During his ministerial screening on Wednesday, Ogbonnaya Onu, former minister of Science and Technology who was nominated a second time by President Muhammadu Buhari, said in the next 30 to 50 years the level of technology development in Nigeria will be at par with what China is today.
While addressing senators during the screening, Onu said that during his term, the Science and Technology ministry in collaboration with other ministries in the federal executive council initiated the executive order number 5. The executive order is expected to promote the application of science and technology and innovation towards achieving the nation’s development goals across all sectors of the economy.
“By that executive order, once fully implemented, Nigeria will have an economy that is innovation-driven, and in the next 30 to 50 years, nobody will imagine the level of development in our country. We would just be like China is today in terms of advancement. Those who travelled to China 30 years ago know the implications of what I am saying. Definitely, it will take a lot of time,” Onu told the senators.
China’s more than 30 years of reform is a well-documented history in which the country made startling transformation from an economically and technologically backward nation to becoming the second-most advanced economy in the world and the leader in many technological innovations.
According to the story, in December 1978, following a decade of the Cultural Revolution led by Mao Zedong that left the communist country in ruins, a series of transformative economic reforms opened China up to the international community and foreign investment. The reforms also paved the way for things like China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – an ambitious infrastructural push aimed at expanding China’s political and economic influence internationally – and set the stage for the emergence of e-commerce and technology giants like Alibaba and Huawei. The economy of the country during the last three decades has also grown at an average annual rate of 9.8 per cent.
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While it should be applauded that Onu even has ambitions of transforming Nigeria’s science and technology space – the jury has not returned on his previous term in office – what is perplexing is why he wants Nigeria to grow at a 2019 level in 30 to 50 years when the rest of the world would probably be run by robots, flying taxis and internet-of-everything becoming common place plus other yet-to-be-seen technological innovations.
In other words, in 30 years’ times Nigeria will just be achieving technological advancements that China had achieved in 2019.
To be fair, China in 2019 is leading the world in many technology innovations. For instance, China’s growing domestic technology market, now second only to that of the United States, is likely to surpass the latter in buying power by around 2020. China is also believed to be leading the world in artificial intelligence. The country’s AI researchers are poised to be in the top 50 per cent of most cited papers in 2019, according to a study from Allen Institute and not to mention China’s superiority contest in 5G technology with the US.
Thus, for 67-year- old Ogbonnaya Onu aspiring to be at the height where China is in 2019 could be a starting point but it is not good enough for Nigeria’s 30 years’ future.
Predictions from top scientists for the next 30 years in terms of technological advances are beyond what China has currently attained and any minister of science and technology that is unable to see as far ahead is unlikely to push any meaningful agenda for tech in the next four years.
“We are not too far away from having an AI and brain interface,” Kai Wulff, executive vice president, Balton CP, the parent company of Dizengoff Nigeria, told BusinessDay in a recent interview.
One of the projections for the next 30 years, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a think tank that is behind some of the biggest innovations of the US military, is human beings getting to the point where they can control things with their minds. Scientists are already working on neurotechnologies that can enable this to happen. This is likely the future where China and the rest of the world with public servants that are ready for the future will be playing.
