Former President, Nigerian Institution of Surveyors, Akinloye Olufemi, has urged government at all levels to patronize Nigerian professionals to grow the Nation’s economy.
Olufemi, who is also the President of the Association of Professional Bodies of Nigeria (APBN), a conglomerate of 31 professional bodies, said Nigeria has what it takes to compete favourably with its foreign counterparts.
He condemned the attitude of government who derives pleasure in seeking foreign expertise, thereby neglecting homebased professionals, which he said it´s at the detriment of the nation’s economy.
“What we are facing is primarily acknowledgement of one’s expertise when it is needed. The government always prefers to bring in foreign counterparts, the supposed experts, even in so many areas where indigenous professionals can be used. So, it is a perennial problem that has just been aggravated by the state of the economy when there are not even funds to go round”, he lamented.
He attributed the cause of the neglect suffered by professionals to deficiency in the nation’s rules of law and self-centeredness on the part of political actors.
“It is because society has not grown enough. You call it a growing economy, you call it a developing country, and some would say under-developed. This is because, at the end of the day, the individuals are not yet for the people, they are for themselves”, he said.
Olufemi noted that the ugly trend has posed socio-economic threat to professionals in the country, hence increasing the level of quackery in some professions.
He emphasized that “we know that quackery is supposed to be the fake of the original. It is the original that gives right to the fake one. What the original is supposed to be doing is to go into measures that we take further away from the fake. When you are so good, the difference will be cleared and nobody will mistake the original for fake. But that can only happen in the professional circles at home when you have the required level of patronage, it is like production, if you produce goods and they don’t go, you cannot improve, no matter the resources you have.
It is what you sell that you want to use. Even if you have to go for loans, they would check your cashflow to see how strong your company is. And what will show is the sale you made of the products. Where your products are there in the shop and they are not moving, this tampers with sales. When the sale is tampered, improvement is very far away. This is the situation with the professionals in the country. When you don’t have that patronage, you don’t have enough room to even grow.”
According to him, if the government wants its professionals to develop, it must effectively explore homebased talents as well as come up with initiatives that will best sell its professionals to the outside world.
