Nigeria has launched five satellites into space in the last 12 years, costing millions of dollars. But the awareness of its importance to the nation’s development plan is as poor among the populace as is the duty of relevant agencies to massively educate the citizenry about it.
Nicholas, an unemployed young graduate of a Nigerian university, cannot afford to buy a newspaper. So, he regularly joins many others like him every morning at a vendor’s stand to read the headlines and argue, often heatedly, about the socio-political goings-on in his country.
As I picked a weekend edition of one of the dailies from my vendor one Saturday morning, Nicholas politely asked me, his face forming into some melodramatic grin, if he could skim through the pages and I obliged him. He then spotted an update on Nigeria’s launched communications satellite in space and the broad grin on his face changed into a forlorn kind of look.
“What on earth is Nigeria’s presence in space going to benefit its hungry millions?” he asked in a voice that betrayed sarcasm mixed with disillusionment. I then tried to educate him on how our space activities will ultimately help improve our economic and human development.
“Sir,” he snapped, “you really don’t know what is going on in this country! Who cares about any satellite in space? I need to get a job, have an apartment to myself, start my own family, and take care of my parents and younger siblings. There are many problems here on the ground, on the earth surface not yet solved! Why bother myself about what goes on in the outer space?”
I perfectly understand all of Nicholas’ concerns. His argument always reminds me of the cynicism of a public commentator who in 2011 condemned in a television interview Nigeria’s aspiration to expand its venture into space programme through the launch of two new satellites: “It is a white elephant project! Why spending millions of dollars gallivanting around the space when schools are down, roads dilapidated and the clinics without drugs?”
Our dear country is a land of big dreams, big men, big resources but small impacts. As strategic and desirable as our space programme is to our national development goals, majority of the citizens find it difficult to see any nexus between spending so much money on launching satellites into space and their quest for improved living conditions. Two main reasons for this cynicism I have observed are poor, in some instances non-existent, positive developmental results; and the lack of mass education and awareness about its importance among the people as shown by Nicholas and that public commentator. Relevant government agencies whose duty it is to educate the populace and promote our national space policy are solely to blame in the circumstance.
Nigeria, since 2007, has nurtured an ambitious dream to sit amidst world’s 20 biggest economies by the year 2020 (Vision 20:2020). In furtherance of this dream, the current Jonathan administration launched a four-year Transformation Agenda in May 2011 which, among other sectoral reforms, underscores the need for availability of infrastructural facilities to propel the economy.
At a May 2014 United Nations Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, Nigeria’s minister of communications technology and supervising minister of science and technology, Omobola Johnson, emphasized the vital role that Nigeria’s Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Policy is to play in transforming the country into Africa’s most vibrant economic hub, underlining Space Science and Technology (SST) as one of the five identified areas of potential impact.
Nigeria’s voyage into SST predates the current administration. In 1999, the country established the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) with the mandate to implement and promote the National Space Policy (NSP) which was adopted in 2001. The policy statement of the NSP is that “government will rigorously pursue an immediate attainment of indigenous space capability in Nigeria, as an essential tool for its socio-economic development, for the enhancement of the quality of life of its people”.
Nigeria, which prides itself as the giant of Africa, has sought to exert its regional hegemony for decades without much success recorded – its citizens were still classified among the poorest of the poor in the 2014 UN Human Development Index (HDI). It now boasts of the biggest GDP figures on the African continent, which has not impacted on its mass youth unemployment, wide income gap, low economic competitiveness, energy poverty, infrastructure deficit, environmental degradation and a moribund real sector.
It is ironically interesting that the nation has not left its big dream un-nurtured. Nigeria has over the years pursued vigorously the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a 15-year global agenda that is due to be replaced in September this year by yet-to-be-finalized new global agenda tagged Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It recently established, in pursuance of these goals, an Office of the Special Adviser to the President on the MDGs, apparently to monitor and measure for development purposes the gains of previous national and regional efforts, such as the championing of the creation of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in 2001; National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategies (NEEDS) in 2003; and the full support given to implementation of the USA-initiated Africa’s Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) of 2000.
Now it may interest people like Nicholas to know why all these efforts have not yielded much result. Why has high economic growth recorded over the years not transformed into economic development? Why is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies (Nigeria is a member of the group MINT – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey – noted for their demographic strength and resilient economic growth in spite of global economic meltdown) import-dominated and bedevilled by an epileptic manufacturing sector? And why should an emerging market seen as a potential game changer expected to transform Jim O’Neill’s BRIC, now BRICS, further into BRINCS have one of the world’s lowest incomes per head?
The answer to these questions is just one simple fact – Nigeria lacks adequate indigenous capacity to build its economy and develop its people. This is why burgeoning economic growth is only making big money available to fuel official corruption and bitter politics rather than laying infrastructures for power generation; crude oil refining; gas harnessing instead of flaring; road, rail, water and air transport systems; information and communications technology (ICT) and education; national security; public health; water and environmental management; food security and the likes. Research and Development (R&D) that will improve our scientific and technological bases for these agents of improved living conditions are known to be best aided globally by data captured through space science and geo-information.
Oluwatoba Oguntuase
