Yemi Adedeji, Abuja
Staff of the National Board for Technology Incubation (NBTI) under the auspices of Academic Staff Union of Research Institutes (ASURI) have commenced a three-day warning strike to protest the re-appointment of Mohammed Jibrin, the Director General of the Board.
Adolphus Ugwu, NBTI Branch chairman of ASURI, told journalists in Abuja during the protest to commence the strike action, that should the government fail to reverse it’s decision to re-appoint the DG at the expiration of their warning strike, the workers will not hesitate to take further actions to ensure that their demands are met.
Ugwu said that the workers were opposed to the re-appointment of Jibrin due to his poor performance at the agency in his first four years.
He explained that the agency whose mandate is to provide an integrated support programme designed to assist budding entrepreneurs in the development of new technology-based firms in Nigeria has lost focus and direction due to mismanagement of the DG
According to him, the once revered agency was grossly mismanaged by the DG, leading to complete collapse of infrastructure and working materials, stressing that there was no capacity building for staff for over four years.
He said, “having reviewed the performance of the DG/CEO during his first tenure, it is clear that he performed abysmally low below expectation and therefore deserves no re-appointment for a second tenure. What is the basis for re-appointing somebody who has performed poorly in his first tenure, to superintend over a people who have passed a vote of no confidence on him?”
Ugwu explained further that the workers are worried that should the trend of non performance continue, government may be forced to scrap the board if they feel that it is no longer achieving it’s mandate, and the workers will be redundant.
He said 80 per cent of the Technology Incubation Centres (TIC), where budding technologists are supposed to be trained to become entrepreneurs have been abandoned.