By Ifeanyi Uwagwu
The State Commissioner for Higher Education, Prof. Nyerhovwo Tonukari, has called on the country’s scientists to take advantage of the global shift towards a green economy to create wealth and improve the nation’s economic standing.
Tonukari issued this charge during his plenary lecture at the Nigerian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Conference, held at the University of Port Harcourt.
According to Prof. Tonukari, the green economy promises to stimulate economic recovery through environmentally friendly production processes, achieving economic growth, promoting positive social outcomes, and reducing environmental impacts simultaneously. He emphasized that policymakers in the country should prioritize this shift, and scientists, particularly those in biological sciences, including biochemists, should contribute significantly to industrial development and wealth creation.
He stressed that the agricultural sector should be central to the drive towards a green economy and wealth creation. He pointed out that Nigeria’s dependence on oil as the mainstay of its economy is at the heart of its current economic challenges. “In Nigeria and most developing countries today, agriculture is a crucial sector for driving the green economy. Our apparent refusal to change the structure of the national economy is at the heart of the very slow development we are experiencing in Nigeria today,” he stated.
Prof. Tonukari posited a paradigm shift from a menial scale of agriculture, focused on the export of raw materials, which has so far failed to alleviate poverty in the country, to a broader scale through biotechnology. He called for efforts towards applying research for the development and production of biochemicals and services.
He also urged biochemists to develop the capacity to collaborate with other professionals in diverse fields. He noted that the study of biochemistry in Nigeria is hindered by a narrow educational curriculum, which has limited the field to a theoretical-based approach, unlike in other spheres where the combination of both the theoretical and practical approach has yielded meaningful results and translated into wealth creation for those countries.
“We need to step out of our laboratories once in a while and go into the real world to understand what is going on and how we can apply our knowledge. We need to put aside our white lab coats occasionally and put on blue factory coveralls to work with factory workers to improve their processes and products or discover other useful biomolecules. We need to insert ourselves into soybean, maize, palm oil, and cassava processing factories and find out what else we can produce from their huge by-products, many of which are lignocellulosic biomass,” he said.
Furthermore, Prof. Tonukari encouraged Nigerian biochemists to take advantage of the myriad opportunities before them, especially in the multi-billion-dollar industrial biochemistry sector, where raw material resources are readily available, numerous, and diverse, through commercialisation of their research inventions and innovative discoveries
