I for one will feel a lot more comfortable about Nigeria’s prospects as an economy the day the government floats a National Directorate of Reverse Engineering

Ayo Akinfe

[1] As a nation, Nigeria is too dependent on imports for her survival. This is simply not sustainable, so if we are serious about lifting 100m people out of poverty, the government needs to come up with a plethora of unprecedented job-creating initiatives

[2] You know, in Greek mythology, it was believed that humans were created by the gods as slaves to build their cities and temples but man rebelled, freed himself and decided to do his own thing. It appears that the African was not part of this rebellion and simply lacks that defiant spirit to create and alternative world to the one in which he finds himself. We are content to remain the slaves of the gods. No wonder religion has taken such deep root in our society

[3] Nowhere else is this docility and lack of initiative more pronounced than in the area of technology. Every serious nation on earth has a department or directorate of reverse engineering that looks at technological developments and seeks to clone them

[4] This is done with automobiles, aircraft, battle tanks, ships, assault rifles, machine tools, trains, etc. No people who want to progress socio-economically sit back and refuse to dismantle and develop technology they currently enjoy

[5] Since the Nigerian Civil War, the Nigerian Army has been using the Soviet T-55 battle tank, while the Nigerian Air Force has been using their Mig fighter jets. How come it never occurred to us to reverse engineer these machines and start manufacturing them? During the Cold War, these tanks were deployed to Czechoslovakia and Poland but guess what? Both of those nations started manufacturing T-55s. Nigeria is currently going to the Czech Republic to buy obsolete Soviet era T-72 tanks for millions of dollars to confront Boko Haram

[6] I swear we are an embarrassment to the African continent as the antiquated Cold War T-72 is an upgrade on the T-55, which sells for about $500,000 on European black market. Surely, it would have been 10 times more cost effective to manufacture our own modern tanks of the quality of say the Leopard, Merkava, Chellenger, Abrams, T-90, etc. Just imagine how much revenue we would generate if we manufactured tanks for all of Africa’s armies

[7] Nigerians drive around in Toyota and Mercedes SUV jeeps, fly about in Gulfstream private jets, use Honda speedboats in their thousands but yet, it has never occurred to us once to reverse engineer and manufacture these products. If you want to really know how dumb we are, check this out - we are the world’s largest buyer of medium size generators but do not manufacture them in Nigeria. Now this is not a human trait and goes against that spirit of the early Homo Sapiens in Greek mythology who refused to act as slaves for the gods

[8] With the growth of software and as computer-aided design (CAD) has become more popular, reverse engineering has become a viable method to create a 3D virtual model of an existing physical part of a machine. In lay man’s terms, this means that the reverse-engineering process involves measuring an object and then reconstructing it as a 3D model. This is not rocket science and and any engineering university undergraduate should be able to reverse engineer say a Nissan Qashqai or a Toyota Rav 4. Our intellectual laziness is so frightening at times, it scares me

[9] You know, if extra-terrestrial aliens were to invade earth today, Nigeria, as the world’s largest black nation would have to be one of the countries they visit. I suspect they would actually launch their invasion of earth from Nigeria as we are the least equipped or prepared of all the world’s large nations. Basically, we are the soft underbelly of the human race

[10] If we want to be honest and objective, a nation that cannot defend her against a rag tag army of Boko Haram religious fanatics and illiterate Fulani nomads deserves to be conquered by a master specie and converted into slaves to build their economies. It is totally unacceptable for a nation of 200m people not to manufacture their own weaponry, automobiles, aircraft, shipping vessels, battle tanks, etc

ayoakinfe@gmail.com