As the Bayelsa State Branch of Nigeria Society of Engineers inaugurate her 13th Executive Council to pilot her affairs for the next two years, Azibaola Robert, founder of Zeetin Engineering Limited, has advised that the Niger Delta Region, especially Bayelsa State, should take comparative advantage of Palm tree/ fruits production by industrializing it maintaining that it will boost the economy of the region.
Robert, who is also a fellow of the Nigerian Society of Engineers, speaking on Thursday in Yenagoa as a Guest Speaker during the inauguration of the NSE’s new EXCO, maintained that Ogbono can also be industrialised, refined and exported outside the country.
Speaking on the topic, everything from everything, the NSE fellow called on the Engineers to take comparative advantage of all the natural resources deposited in the Niger Delta region, adding that engineers are the builders of society.
He also called on his engineers to put on their thinking cap advising that every other hand must be on deck to achieve results.
“In order to achieve a feat of industrialisation, I think we should start from Palm Tree planting. Palm tree is very feasible because people have been planting palm trees.
“We can make an oil-rich state. After all, in the colonial period, the white people came here and established the Royal Niger Delta Company, which dealt only in palm kernels and palm fruits. If we can go back to that and discard, maybe downgrade crude oil, we will be able to make progress.
“Then also, I think that domestication of Ogbono (Irvingia Gabonensis) is very important at this stage, because wild Ogbono will go extinct soon. And if people start farming it, we will be able to commercialise it and process it.
“But whatever thing that we are doing, if you are unable to process it in commercial quantities, it will be counterproductive. There must be a chain of development. That chain must start from the farmer.
The farmer should send it to the factory that will process it, and standardize it packages and send it to society and probably abroad. It could be packaged through a chemical reaction, and that is why I’m speaking to engineers.
“If we don’t domesticate some of these species now and farm them as official crops, economic crops, they will also eventually go extinct, and they will be lost forever.
“There are so many plants that have not been domesticated in the forest; they need to be domesticated. And then we need to choose one plant as a statewide tea or a national tea that we will mandate people to drink from, provided it is herbal in nature and it’s able to give people that sense of drinking tea.
“To achieve this, it’s not only about government leadership. It’s about community leaders, individuals, all of us, the Nigerian Society of Engineers. Everybody must put on their thinking cap to make it possible.” He said.
Also speaking, Engineer Eluanaten Mac Jokori, the new chairman of NSE, Yenagoa Branch, maintained that Engineering is innovation, innovation is engineering, stating NSE is looking at continuous professional development of engineers and young engineers.
The 13th Chairman of NSE, Yenagoa Branch, disclosed that as engineers, if they don’t train themselves, they will be left behind.
“Engineering, they say, is dynamic. So we need to upgrade our skills, we need to upgrade our knowledge. We need to upgrade ourselves in research and development. That is why we are talking about innovation, we are talking about training and retraining of engineers.
“That is why we are anchoring on building an engineering resource centre in Bayelsa State that will be a hub for development, a hub for research, a hub for innovation. We’ll be moving from a manual to digital transformation, to artificial intelligence and robotics and all manner of innovations.
“So we are looking at moving from where we are as engineers, to be able to compete with our peers wherever we go all over the world.
The new chairman agreed that there are a lot of untapped resources in Bayelsa State, adding that there are “untapped areas where we need to bring in revenues to the state.
“Take, for instance, as he demonstrated, the wood carving. Today, the marine and the marine sector have graduated from that local wood carving to fibre boat making, and that is an area that engineers need to really improve on. And then look at our already existing skills and crafts, and then modernise them according to how the world is revolving around technology.
“So we have the availability of resources around us that are untapped. It’s now left for the engineers, but one key thing is for the government of the day to recognise the function and the importance of engineers.” He stated.
Inaugurating the new executives, Engineer Alimasuya Rabiu, President and chairman in council of NSE, represented by Dennis Denia, congratulated the new leadership led by Engineer Eluanaten Mac Jokori, and called on every aspect of society to support them.
He called on the new executives to take their work assiduously to move the society forward.
