President Muhammadu Buhari has set out priorities on how Africa can achieve full industrialisation by the year 2030.
They include a recommendation to African leaders to tailor their educational system and academic curricular towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
In his national statement yesterday in Niamey, the capital of Niger Republic at the AU Summit on Industrialisation and Economic Diversification in Africa, the president in a statement by presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, emphasised that STEM is the ‘’short way’’ to produce the next generation of managers of an industrialised Africa not dependent on expatriates.
The president urged leaders in the continent to solve the problem of generating cheap and clean energy, saying, ‘’It is no secret that we cannot industrialize the continent, if we do not solve the problem of generating cheap and clean energy.’’
‘’Your Excellencies, energy generation and distribution is an enabler for industrialization. Africa is richly endowed with multiple sources of energy generation. We are richly endowed with Hydro-Carbons, Coal, Natural Gas, Solar Energy, and Hydro- Energy.
‘’Yet we are lacking in the capacity to produce clean and cheap electricity to power our production, manufacturing sectors.
‘’I hope this Summit will afford us the opportunity to explore the possibilities of collaboration in pooling resources on a continental level to address the vexing problem of Energy generation and distribution on the continent,” he said.
