Telecoms giant Etisalat Nigeria has advised Nigerian government at all levels to prioritise meeting the critical development needs of the nation in their renewed efforts at achieving the Sustainable Development Goals agenda of the United Nations. Vice President, Regulatory and Corporate Affairs, Etisalat Nigeria, Ibrahim Dikko, gave the advice while speaking at the seventh edition of the thought leadership breakfast series, Sustainable Conversations, organised by Thistle Praxis Consulting in partnership with Etisalat Nigeria.
He commended the UN-backed Sustainable Development Goals agenda, but said Nigeria must evaluate and prioritise which goals constitute its most pressing needs and go for such without taking its eyes off the others in the UN-backed 17-goals agenda block.
“The SDGs are lofty and ambitious targets. I think the way around this is for countries to look for what is the most critical for them. Each country has its own priorities. For a country like ours that has a very young, up and coming population, our primary concern for now should be to focus on education, health, security, peace and justice, access to facilities, among others needs. That is not to say we should ignore the other goals and just focus on these. We should prioritise and start with what is achievable now given the resources at our disposal,” Dikko said.
Dikko said Etisalat is leading a quiet revolution in providing telecommunications-focused education with training of students and lecturers in that field.
“When we started operations in 2008, we realized that in our Universities, there were only such programmes like petroleum, electrical, mechanical and chemical engineering, but there was no telecommunications engineering. In this 21st century, there is no way we can go forward and build capacity if we did not try and address that. So we started a partnership with ABU, Zaria to sponsor students to Masters’ Degree programmes in telecommunications engineering in partnership with Plymouth University, UK and the Etisalat Academy, UAE. We are also training some lecturers at PhD level so there can be capacity for knowledge sharing,” he said.
