Deputy Senate Majority Leader and Chairman Senate Committee on Science and Technology, Senator Ajayi Boroffice, has expressed worries after he recently discovered that the space agency in Nigeria that should be employing scientists and engineers are employing graduates of religious studies and other unrelated courses.
Boroffice said this at the annual national space dialogue/media conference on space science and technology on Friday, December 4. He said the agency needs to be sanitized as such actions amount to misemployment considering the fact that the support staff of the agency constitutes about 80 percent of the workforce. He also alleged that people pay between N2 million to N2.5 million to get a job in the space agency.
“How can you be taking people with religious studies in space centre? It is misemployment when the support staff that constitute about 80 per cent are the workforce. It is wrong. We need experience. We need scientists to constitute about 70% per cent of the workforce but the reverse is the case.
I learnt that the ICPC is around, scrutinising employment documents, I heard employment is earned with N2 million, N2.5 million. It is sad.
We have to reexamine ourselves. We have to sanitise the space agency so that we can achieve the purpose of nation itself.”Boroffice said
Responding to the allegation, the Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, said the government is determined to correct the mistakes made.
“I want to assure you that this administration is very interested and this minister here is a big champion for space science and technology, and we will continue to do the best we can.
I will like to assure the deputy majority leader of the Senate that we agree with you about the mistakes that were made here.
They are also mistakes that you can find in government institutions. But we are determined to correct those mistakes and we are taking the neccesary steps to make sure they are corrected.”he said.
