NASENI: Taking Bold Steps for Better Result

Khalil Halilu writes about the move to take bold steps towards getting better results from the revised institutional capacities of the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure.

Six months ago, I was appointed by President Bola Tinubu as Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI), the agency of the Federal Government of Nigeria responsible for driving industrial innovation, and technology transfer, in Nigeria.

It has been a most interesting period, full of both expected and unexpected learnings and experiences. First and foremost, I have to say it is a great privilege for me to be serving in this role, a beneficiary of one of the President's earliest appointments.

I came to this job with a background in building and leading technology startups: I founded ShapShap, a logistics business (which won an ‘Innovator Prize' at the Gulf Information Technology Exhibition, GITEX, in Dubai, in 2022); OyaOya, Africa's first on-demand commodity marketplace, and The CANs Technology Hub, the first eco-friendly Tech Hub in West Africa.

One of my first priorities upon assumption of office, was staff welfare and development. From my experience, no organisation cannot thrive beyond the capacity and the motivation of its personnel. It was immediately clear to me that I needed to put the staff at the center of the re-engineering I want to achieve at NASENI. This led to the setting-up of a Committee, staffed and led by our junior-level staff—we're starting from the bottom, and working our way up—to come up with recommendations about improving their welfare, and kickstarting the journey of making NASENI a public sector employer of choice in Nigeria.

The Committee has since submitted their report, and I have wasted no time implementing most of the recommendations. One of the things they asked for was putting in place a functioning Staff Bus system, to help cut down on commuting costs to the office. We wasted no time implementing this. We have in fact already implemented ninety-percent of all the recommendations proposed.

Another major area of focus has been the NASENI brand. NASENI has never really thought about itself as a ‘brand', despite the fact that we are playing in a space where branding, positioning and public perception matter greatly. We needed to ask ourselves the question:

What comes to mind when people think about NASENI? It was an easy question to answer: most people don't even think of NASENI at all.

Anecdotal evidence suggested many Nigerians had never heard of the agency, despite it being designed to be at the forefront of advancing Nigeria's industrialization, as the only purpose-built Federal agency with the mandate to intervene in all fields of Science and Engineering Infrastructure.

Our work was therefore clearly cut out from the start. We needed to lay out a vision, a definition: this is who we are, what we do, what we would like to achieve—and how all of these fit into President Tinubu's Renewed Hope agenda for Nigeria.

This is how our Strategic Launchpad was born, the product of intense brainstorming and consultations. That Launchpad has four Pillars, which spell out what we want to achieve, as follows: Enhance Nigeria's Manufacturing Capacity; Reduce Nigeria's Import Bill through R&D; Strategically Reposition NASENI; and Leverage the Comparative Advantages of Nigeria's 36 States and the Federal Capital Territory.

The Launchpad also clarifies our nine focus areas: Engineering & Manufacturing; Renewable Energy & Sustainability; Health & Biotechnology; Agriculture & Food Sustainability; Transportation & Mobility; Education & Creative Industry; IT & Software; Construction & Smart Cities; and Defence & Aerospace.

So, the last six months have been about setting things right, clarifying the vision, laying the foundation for the future.

To put it in the simplest possible terms, in the short- and medium-term, I would like to, first of all, make NASENI—products, Institutes, companies and people—a household name and brand in Nigeria. I am pleased to note we have started making this happen; in February we launched three sets of NASENI-branded products: a solar-powered irrigation system, electric motorcycles and tricycles, and an offgrid solar home system.

-Halilu writes from Abuja.

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