My host in Lagos, Mr Azih (a.k.a. Engineer Azih), is a very intelligent man with a great sense of humor. He went to Stanford for graduate school, and after getting his master's in material science, Mr Azih soon realized that getting a doctorate would overqualify him for anything he coud do in Nigeria. In other words, researching the solubilities of gases in liquid metals would have held little relevance to the engineering problems that he would have faced in Nigeria in 1979. He returned to Nigeria to work in the power sector, a move which I admire very much because while he could have lived quite comfortably in the US, he put the interest of his people before his own. (Incidentally, he had also considered Caltech for graduate school, but after the school notified him that any research he would do there would be "too advanced" for Nigeria, he turned Caltech down.)
With several decades of experience in power distribution, Engr Azih was very expressive about what was going wrong with the power in Nigeria. Referring to a newspaper article stating that the federal government had promised 6000 MW by the end of the year, he scoffed, "How are you going to get 6000 MW in 3 months, when it's taken you 10 years to get from 2400 MW to (an even lower) 2100 MW?" He recommends that the power problem should be taken out of the hands of the Federal Government and taken care of on a more local level. Quoting Thomas Paine, Mr Azih says, "Either follow, lead, or get the hell out of the way!"
No comments:
Post a Comment