Thursday, 24th June 2021: The National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure, (NASENI), and the Nigerian military are working out modalities on the manufacturing of locally made weapons to assist in the fight against insurgency.

Indications to this development emerged on Wednesday when the director general, Defence Research and Development Bureau, (DRDB) of the Nigeria Military, Air Vice Marshal Ubrufih Uzezi, paid an official visit to the NASENI headquarters in Abuja where he solicited the support of the agency.

Receiving the Air Vice Marshal, the executive vice chairman of NASENI, Prof. Mohammed Sani Haruna, said that it had become incumbent on the nation to invest more in local technological production of military hardware in order to make the nation self-reliant on that front.

The NASENI boss, who decried paucity of funds as impediments to some of the avowed pursuits of the agency, however, commended President Muhammadu Buhari for approving 0.5 per cent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for research and innovation, which he said is an improvement judging from previous provisions for the agency.

The president, he said, had directed the agency to work closely with security agencies in areas of manufacturing warfare equipment.

He disclosed that the agency had received the required certification and approvals from the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority, (NCAA), for the first made-in-Nigeria non-commercial helicopter being constructed by the agency.

He said; “If we don’t work with other agencies such as DRDB, we wouldn’t know what is needed to do in need-oriented research. We will learn from them and they also learn from us, and that is the way to move the nation forward”, he added.

According to him, the technological challenges in military operations have made it necessary to look inward for the production of warfare equipment.

Speaking during the meeting, Air Vice Marshal Uzezi noted that the DRDB had a mandate to locally develop and deliver cutting edge war fighting technologies for the armed forces.

He added that support was needed in areas such as conduct of reverse engineering, identifying subject matter experts both within and outside Nigeria, solar energy, artificial Intelligence and fabrication of components.

He said; “Because of the way we are focused, it is important that we must work with NASENI. The agency has capability and reach that no other institution in Nigeria has; therefore, the capacities and competencies they have are things we can leverage on to get our own research efforts, especially in military technology development, ongoing,” he said.