The Director-General of the Nigeria Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Dr Dakuku Peterside, has described the Federal Government’s anti-corruption fight as a step in the right direction.
In a lecture at the University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus at the weekend, Peterside called on Nigerians to appreciate the unusual courage displayed by President Muhammadu Buhari to fight the cankerworm.
He said that countries with impressive records of development had stringent anti-corruption regimes to detect and punish corrupt practices.
In the lecture titled Connected Vision: Building blocks for a new Nigeria, the director-general said that the country stood to gain from strong institutions rather than strong leaders, saying that it must rely on the integrity of its institutions to survive.
On the country’s economy, Peterside said that past leaders failed to diversify into other potential lucrative areas, leading to the consequences being experienced now.
“Ordinarily, Nigeria’s originating economic policy framework should have from the mid 1960s included the element of diversification from oil by retaining the initial pride of place which agriculture enjoyed in our immediate post-colonial period.
“Even in the context of the so-called oil boom, the process of diversification into other lucrative areas like tourism, solid minerals and human capital development should have begun actively from 1970,’’ he said.
Peterside described education the time-tested mechanism for galvanising the latent power of a nation to transform its environment and develop its economy.
“Natural resource based economies like ours remain vulnerable because we calculate our national survival in barrels of oil and cubic metres of gas.
“On the contrary, human resourced based economies depend more on the power of the human mind to create an alternative economy that is largely independent of the vagaries in the international prices of natural resources and extractive produce.’’ (NAN)