A microbiologist, Professor Moses Efuntoye, has advised the Federal Government to seize the current economic hardship to galvanize the nation’s rich human resources to invent urgent solutions to food, energy and other challenges confronting the country now.
The Daily Crucible reports that protests by Nigerians erupted on Monday last week in Minna, Niger State capital, and Kano following bitting hardship resulting from increase in the cost of foodstuffs and harsh economic situations still trailing the fuel subsidy removal and free floating Naira against the Dollar.
On Tuesday same week, some women also hit the streets in Mile 2 and Mile 3 Diobu area of Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, protesting the lack of romance with their husbands due to heat caused relentless power outage.
The women – over a dozen of them, who stormed the office of Port Harcourt Electricity Distribution Company(PEDC), lamented that they have been starved of sex by their husbands due to heat and urged the power distribution firm to give them light and not bills.
Earlier, some women in Ogun State also poured into the streets in Sagamu area of the state, lamenting the rising cost of living.
Meanwhile, bakers in Nigeria on Tuesday, February 13, announced their resolve to embark on a nationwide strike February 27 to protest the rising cost of bread production and other confectioneries as well as multiple taxation imposed on them by the Federal Government through her agencies like NAFDAC.
This is coming jas the National President of the Nurses and Midwives association, Faruk Abubakar disclosed that in the last three years, over 42,000 nurses have left Nigeria for UK and other countries in search of greener pastures as the hardship bites harders.
But Efuntoye said that this critical time of the country’s trajectory demands that it adopts the Chinese option, close its borders to the world, impress it seriously on citizens to begin to look inward and use local content to innovatively address the needs of Nigeria’s over 200million population.
The don therefore, called for the setting up of a consortium of researchers drawn from universities across the country to commence meaningful collaborative research towards finding solutions to the socio-economic, political, technological, food and health issues.
He also advocated given the nation’s non – conventional universities such as Federal Universities of Agriculture, Federal Universities of Technology among others, research mandates to find answers to critical issues facing the country and which must be fulfilled within a specific time frame.
According to him, funds for such research mandates should be drawn from TETFund and should be devoid of government bureaucratic bottlenecks.
These were the submissions of Professor Efuntoye yesterday while delivering the 116th inaugural lecture of the Olabisi Onabanjo University(OOU) Ago Iwoye, Ogun State titled, “The Triad of Toughness, Tenacity and Tameness in the Tale of Antibiotic Resistance.”
The inaugural lecture was declared open by the University Vice Chancellor, Professor Ayodeji Agboola.
Efuntoye expressed concern over the economic burden of antimicrobial resistance at the national and global levels, saying aside the costs such as reduced productivity due to illness and even death which may arise after treatment failure, he also expressed the fear that the war against antibiotic resistance is one that may never be won.
He noted that bacteria are today known to form “cooperative societies” to survive the actions of antibiotics by forming a multilayer conglomeration of diverse species of bacteria called biofilms, especially on kits used in the treatment of ailments.
He urged the Nigerian government to explore alternatives to antibiotics in the treatment of infections, even as he warned that some of the swimming pools, insects, fish from ponds, Ope eyin and other herbal products being patronised in parts of Southwest of Nigeria were reservoirs of antibiotics resistance bacteria.
