RAINProtocols
The Chairman of this occasion, the Chairman of NSE Ibadan Branch, Engr. Ayokunnu Olukunmi Ojedele, MNSE, the Chairman of the Conference Planning Sub-Committee, Engr. Prof. Wasiu Olabamiji Ajagbe, FNSE, FNIEE, members of the Branch Executive Committee, distinguished Fellows, my fellow engineers, invited guests, gentlemen of the press, ladies and gentlemen. All protocols duly observed.
It gives me great pleasure to speak at the 2026 Annual Conference of the Nigerian Society of Engineers, Ibadan Branch.
We must begin by reminding ourselves what we are. We are engineers. We are problem solvers. Where there is a problem, there is a need for a solution. And the best solutions are generated internally. They are adapted to the environment. They last, provided the engineers who build them look inward and design for the environment they are actually in.
That single sentence carries the whole weight of today's theme. Because it also means the opposite is true. If engineers continue to import solutions, and all we do is swap and swap with what has already been done abroad, then we will continue to find ourselves in trouble day after day.
So in the bid to internalise our problems and to localise our solutions, we are gathered here once again. And it is fitting that we are gathered in Ibadan. This branch is the Premier Branch. We have historically been the forerunner when it comes to building solutions that last, whether the work is electrical, industrial, environmental, civil or agricultural. As the world moves towards smart solutions, the Internet of Things, robotics and artificial intelligence, Ibadan Branch is not left out. I represent this branch proudly wherever I go as an engineer. I am honoured to be given this podium.
The theme of this conference is apt and timely: Securing the Future: Scaling Engineering Innovations for Critical Infrastructure Resiliency and National Security in Nigeria.
Nothing can be truer than this. If we do not scale the innovations we build locally for the critical infrastructure we need, we will not find buyers. We will not find a market even here, in the very place where that infrastructure is critical. And if we cannot find buyers for critical infrastructure at home, then we are exposing our national need to foreign solutions, with their own embedded threats.
Foreign solutions do not only come with threats. They come with a cost we cannot afford. For a nation that is a consumer nation, we will simply continue to import solutions while selling the God-given natural resources that were supposed to be our leverage for the future. And at the end of that road, the future is not secured. It is mortgaged.
Let me put numbers to the urgency, so that we are not speaking in abstractions. Since 2010, Nigeria has recorded hundreds of partial and total national grid collapses. Twelve of those happened in 2024 alone. Our installed generation capacity is quoted at somewhere between 13,000 and 15,500 megawatts. What we actually deliver to homes and factories rarely exceeds 5,000. Experts put the minimum requirement for adequate national supply at around 30,000 megawatts. We cannot reliably transmit one-sixth of what we need.
And it is not only power. In the first six months of 2026 alone, the Nigerian Communications Commission recorded over five thousand fibre optic cable cuts from road construction, excavation and related civil works, in a country where telecommunications infrastructure has already been formally designated as Critical National Information Infrastructure since 2024, and where damaging it already carries a ten-year jail term.
So we already have the law. What we do not have is the engineering.
Every blackout is a security incident. Every fibre cut is an economic attack. Every collapsed bridge is a denial-of-service on the movement of goods, people and troops. This is why infrastructure resilience is not a utilities conversation. It is a national security conversation. And it is our conversation, as engineers.
The diagnosis: we are working in silos
Let me say to you plainly that the situation today is that we are all working in silos. Engineers. Lawyers. Politicians. Bankers. Everybody is in a silo.
It is partly the nature of mankind. We are political. We are competitive. But what serious organisations abroad have realised is that the best only comes out when we collaborate. And collaboration is not only between people in the private sector. It is also among government agencies, among the tiers of government, and between government and the private sector. So ask yourself honestly: how well are we cooperating?
That is the first step we must imbibe. Cooperation. Where the banks support the businesses, believing in them, trusting their ideas, supporting them in the areas where engineering companies are not strong — marketing, for instance, and foreign partnerships. It is not the job of the engineer to go looking for partners. That is the job of the business investor. So how well are our investors trusting our local talent?
I am also speaking to government. Agencies competing with one another, refusing to share their data, refusing to even share their problems. There is an engineer with an innovation, and the officer who is supposed to use it cannot adopt it, because adopting it would look like an admission of weakness, or because sharing the problem feels like exposure. That is not how it should be. Many people are doing the same thing repeatedly and do not know that somebody else has already done it.
Consider the matter of research publication. Most of our very brilliant researchers publish in foreign journals. For that reason you cannot access their work locally, and we cannot build on what they have done. Your citizens cannot read it because they must pay. But foreigners are sponsored to access it, so they build on your knowledge, while at home we rebuild the same thing over and over again. Our best research sits behind a paywall that our own citizens cannot cross.
Platforms must be built to encourage collaboration, and the Nigerian Society of Engineers has the mandate to look at this. Let it start from the Society itself. How do we interface with the Nigerian Medical Association? With the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria? Some of this is already happening. But we must be deliberate about it.
An honest SWOT
Strengths. Nigeria has strength. We are gifted in our youthful population. Everywhere you go, people are ready to work. We have resources, if we are willing to drill and to refine. We have a comparatively affordable labour force, fewer regulatory barriers to entry than many countries, a favourable topography and climate, and natural safety from many of the catastrophic events other nations must engineer against. And above all we have brilliance. Nigerian engineers are found at the top of institutions across the world.
We also have domestic proof that local capacity can be built by policy. Before 2010, Nigerian participation in our own oil and gas industry was below five per cent. Following the Nigerian Oil and Gas Industry Content Development Act, that figure now stands at over sixty-one per cent, with more than eight billion dollars a year retained in-country. Earlier this year, TotalEnergies announced ninety-five per cent Nigerian content on one of its projects. Under five per cent to sixty-one per cent in fifteen years — not by prayer, but by law, by enforcement, and by deliberate capacity building. If it worked for oil and gas, there is no engineering reason it cannot work for power, transport, water, telecoms and defence.
Weaknesses. The first is corruption at scale. I wrote in a newspaper in 2005 that corruption had become a way of life in Nigeria, so that if you are not corrupt, you are the one who looks odd. And it distorts engineering itself. Build a breathalyser that helps road safety detect drunk drivers, flag them automatically and process the penalty through the system. It works. It is cheap. It saves lives. And it will not be adopted — because some would prefer to retain the personal power to forgive on the road.
The second weakness is weak purchasing power across a large part of the population. Your idea is great, but it is expensive. Where does that leave us?
The third, and this one is ours to own as a profession, is that we have not built the culture of maintenance. We build and we do not maintain — roads, plants, rail, transformers. Some of the transformers on our network are older than most of the engineers in this room. There is a rule of thumb in infrastructure economics that every one naira of maintenance deferred becomes roughly four naira of reconstruction later.
Opportunities. People say power supply is bad, so they cannot do business, cannot manufacture, and the cost of living is high. All of that is true. And every line of it is a specification for a product: solar and storage, and appliances designed to run on intermittent supply; energy management and demand forecasting for estates, campuses and industrial clusters; fault detection and automated fault location on distribution networks; predictive maintenance for manufacturing plants; road-condition data collection — imagine every commercial vehicle in this city carrying nothing more than a gyroscope and an accelerometer, detecting potholes as they drive and synchronising when they pick up internet at the bus stop. Google already has that data. Why should we not have it ourselves? And trade and logistics platforms for intra-national and intra-African trade under our own laws. Every one of those is a business. Every one of those is a national security asset. Because a country that cannot see its own infrastructure cannot defend it.
Threats. It is cheaper to buy foreign than local, and the expatriate is presumed to do it better, so you never get the opportunity to prove otherwise. Our practical skill level is low — not our theory, our practice. A very accomplished Nigerian lady returned from the United States with an industrial robot arm and could not find anybody to operate it. She came to us at RAIN, and even we hesitated: that arm costs in the region of three hundred million naira, there is no insurance cover for it, and if we damage it while learning, who pays? We do not have sufficient hands-on skill because we do not have sufficient hands-on equipment. Then brain drain. And data: we continue to use foreign applications that have access to our data, while starving local applications of the very data they need to become good. Data is the raw material of the twenty-first century, and we are exporting it free of charge, the same way we exported everything else.
Who is doing what, and at what scale?
The researchers. Our teachers in the universities are trying within their own space, mentoring students. But the talent graduates and the business does not employ them. The business asks, did they teach you how to do it? And the student says, no, but they told us how to do it. They told you how to do it. They did not teach you how to do it — which means they did not do it with you. We must equip their laboratories. Where a university cannot be equipped, let us encourage facilities like RAIN that are already doing it. And let us answer the real question: how do we fund our research facilities, our researchers, and how do we insure our laboratories?
This is where the triple helix comes in: government, academia and the private sector. It is how DARPA operates in the United States; how Fraunhofer operates in Germany, with a funding formula of roughly one-third base public funding and two-thirds earned from contract research, which forces it to stay relevant to industry; and how ITRI operated in Taiwan, an applied research institute that spun out TSMC and UMC. Taiwan did not become a semiconductor superpower because Taiwanese people are smarter than Nigerians. It became one because a government-funded applied research institute was mandated to spin out companies, not to publish papers.
The youth. How many times have we seen students fund final-year projects from their own pockets? How many young people build things worthy of headlines — a drone, an electric bus, an app that speaks multiple local languages? But once they showcase the talent, that is where it ends. At most, a handshake with a governor. Perhaps a scholarship abroad — and we may never see them again. What is our process for rebuilding more talent behind the one that left?
And to the young people directly: you enter the engine room of national development at about twenty-six. Take a working life of about thirty-five years. You have roughly three decades. The first decade you spend learning how to do it, and how not to do it. The second is where you make impact. The third is where you make sure there is something to hand over — a team that can continue, and a solution that can outlive you. Time is of the essence. Please do not waste it.
The business owners. They see the problems daily, but they are equipped to buy solutions, not build them — and the safest bet appears to come from abroad. We must rethink this. If someone from abroad offers to build your refinery, say: I want it built by my own people. Train them. This is precisely the job NOTAP, the National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion, is meant to enforce, so that we are not only taught how to service what we must always call foreigners back to fix. And is it not the same Nigerian who misbehaves at home and behaves impeccably the moment he lands abroad? The problem was never that they do not know how to behave. The problem is the system they are behaving in.
The missing link: nobody will let you test
Can we compete with foreigners today, as we are? Not yet. And the reason is not talent or intelligence. The reason is that in Nigeria, there is nowhere to test.
Go to the military with a solution that can counter insecurity and you will be told to test it first. But how do you test a military-grade solution when you are not a terrorist? It is the same with the banks: prove it at a lower risk level first — but a system that works at low risk can behave completely differently under real pressure. You are stuck between two impossible instructions: prove it in the real environment, and stay out of the real environment.
Engineers measure technology maturity on a scale of one to nine: Technology Readiness Levels. One to three is basic research — the university. Eight and nine is a proven system in the real world — the market. Four to seven is where you validate and demonstrate under real conditions. Nigeria funds TRL 1 to 3. Nigeria buys TRL 8 to 9. Nigeria has almost nothing in between. That gap is what the literature calls the valley of death, and every country that industrialised built an institution to carry its innovations across it.
The answer: build the sandbox
A sandbox is a faithful similitude of the real operating environment, in which anything can be attempted under real conditions, but without real consequences in the real world.
Suppose you build a system that automatically marks handwritten WAEC scripts. WAEC cannot rely on it for a live examination, and they are right not to. But WAEC can mirror the same traffic into your system and see how you handle it — how fast, how accurately, at what failure rate — without a single mark ever being issued to a student. That is a recognised engineering practice: shadow deployment, or parallel running. It is how banks migrate core systems and how air traffic control validates new software. It is how we should be qualifying every locally built system in this country — in defence, banking, power, manufacturing, education, health and transport.
The good news is that the sandbox is an established regulatory instrument, and Nigeria already operates one. The UK Financial Conduct Authority created the first regulatory sandbox in 2016; more than sixty countries have since adopted the model. The Central Bank of Nigeria issued its own Framework for Regulatory Sandbox Operations in 2021. A Nigerian fintech can legally test a product on live money under supervision. A Nigerian engineer cannot legally test a sensor on a live transformer. If the Central Bank can do it for money, NERC can do it for the grid, NCC for networks, ONSA for critical national infrastructure — and SON and COREN can define the qualification pathway.
Simulation environments, digital twins, virtual and augmented reality, hardware-in-the-loop rigs and game engines are the tools of the sandbox — and this is where our young engineers should be building careers. These are buildable here. Some of them we are already building here.
Adapt, do not merely import
Every transformer, every feeder, should be able to tell us when it fails and when supply returns. Someone will say this already exists. But the real environment says: no internet in rural areas; vandalism; communities that resist what they do not understand; no reliable power to run the monitor itself. Every one of those objections is an engineering requirement, not an excuse. No internet? Store and forward. Vandalism? Tamper detection, low-value components, mesh redundancy. No power? Microwatt duty cycling and solar harvesting. Community resistance? Engineer the community in — the node also tells them when their power is coming back. In a foreign environment, these solutions are not needed. Here, they are the whole job.
In the United Kingdom, quieter crossings have a button on the pole: only when a pedestrian presses it does the pedestrian phase run. That button is not new technology. It is an adaptation to reality. That is all engineering is — and it is what we must do with language, with our weather, and with every technology that arrives here.
And then, market it
If you prove your solution in a sandbox, the business case will come. But you must also market. Every car, machine and phone people use today was once advertised. And government must support this. Government must be the chief marketer of local solutions and local talent, and not their competitor.
Six asks
One: a National Engineering Sandbox Framework, drafted by NSE and modelled on the Central Bank's framework, addressed to NERC, NCC, ONSA, SON and COREN. If it exists for money, it can exist for machines.
Two: enforce Executive Order 5 of 2018, which directs ministries, departments and agencies to engage indigenous professionals in national security projects and permits foreign professionals only where the expertise is certified unavailable in Nigeria. Let this Branch audit engineering contracts in Oyo State against it and publish what it finds.
Three: a live, searchable register of Nigerian engineering capability, so that no procuring officer can claim the capability was not available.
Four: ring-fence maintenance — around five per cent of every public infrastructure project committed to a ten-year monitoring and maintenance obligation, with sensing built in from day one.
Five: open the laboratories, and insure them — a shared instrumentation and insurance pool across the University of Ibadan, LAUTECH, the Polytechnic Ibadan and independent facilities such as RAIN.
Six: publish at home as well as abroad. Mirror every Nigerian-funded engineering paper in an open local repository.
Conclusion
The scale at which our researchers, students and business owners are producing innovations is too low to transform this country. But the reason is not capability. The reason is that we have built no bridge between the laboratory and the live system. We have no sandbox.
Nigeria cannot secure what it cannot see, and cannot scale what it is never allowed to test.
We have the people. We have the market. We have the urgency. What we have been missing is a place to fail safely, a law that is actually enforced, and the confidence to buy from ourselves. So let us look at our problems locally. Let us believe we can solve them. Let us build the sandbox, enforce the law we already have, equip our laboratories, market what we build, and hand something over to the young people who are watching us this morning.
Thank you very much. May God give us reason to smile, for there is light at the end of the tunnel. God bless you.