By Maduabuchi Efegadi
Azibaola Robert, the founder of Zeetin Engineering Limited, Nigeria’s high-end precision engineering company for heavy products, says the firm would soon partner with professional women engineers to deploy science, technology and engineering in Nigeria.
According to him, this would facilitate and deepen the economic and infrastructural development of Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, but which is currently in dire search for models to steer its badly managed economy out of the woods.
Robert stated this in his Abuja office when he hosted a delegation of the national executive of the Association of Professional Women Engineers of Nigeria (APWEN), led by its president, Elizabeth Jumoke Eterigho, a chemical engineer.
“There are many things wrong with Nigeria’s technological advancement,” Robert said. “And until we sincerely embrace and deploy science and technology as the necessary tools to facilitate and deepen the economic and infrastructural development of Nigeria, rather than pandering to ethnic or tribal sentiments or considerations, we will not be able to develop and make progress as a country. For me, I want to do the technology; that’s why at Zeetin, we are buying machines to make machines,” Robert said.
A high-end tech entrepreneur, Robert called for collaboration among Nigerian engineers for the technological advancement of the country; adding that Nigeria’s technological development can easily be fast-tracked when our engineers, companies, especially those that are technology-driven, collaborate strategically for the overall industrial development and growth of Nigeria through technology. That is what we are doing in Zeetin,” he said.
He decried the country’s penchant for dependence and consumption of foreign brands, which is detrimental to the development of the country. “Our brains have been wired to think that nothing good can come out of Nigeria,” he said. “But this country will be great if we change that mentality of depending and consuming everything foreign; believing that whatever we are wearing is fake once it is not a foreign brand,” he said.
He said he believed that technology is not transferable. And that the country must start building its own technology; insisting that his company, Zeetin Engineering, was building a brand that will outlive its present employees, and stand the test of time.
“Like the SolidWorks Academy, we should provide a platform for other Nigerians to showcase their tech work. Nigerians should begin to build conglomerate brands that cut across Nigeria’s ethnic and tribal borders.
As part of a collaborative effort, Zeetin would be receiving women engineers from APWEN for professional skills development and NYSC assignments.
