By Abayoi Adeshida, Abuja
The Chairman, National Commission for Persons with Disabilities. Hon. Sulaiman Kangiwa has appealed to the National Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA assist the new Commission to design specialized training programmes with Nigerians living with disabilities so they can contribute their quota to the socio-economic development of the country and cut the supply of human capital to the problems of banditry, kidnapping and general insecurity in the country.
Kangiwa made this public in a brief speech he delivered when he led a delegation on a courtesy visit to the Director-General NITDA, who granted his delegation an audience at the NITDA Office, Garki, Abuja.
According to him, ” The Board has decided to visit NITDA as the first place of call after the composition formalities because of the importance and strategic significance of training to what we are set to achieve in the Commission.
“We are here to rub minds with you on how we can work with you so that our constituency can benefit from the globally acclaimed benefits of NITDA to Nigerians from all works of life and we believe that working with your agency would further boost the quality of the outcome of our dreams and aspirations to make life meaningful to Nigerians with disabilities in all parts of the country.
“We wish to seize this opportunity to express our joy over the impact of your agency on the successes of the youths in the country across many sectors of our economy and we believe that if we also key into the numerous programmes here, many of our members would become gainfully employed and they would not be available as tools to cause insecurity in the country.
“We have taken note of the numerous training that your agency has coordinated, most important to us among them being the specialised training you recently concluded in Enugu for People with Disabilities.
“While we have come to show appreciation, we want to present a request before you to consider that the training is taken to the six geopolitical zones of the country so that many of the people in our community can be beneficiaries and lead a meaningful life after they benefit from your training.
“Similarly, we wish to request for collaboration and partnership between your agency and our commission from the foundational level of our attempt to make life easy for the millions of people with disabilities in the country.
“We look up to your agency and wish to leverage on its existing structures and programmers, especially those that can positively impact the lives of our community and transform them to employers of labour in all spheres of the economy.
” We would also be very delighted if your agency can consider the vigorous commitment to design some new programs that can make members of our community leverage on new technological discoveries lead better lives.
” We want to seize the opportunity of this visit to appeal to your agency to consider the people living with disabilities when selecting candidates for your scholarship schemes that gives opportunities to two candidates from each state across the country.
” We believe that if you consider and approve all these for us, you would have assisted us in a great deal to bring the dream of President Muhammadu Buhari into fruition when he established the Commission to make the people living with disabilities live a normal life, arm them with technological tools that can transform their lives as well as their community and fight insecurity across the country,” Kangiwa told his host.
In his response, the Director-General of National Information Technology Development Agency, (NITDA), Mr Kashifu Inuwa assured the delegation that the agency under his leadership is revved up to pay more attention to expending scarce resources on only candidates that can return to the country to create jobs and build the wealth that can transform the nation’s economy.
In his words, “We have come to realize that when we identify those who are qualified and send them on scholarship abroad for Masters and PhD studies, they either refuse to return to the country or when they come back, they would return to us and be asking us to help them find employment.
“Currently, there is a deliberate redirection of the criteria for selecting our candidates to be directed towards those who can go out there and return to create new jobs, employ many of our youths and make a positive impact on the economy of the country in the long run.
“While we have taken note of your requests, we wish to implore you to encourage your duly qualified members across the country to take advantage or our existing programmes that can be beneficial to them.
“We are also open to collaborations with your Commission in all of the areas possible, like the specialized initiative you mentioned that we did in Enugu. we in the agency consider the people you have come to represent as people with special needs.
“In our intervention, we pay special attention to the unserved and underserved people in our country and we consider the people in your constituency as the unserved or underserved people in the society which qualifies them for the special intervention that we did for them, different from the general one we did for others.
“One of the specialized initiatives for them was the one you mentioned that we did in Enugu.; we have also done the same thing in Abuja, Gombe and another location. Currently, we have limited resources to pursue special projects for people with special needs, but we assure you of giving your members the opportunity to benefit when they participate in general programmes we have in the agency.
