Will this ambitious project ever see the light of day?

Promotion of the development of massive human resource capacity in the ICT sector of the economy,
Training of personnel in ICT, innovation and related sectors,
Establishment of training and research facilities with modern infrastructure and tech,
Provision of fully interactive distance learning facilities
Collaboration with other institutions, local and international. This should enable idea and curricula swapping.
encourage, promote and conduct research in innovation, communications and ICT; and all the usual things the Federal Government lists when they want you to convince you a project is a good idea.

This looks interesting here.

The University will have have; College of Information Technology, College of Applied Technology and Society, College of Security Technology. At its core will be the Entrepreneurship and General Studies.

The Ministry set up a 31-person committee to implement everything necessary to bring this University to life. The committee is being led by the immediate past Executive Secretary of the National Universities Commission (NUC), Prof. Julius Okojie.

Here’s the problem.

The first issue is from the President, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), Titi Omo-Ettu. He told the Guardian he believes it should run more like a training centre on steroids, one where graduates of any discipline qualify. Here, they get rigorous training on any area of interest, from software engineering to robotics.

He added:

“The faculty should comprise of experts invited from industry and academia from anywhere in the globe to the extent of what the centre can afford. It is the quality of equipment for training that makes this centre different from a typical university, and a deliberate desire to take it away from structures such as the NUC, where its mandate may be lost to politics of the land and the ‘job for he boys’ syndrome that we are known for.”

“Death by Government.”

This is the classic case of anything the government lays its hands on. If there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that the Nigerian government has shown over and over, that it sucks at managing anything.

Omo-Ettu agrees, which is why he said:

“Recruitment into the centre would be strictly on merit and taken away from government’s apron. It should be a self-sustaining business and not receive government handouts in any form.”

We already know that the Ministry intends for this to be a joint Public-Private management, whether it’s a steel project, or its a refinery, or even humanitarian effort. Don’t forget the government tried to run a technology incubator, that also went south.

The Minister has stated clearly that the institution will be supported by global leaders in ICT including, Cisco, Facebook, Huawei, MTN, D-Links, Globacom, Lenovo, Samsung, Apple, Siemens-Nortel, Intel, Motorola, Ericsson, Dell, He, ZTE and IBM.

Perhaps, we should be looking at a scenario where government gets to participate as little as possible. This way, the project is run almost entirely by private institutions and work towards 100% independence from the government.

Let’s look at Government’s report card.

According to Wikipedia, a University of Technology “is a type of university which specializes in engineering, technology, applied science, and sometimes natural sciences.”

The Federal Government currently runs 6 Universities of Technology; Federal University of Technology, Akure; Federal University of Technology, Owerri; Federal University of Technology, Minna; Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi; Federal University of Technology, Yola; Federal University of Petroleum Resources, Effurun.

Perhaps an interesting option would be for government to invest in making these ones better, instead of thinning out resources. That way, the Universities develop, and this implementation can then be scaled to more Universities. That way, we get to have better institutions across board.

In the end, it appears that the Minister of Comms has no plans to slow down on these plans.

Should this project succeed;

Although one deadline has already been missed, we can be sure there’ll be positives if it goes live eventually. The butterfly effect could see the impact trickle down, and add real value to the Nigerian ICT industry. The world is not slowing down as regards tech, and it’s about time we catch up.