Last week, a request was made by this writer that we should ponder on why Malaysia that took palm seedlings from Nigeria in the 1960s is currently the world’s largest exporter of palm oil. It is worth stating that Malaysia has applied very efficient technology for extraction and production such that the country has developed about 21 different products of exportable standard from palm oil. On the contrary, Nigeria has fallen from being the world’s leading producer and exporter of palm oil in the 1960s to being a net importer of same commodity in order to meet growing domestic demand. What a sad story!
It is, however, heart-warming to read from one of the dailies on 18 November, 2015 that the federal government will not spend the sum of N1.0 trillion to import agricultural products to meet local demands. This is good, but what will the federal government do to provide food security for about 180 million people in order to cover the gap to be created by the ban on imported agricultural products? Do we plan to embark on agricultural research in order to add value to existing locally produced crops so that they could be consumed and also be exported? These questions are raised because agricultural research in many African economies including Nigeria has limited capacity for meeting priority needs such as boosting productivity of food crops, adding value to agricultural products through postharvest processing and ensuring sustainable use of land resources for farming. Consequently, the overall level of knowledge employed in the agriculture sector remains low in many African countries, and that is the reason why agriculture is not living up to its potential as an engine of economic growth. What do we need to do to diversify the economy into agriculture? The ministers of agriculture, industry, education, including science and technology need to collaborate amongst themselves. This is because Nigeria will need to build capacity of the agricultural research and training systems which include faculties of agriculture in tertiary institutions, technical colleges, and research laboratories and technology transfer centres, such as the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP).
It is worthy to state that not every country has the capacity to be deeply involved in R&D at national and global levels, respectively. For instance, it is not every nation that has the capacity to participate in the global R&D effort to cure AIDS, Ebola and to develop anti-malarial vaccine. But Nigeria needs to develop R&D capacity in order to add value to its natural resources, and innovate ways of applying modern technology to solving local problems. If not, Nigeria will perpetually be import-dependent without significant export of goods and services to other countries.
Questions that have bothered many scholars on the role of R&D in the innovation endeavour are as follows: what R&D capacity should less developed countries build at the early stage of development? How can R&D complement university science and engineering education including training initiatives? How can R&D be harnessed to solve the country’s economic development challenges? What can be done to improve the quality of existing R&D capacity? Will building high-level R&D capacity help to reverse the brain drain and engage the skills and energy of about 45,000 Nigerian medical doctors, thousands of engineers and professors of Nigerian descent in the diaspora? Whilst it is difficult to have an accurate answer to all these questions, our best option as a nation is not to re-invent the wheel but to adopt copy technology or the imitation strategy that will enable us leapfrog into the appropriate level of economic development. This can only be achieved through commitment on the part of government.
This is because Nigeria cannot adopt the offensive or defensive strategies considering the huge resources that these strategies require. These strategies are for nations with large number of quality educational institutions, personnel and funds, and are willing to use technological innovation to outsmart their rivals. But the strategy that may be appropriate for a less industrialized country like Nigeria is the imitation strategy. Why is imitation strategy the most appropriate? It is because the cost of R&D is so high that it is regarded by studies as the costliest element in the innovation process accounting for about 46 to 59 percent of the total cost of innovation depending on the extent to which the innovation is radical. If an innovation project is abandoned after the R&D stage because it is no longer feasible to continue with it, about half the cost of the innovation which is unrecoverable would have been spent. Nigeria does not have funds to cope with risks and uncertainties in offensive and defensive strategies. The country should try the imitation strategy but this may not take off smoothly unless we deliberately as a matter of policy develop our industrial and technological bases. That is why innovation is complex.
In the imitation strategy, meagre resources are invested in reproducing carbon copy of the products of other nations. In the imitation strategy, the motivation is not to improve on innovation but to copy what others have done. Look around Nigeria, you will observe that we have acquired foreign technologies over time at a huge cost to the nation but we have not been able to adopt and adapt these technologies for our local use. It is a pity that there is scarce foreign exchange now due to crude oil price drop in the international market. But we have to be inspired by other nations like Japan, Korea, China and India that have successfully adopted the imitation strategy. These countries have adopted the imitation strategy despite allocation of about 7.5 percent of their GDP to R&D, while Nigeria barely allocates 0.1 percent of GDP to R&D.
The reason why most nations align with this strategy is that the vast majority of technologies required to reduce poverty, add value to natural resources and upgrade the technological proficiency of local industries have already been invented. They are typically in wide use in industrialized countries. The challenge is that these technologies are not widely used in many less industrialized countries. For instance, this writer was going through one of our popular newspapers where it was reflected that one of our industrial research institutes in Lagos has recorded a lot of “research breakthroughs” awaiting adoption by local entrepreneurs and other investors. What could be responsible for weak linkages between research institutes, local entrepreneurs and investors? It is likely that what is considered as “research breakthroughs” by the institute are obsolete to the average entrepreneur in Nigeria, while there are better imported technologies currently existing in the market. That is why R&D is marginalized in a country like Nigeria that relies heavily on imported goods. It is because of these reasons that research institutes are always advised to relate with local industries to know what their needs are before committing scarce resources to research whose outputs may likely remain in the laboratory perpetually. (To be continued)
MA Johnson
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