Letter to President Buhari on ideas,Research and development
Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth
Academics are purveyors of ideas. You are an ideas man. where there ae no ideas there is no development . development and economics are in a symbiotic relationship
Mr. President, you have done well with the start-up bill, sports business bill, MSMES support t Creative industries., and solid minerals what you need new is to go beyond financing projects to enhancing development with the brain power of 60,000 Nigerian lecturers and 9000 plus Nigerian professors in addition to thousands and Thousands of post graduates students exploring or generating new ideas.
On the Founders Day of University of Ibadan, the Nation's premier degree awarding institution the world is told that there are 133 million Nigerians experiencing multi-dimensional poverty.
mr president what we have to encourage now in the private sector, public sector and Academia is Reserarch and Developmnt.mr president you may have to do some magic a bill of some sort to encourage the private sector to carry out their own scientific and techological research ,currently they are doing nothing like that not even, DANGOTE, GLOBALCOM , OR BUA Or TONY Elumelu or FEMi Otedola, or SAHARA GROUP they are all traders of some sort.
. mr president we cannot remain a trading country, we have to do Research and development.
Mr President what Nigeria needs now is the equivalent of a Manhattan project to fight poverty, in the Manhattan project of the 1940s ,100,000 engineers and scientists were invlved.it was a matter of survival. Mr President Sir, we should go back to the universities to fight poverty to a standstill in collaboration with government and private sector and the fourth sector and Faith based organisations.
One of our best bet to fight poverty to a standstill is Professor Francis Ogbimi a Technology management expert
Mr President, I hope tomorrow would not be too late
best regards
Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth #collaboration #founders #management #universities #universities
Cornelius Hamelberg
A sympathetic Buhari-ite neither from the North nor from the South, the East or the West, replies:
In good conscience, at least one brave man, Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth dares to write to his president, offering unsolicited advice without feeling that he is committing the crime known as impertinence or treason and at the same time without cringing to the extent that the devil’s dictionary defines as ABASEMENT
Kudos!
This means that he should thank his lucky stars that he is a free Nigerian who can blow his mind without being afraid for his life, and write a public letter addressed to the President of Nigeria, man to man. Wishfully thinking a little deeper he should also thank his lucky stars that Nigeria has not been violently re-partitioned, de jure divided into North and South, as happened with Sudan, so that we now have two countries, “Northern Nigeria” and “Southern Nigeria” since Nigerian commentators, especially those from the South / geographically speaking the so-called “Southern Nigeria” are always complaining, some of them pointing a dirty finger at what they fear and are forever trying to call out as evil machinations/ strategies being cooked up and daily being implemented in front of the whole country in real-time in the name of “Northern hegemony”.
We are to suppose that Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth is also thanking his lucky stars that he was born a Nigerian and not e.g. a North Korean currently living in or out of North Korea and offering some advice - some thinly veiled criticism to his one and only President Kim Jong-un as a result of which metaphorically or not metaphorically speaking some not so thinly veiled ballistic missile could have been aimed in his direction, with he himself as the target, for which he should have already known in advance before his abrupt departure from here and his arrival in the Hereafter, that he should have been more circumspect and retrospectively or posthumously speaking - from the Hereafter only have himself to blame for being so brave as if he didn’t know that discretion is the better part of valour.
Indeed, as Herr Togonu-Bickersteth cautiously prefaces his goodly advice, and he is not flattering Mr President when he says just like your average two-cent sycophant, “You are an ideas man. where there are no ideas there is no development “ He could have put it even more strongly :
where there is no vision, the nation perishes - and if he indeed wanted to ridicule his president, ever so slightly for sometimes lagging behind when it comes to biting the bullet and taking what the Buddhists call “ right action” he could have referred Mr President to A Man of Words and Not of Deeds by Percy B. Green
What we all know is that Muhammadu Buhari is indeed a man of action and a man of deeds, if we care to take a glance back at what he did on New Year’s Eve of 1983 when he struck and deposed the Shagari regime.
In addressing Muhammadu Buhari, the president of the current regime, Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth advises Mr President about
“enhancing development with the brain power of 60,000 Nigerian lecturers and 9000 plus Nigerian professors in addition to thousands and Thousands of postgraduate students exploring or generating new ideas…On the Founders Day of the University of Ibadan, the Nation's premier degree awarding institution the world is told that there are 133 million Nigerians experiencing multi-dimensional poverty.”
As if Mr President is unaware of the importance of education as the main engine for development. There’s no denying that Muhammadu Buhari is a man of ideas - from way back - if we care to look back at what he said here: Achebe Interviews: Muhammadu Buhari from which we can quote the entirety of what he says so lucidly in that interview.
Here’s the first question he was asked in that interview
“Your Excellency, you are arguably one of Nigeria’s most experienced elder statesmen. You have been a military Governor, a Minister, a General Officer Commanding, and a former Head of State. And recently, you contested an election for the presidency of this country. What would you put your finger on as the problem with Nigeria?”
Muhammadu Buhari: “ I will most sincerely say education. I think education will unchain our people from all their prejudices, whether it is ethnic, religious or whatever. And here, unusually, I have to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the elite. It is not the number of degrees each ethnic group holds that matters, although that matters; what does is continuous education in politics, the economy and security. It is amazing how groups are hijacked and held hostage by incompetent leadership in Nigerian communities, not allowing them to make dispassionate choices of representation and leadership. And really, ignorance is costing us so much in terms of development and the tension it creates. Of recent, I have been targeting the elite and its conscience. Let the elite wake up, go back to various constituencies and, directly or indirectly, continue to educate our people. Once there is an educated majority of Nigerians, I believe there is a certain level of standards they will not accept under any arrangement. But when people are allowed to wallow in ignorance, even concerning their immediate environment, they cannot be productive.”
And then this retort to any of his detractors from back: You sef bro, can a man bereft of ideas and incapable of action be elected President of Nigeria, not once but twice?
The question arising from such a perception is this: The Buhari in that Achebe interview, is it the same Buhari that we have today?
Well, you can’t fall into the same river twice and Baba Kadiri has already answered the question. His answer is painful - it hurts and calls for self-examination - examination of self at an individual level and a re-examination of what we in Nigeria and of Nigeria are as a nation - not only at the ethnic, clan and tribal level but also at the national level with this main idea as the backbone: UNITY - everyone’s shoulder to the wheel, united we stand, divided we fall.
Which team is going to win the FIFA World Cup if the players are disunited?
According to Baba Kadiri, the fault is not in the President, the fault mainly lies in the people, who, maybe unconsciously quoting the Quran he has described as Deaf, dumb, and blind, listen to the Pharoah making music out of this: Summun, Bukmun, Umyun