to launch its own manufactured satelite by 2018
Nigeria announced yesterday that it would in the year 2018 launch a satellite manufactured in Nigeria into space.
Though details of the project are not yet very clear, Minister of Science, Dr. Abdu Bulama, said at a ministerial briefing in Abuja yesterday that the National Space Research and Development would facilitate the building and launching of the made in Nigeria satellite.
He said: "They (NASRDA) should be able to meet the target of 2018 to produce a Nigerian satellite."
Meanwhile, government said it had N171.85bn in the past five years through the scrutiny of technology transfer agreements entered into between organisations in Nigeria and foreign entities.
The Minister said the feat was recorded through the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP).
He highlighted how NOTAP had been scrutinising applications for technology acquisition from operators in the Nigerian economy, adding that the exercise had saved the country N171.85bn in the past five years.
His words: "The intervention of NOTAP has led to financial savings for the country, which would have been unremitted due to over invoicing of technology transfer fees.
"Since the inception of NOTAP, it has made a financial savings in billions of naira, due to its intervention in the process of evaluation and registration of technology transfer agreements."
The Minister spoke on how the ministry was now focusing attention on enhancing agricultural raw materials through a number of activities:
"The Raw Material Research and Development Council procured 1.6 and 2.0 tonnes of Samcot, 11 and 13 varieties of cotton respectively from the Institute of Agricultural Research, ABU, Zaria and distributed them to members of the National Cotton Association of Nigeria in six States including Oyo, Ondo, Ekiti, Osun and Edo States," he stressed.
He went on: "This is targeted at increasing cotton yield to feed the textile industry that is almost comatose due to insufficiency of raw materials or reliance on imported cotton resulting in undue competition.
"The Oyo State Sugarcane Farmers Union Limited was provided with 60 tonnes of sugarcane seeds for their sugarcane farm clusters.
"These programmes are projected to create 20,000 jobs along the agricultural and industrial manufacturing value chain over a period of 5 years."
He added that improved oil palm seedlings for one hectare of land expected to have shorter maturity period and increase the oil yield were through RMRDC procured for AICO Projects Limited.
President Goodluck Jonathan had last year launched the National Space Council with a charge to design a made in Nigeria satellite.
Members of the Council include the President as Chairman, the Vice President, Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Attorney General/Minister of Justice, Minister of Science & Technology, Minister of Communication Technology, Minister of Defence, Minister of National Planning, Minister of Education, Minister of Interior, National Security Adviser, Director General, NASRDA and Secretary to Council, Prof. V.O.S Olunloyo, Prof. Francisca Okeke and Prof. E.D. Mishelia.
Jonathan had charged the National Space Research and Development Agency to develop the capacity to design a made in Nigeria Satellite and launch the satellite from Nigerian soil in the very near future.
The National Space Council is the highest policy making body for space science and technology development in the country.
Guardian
Though details of the project are not yet very clear, Minister of Science, Dr. Abdu Bulama, said at a ministerial briefing in Abuja yesterday that the National Space Research and Development would facilitate the building and launching of the made in Nigeria satellite.
He said: "They (NASRDA) should be able to meet the target of 2018 to produce a Nigerian satellite."
Meanwhile, government said it had N171.85bn in the past five years through the scrutiny of technology transfer agreements entered into between organisations in Nigeria and foreign entities.
The Minister said the feat was recorded through the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP).
He highlighted how NOTAP had been scrutinising applications for technology acquisition from operators in the Nigerian economy, adding that the exercise had saved the country N171.85bn in the past five years.
His words: "The intervention of NOTAP has led to financial savings for the country, which would have been unremitted due to over invoicing of technology transfer fees.
"Since the inception of NOTAP, it has made a financial savings in billions of naira, due to its intervention in the process of evaluation and registration of technology transfer agreements."
The Minister spoke on how the ministry was now focusing attention on enhancing agricultural raw materials through a number of activities:
"The Raw Material Research and Development Council procured 1.6 and 2.0 tonnes of Samcot, 11 and 13 varieties of cotton respectively from the Institute of Agricultural Research, ABU, Zaria and distributed them to members of the National Cotton Association of Nigeria in six States including Oyo, Ondo, Ekiti, Osun and Edo States," he stressed.
He went on: "This is targeted at increasing cotton yield to feed the textile industry that is almost comatose due to insufficiency of raw materials or reliance on imported cotton resulting in undue competition.
"The Oyo State Sugarcane Farmers Union Limited was provided with 60 tonnes of sugarcane seeds for their sugarcane farm clusters.
"These programmes are projected to create 20,000 jobs along the agricultural and industrial manufacturing value chain over a period of 5 years."
He added that improved oil palm seedlings for one hectare of land expected to have shorter maturity period and increase the oil yield were through RMRDC procured for AICO Projects Limited.
President Goodluck Jonathan had last year launched the National Space Council with a charge to design a made in Nigeria satellite.
Members of the Council include the President as Chairman, the Vice President, Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Attorney General/Minister of Justice, Minister of Science & Technology, Minister of Communication Technology, Minister of Defence, Minister of National Planning, Minister of Education, Minister of Interior, National Security Adviser, Director General, NASRDA and Secretary to Council, Prof. V.O.S Olunloyo, Prof. Francisca Okeke and Prof. E.D. Mishelia.
Jonathan had charged the National Space Research and Development Agency to develop the capacity to design a made in Nigeria Satellite and launch the satellite from Nigerian soil in the very near future.
The National Space Council is the highest policy making body for space science and technology development in the country.
Guardian
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)