Writing on Ethnicity and Stolen Opportunities in Public Service: Anti-corruption, Where is thy Reach and Victory? Prof. Kenneth Amaeshi lamented that “Corruption goes beyond stealing public funds, although it is a major understanding of the word.
As much as it is important to curtail the opportunities for embezzling public funds, and bring perpetrators to justice, it is also important to cast a wide net on corruption, and frame it as an act of “stealing opportunities”. The view of corruption as stolen opportunities can offer a different lens to appreciate the anti-corruption agenda. …….poverty is unfreedom.
It is a lack of freedom, because in such situations, choices are limited, and the capability to meet the very few available choices is significantly constrained…. Some people are trapped in poverty because they don’t have access to opportunities.
This can be as a result of poor education, lack of access to resources, and inappropriate social networks…….. Good education helps people to explore good opportunities to improve their lot in life…… Notwithstanding, opportunities can still be stolen……. This is a form of corruption that is hardly talked about in the current framing of the anti-corruption agenda in Nigeria.”
The bottom line of this narrative is that the surest way to liberate a generation from poverty is to avail them access to relevant information and a wide range of choices for entrepreneurship, employability and community development. And, in what appears to be giving impetus to this, President Muhammadu Buhari while presenting the 2017 budget proposal at the National Assembly, openly admitted that digital skills are essential and as such, ICT as a deliberate policy is slated for priority attention as a key objective in revamping the collapsed economy. He hinted that “….. we also have an ambitious programme for growing our digital platforms in order to modernize the Nigerian economy, support innovation and improve productivity and competitiveness.
We will do this through increased spending on critical information technology infrastructure and also by promoting policies that facilitate investments in this vital sector.” But before then, the UK House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee published its “Digital Skills Crisis” report in June 2016 and stated that: “digital education and training need to be addressed as a matter of urgency in the Government’s forthcoming Digital Strategy.”
From the foregoing, given the intensity of the global need and demand for digital skills and competencies and of course the consequent emerging ICT revolution in developing nations, there is a logical and gloomy prediction that certain “white collar jobs such as accounting, law, journalism are next in line to see technology remove vast numbers of existing jobs in the next five to ten years.” Computers would assume numerous roles and only the skilled can play competitively and productively fore entrepreneurship, employability and community development. The big question, therefore, is: How ready is Nigeria to fill this yearning gap?
The Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, while speaking on the readiness of the Federal Government to establish in Nigeria an ICT university which will be first of its kind in Africa with one of the campuses in Enugu courtesy of Senator Gilbert Nnaji, cheerfully announced that “we already have what is called the Digital Bridge Institute which is for short term training programmes in six locations across the country and we hope to transform this institute into the ICT University of Nigeria.
I am already talking to a lot of operators at the international level, Facebook, Motorola, Ericson, all of them. We are encouraging them to come and adopt the university campuses as their own. Nigerians will, therefore, be equipped with the best skills to look for jobs all over the world. If we have Korean telecoms companies coming to adopt one of our campuses, that will strengthen us instead of going to South Korea.
We can have all the training and the number of people who will have the training locally will certainly be more than those who will have opportunities of going abroad to train. So, we feel that the ICT University is one of the big legacies that this government wants to give to Nigerians by adding value to computer science education,” This aptly explains why Gilbert Nnaji, apparently over-whelmed by the tragic neglect that bedeviled his Enugu-East Senatorial District for-which he aspired to represent them at the Senate had declared that he would “certainly make sacrifices in order to bridge the gap between electoral promises and fulfillments”.
As such, after being appointed the Chairman of Senate Committee on Communications, he quickly sought ways to avail his constituency of the benefi ts of Information and Communication Technology. He was convinced that it was only through a broad-based, sound and qualitative technology education that Nigeria can effectively achieve the knowledgebased economy being projected in the Vision 20-20-20.
This, he proved by investing energies and resources in the enhancement of education with specific campaigns that secondary schools in the country practically integrate ICT into their curricula, and he has sponsored a motion on that. He, however, used his Enugu-East Senatorial District to demonstrate the efficacy of this proposition. Charles writes from Abuja.
