Continued from last week
Q: President Muhammadu Buhari will be pleasantly surprised at the quality of the consulting engineers who are patiently seated in his waiting room while awaiting the call to do our nation proud and discharge their patriotic obligations to a country which does not appreciate them, what and who they are.
Perhaps while pondering on the somewhat eclectic topic:
Reverse engineering; Penetration tests (vulnerabilities); and artificial intelligence
We should purse to reflect on whether our nation’s myriad of challenges are due to a fundamental engineering problem or a design fault.
Indeed, I am tempted to share with you the experience of one of your foremost members who died several years ago. His name is Engr. Obembe and I believe at one time he served as the president of your association. He had successfully handled a major assignment for the federal government of Nigeria at a time when the government was totally obsessed with “foreign consultants”. Anyway, as time dragged on without any sign that payment was forthcoming, he decided to catch a plane out of Lagos to chase the outstanding payment at the Ministry of Works which had recently been moved to Abuja. He was accompanied by a very junior technician who happened to be an Indian. After several hours of waiting in the Minister’s waiting room, he was shocked when the Minister’s secretary sauntered into the room and announced that the Minister was about to close for the day. However, he would attend to foreign consultants. Eng. (Chief) Obembe was enraged.
However, he had the presence of mind to hand over his file containing his outstanding claims to his Indian assistant who was speedily ushered as a foreign consultant into the Minister’s office. To cut a long story short, the outstanding claims were processed expeditiously. We can only hope that this type of brazen discrimination against our own consulting engineers has been totally eliminated. Again, we should encourage Nigerian consulting engineers who are unable to get into the kitchen……….and the other room to ensure that they make their presence felt in the waiting room.
President Muhammadu Buhari will be pleasantly surprised at the quality of the consulting engineers who are patiently seated in his waiting room while awaiting the call to do our nation proud and discharge their patriotic obligations to a country which does not appreciate them, what and who they are.
I suggest that Consulting Engineers should borrow a leaf from the encounter between late Chief (Dr.) Moses Adekoye Majekokunmi, a very distinguished medical practitioner and Chief Sobo Sowemimo S.A.N. an eminent lawyer. The latter had been on a purely social visit to the home of the eminent doctor who while seeing off his guest noticed that there was something not quite right about his gait. He appeared to be somewhat unsteady on his feet. The good doctor quietly but firmly insisted that rather than go home, his guest should head directly to the nearest hospital. That unsolicited intervention saved the life of Chief Sowemimo who lives for many more years. The lesson for Consulting Engineers is that rather than wait to be invited they should seized the initiative and ensure that their views get to President Muhammadu Buhari.
You are entitled to take a cue from Barry B. LePatner who in his exceptionally well researched book: “TOO BIG TO FAIL” raised the alarm over America’s crumbling infrastructure. His thesis is anchored America’s failing infrastructure and the way forward. Here is a blurb from the book:
“In August 2007, the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis, MN, collapsed, killing 13 and injuring 145 others. Investigations following the tragedy revealed that it could have been prevented. The grave reality is that it is a tragedy that threatens to be repeated at many of the thousands of bridges located across the nation.
In Too Big to Fall: America’s Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward, author Barry LePatner chronicles the problems that led to the I-35W catastrophe—poor bridge design, shoddy maintenance, ignored expert repair recommendations, and misallocated funding—and digs through the National Transportation Safety Board’s report on the tragedy, which failed to present the full story.
From there LePatner evaluates what the I-35W Bridge collapse means for the country as a whole—outlining the possibility of a nationwide infrastructure breakdown. He exposes government failure on a national as well as state level, explains why we must maintain an effective infrastructure system—including how it plays a central role in supporting both our nation’s economic strength and our national security—and rounds out the book by providing his own well-researched solutions.
Too Big to Fall presents an eye-opening critique of a bureaucratic system that has allowed political best interests to trump those of the American people.”
I believe we are entitled to rely on the collective and individual experience of the eminent and very distinguished consulting engineers to enlighten the rest of Nigeria whether the observations of Barry B. LePatner bear any relevance to what we are confronted with in our physical, economic and social infrastructure. Anyway, the President elect of America Donald J. Trump has already signalled that the dilapidated (that is what he called it) infrastructure will get maximum attention once he assumes office.
This brings us back to the issue of reverse engineering which in engineering is the taking apart of an object so as to see how it works in order to duplicate or enhance the object. It can also mean taking a piece of software or hardware, analysing its functions and information flow and then translating those processes into a better product.
Reverse engineering is also called back engineering as it is the process of extracting knowledge or design information from anything man-made are re-producing it or re-producing anything based on the extracted information. The process often involved disassembling something (a mechanical devise, electronic component, computer programme, or biological, chemical, or organic matter) and analysing its components and workings in detail.
So much has gone wrong in our country that we are compelled to resort to reverse engineering in order to comprehend why we have according to a report published by a committee set up by the government under Arc. Bunu Sheriff over 11,000 abandoned projects all over the country – from power plants to roads, dams, bridges etc. We even have four oil refineries which have hardly ever worked at above 30 per cent of their installed capacity. The consequences are obvious. Our nation has been subsidizing consumption of fuel rather than confronting the challenge of producing fuel from crude with which the Almighty has blessed us abundantly.
Penetration testing (also called pen testing) is the practice of testing a computer system, network, or Web application to find vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit. In essence, it is an attack on a computer system that searches for security weaknesses and thereby gain access (potencially) to the computer’s features.
We may choose to stretch the concept to our version of democracy which we have adopted as the anchor sheet of our political economy. However, whenever we put it to test at election time we find all sorts of vulnerabilities – violence; rigging; ballot snatching; kidnapping etc cropping up. Matters are further compounded by judicial interventions which have in recent times delivered bewildering verdicts to the consternation of those of us who are not consulting engineers.
J.K. Randle
[Address delivered on 1st December 2016 at the Dinner Night of Association for Consulting Engineering in Nigeria]
