Protocols

Greetings and Acknowledgements: I must confess that when I was nominated as the Vice President by our elders in 2020, I thought it was a joke. But here we are today. By the Grace of God, after two years of tutelage and learning the ropes as the Vice President, under the able leadership of the Immediate Past President (IPP), Engr. Alex Ogedegbe, I am faced with the realty of leading the apex engineering professional group in Nigeria.  But God can only work through people. I therefore want to thank everybody that contributed in making this possible. These include the members of Board of Trustees (BoT), past Presidents, Board of Directors, Council, Executive Committee and indeed all Fellows of the Academy for this rare and privileged opportunity as your new President. I believe that with your support, we shall take the Academy to greater heights and ultimately contribute towards towards Nigerias development.

For our distinguished guests, we thank you for joining us for this ceremony for the investiture of the 12^th President and induction of 10 new Fellows of the Academy. May God lead everybody safely back home after the ceremony.  For those who are with us on-line, we thank you.

For Policy Makers and our leaders in government, academia and industry may I seize this opportunity to thank you for the years of goodwill, collaboration and support the Academy has received from you. Our success depends on your disposition to listen and make use of the advice we offer as a Think Tank for the development of our country.

For our new fellows, I congratulate you. As the chairmen of the screening committee, I tell you that it was a very difficult exercise to select you from a list of other well qualified engineers. I appeal to you to join others fellows in providing the needed knowledge and advice required to drive engineering practice in Nigeria. You must belong to at least one technical committee.

Permit me to recognize and thank my family for their support. They have been at the receiving end of all my deficiencies and been very supportive. May I therefore thank my dear wife, Mrs Blessing Nwamaka Onwualu for always being there. I also want to thank my immediate staff for all they do.

Why Nigerian Academy of Engineering?: A number of people have confronted me with different questions on the Academy. Why another Academy? What has the academy achieved over the years? Why is Nigeria still under developed even with the existence of the Academies? How can the Academy be repositioned to have more impact towards the development of the Nigerian economy? etc I will not attempt to answer these questions here as you can find the answers in our website: www.nae.ng.

Academies are established all over the world as non-governmental, non for profit Think Tanks made up of a small number of professionals who have reached the peak and have excelled in their chosen professions. While some of them are retired, some are still in active service but the important thing is that these are distinguished men and women who have seen in all and have the relevant knowledge, experience, network and other resources required to provide ideas that can be used for public policy towards development of a country. Globally, there are at least 140 Academies in different countries. In some countries, the academies are actually part of government, providing critical knowledge inputs to public policy. In Nigeria, there are Academy of Science, Medicine, Letters, Pharmacy and Nigerian Academy of Engineering among others.

Establishment and Operations of the Academy: The Nigerian Academy of Engineering (NAE) was established by statute in 1997 as a non-profit and non-governmental institution for the promotion of excellence in engineering training and practice to ensure the technological growth of Nigeria. The Academy is a national "Think Tank" for Engineering, Technology and Innovation that provides leadership in national engineering and technological issues by conducting studies and research on relevant issues and making inputs to developmental policies at the highest possible level. Its Fellows are drawn from among very senior Nigerian engineering professionals resident in Nigeria and abroad who have distinguished themselves in business, academia, and government.

The Academy performs its functions though a well-structured framework made up of the Board of Trustees, Board of Directors, Council, Executive Committee, Technical Committees and a Secretariat supervised by the Honorary Secretary. All fellows of the Academy belong to at least one committee through which all professional are carried out. Our activities include: Annual General meeting; Committee meetings; Fellows forum; Public forum; Publication of proceedings and journal, advocacy on national issues and provision of advice to government and industry in the area of engineering, technology and innovation for infrastructure, industrialisation, education, oil and gas, agriculture, transportation, SMEs, health care, security, etc.

Towards a new Direction for the Academy: In order to be more focused, the Academy in 2020 developed and adopted a new strategic plan. We are currently implementing the strategic plan and I want to request all fellow to go back and read that plan again as our activities will continue with the implementation of the plan. I believe that if we all study the plan which we all worked hard to develop, it will help us to see what we have been able to do in the last two years and chart a new path for implementing the remaining aspects of the plan. In doing this, we need to do few things differently in order to be more effective and impactful as a think tank.

• We need to interface more with executive arm of government both at federal and state levels. In doing this, we need to be more proactive rather than reactive. We need to find new ways of having the ears of government at the policy formulation stage before the programmes are rolled out.
• We need to interface more with relevant committees of the national assembly and house of assembly in the states to provide inputs into their processes, policies and development plans.
• We need to work more on promotion of academia industry collaboration in order to drive innovation in all sectors of the economy using technology innovation hubs to promote re-industrialization of Nigeria and revitalization of critical infrastructure for transportation, power and energy, water, health care, agriculture and communications.
• We need to work with government and industry to save the education sector from complete collapse. As a country, we need to revive skills, technical, vocational and entrepreneurship education to prepare future graduates of our colleges and universities for the future of work and work of the future which is very dynamic.
• Finally, we need to use our wealth of experience to advice government on finding engineering and technology based solutions to the current challenges of insecurity in Nigeria.

Collaboration with Government and Other Stake Holders: One thing is to generate an advice on knowledge, and another thing is to get policy makers in government and industry to implement them. Therefore, we must find new ways of advocacy that can make the relevant authorities to seek for and use the knowledge generated by the Academy. I want to seize this opportunity to call on governments at federal and state levels and industry to partner with the academy in order to assist them in evidence based policy formulation to address the challenges confronting Nigeria.

In order to succeed, we need to work more with other Academies, globally and national. We shall therefore continue to work with Council of Academies of Engineering, Technology and Science (CAETS), Royal Academy of Engineering of the UK and their equivalents in the United States of America, Canada and Japan. Back home we shall reinforce our collaboration with sister academes such as Nigeria Academy of Science, Pharmacy, Education, Letters, Medicine.

We note that for engineering practice to excel, all members of the engineering family must close ranks and complement each other. Therefore, we shall pursue more project based collaboration with Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), Nigeria Society of Engineers (NSE), Council for Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) and the relevant professional bodies for technologists, Technicians and Craftsmen, to ensure we can work together to revive the technical skills sector in Nigeria.

Concluding Remarks: It is interesting to note that the new Executive Committee of the Nigeria Academy of Engineering is being inaugurated today, a few months before new governments at the federal and state levels. I call on governments (executive and legislature) at the federal and state levels to avail themselves of the wealth of knowledge and experience of the Fellows of the Academy in solving the challenges of infrastructure, communication, agriculture, healthcare, water and other engineering and technology problems of Nigeria. The technical committees of the academy for the different sectors have analysed the problems and advice that can inform development policy are available.

Thank you and May God bless you all.

Engr. Prof. Azikiwe Peter Onwualu

FAEng, FAS, FNSE, FNIAE, FNIM

President, Nigerian Academy of Engineering

23^rd June, 2022