Kaduna — Nigeria requires 17,000 fully qualified electrical technicians to produce 20,000 megawatts of electricity, statistics have shown.

The President of Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN), Engineer Ibikunle Ogunbayo said Nigeria is barely producing 2,000 technicians in a year.

Engineer Ogunbayo said this in an interview at the end of a one day workshop in Kaduna for Engineering Regulation Monitoring (ERM) chief inspectors, ERM desk officers and COREN zonal officers from the north-west geo-political zone.

He said an emergency situation needs to be declared in the Engineering profession, saying there is urgent need to resuscitate technical colleges in the country.

He said: "Lack of technicians and craftsmen is posing a very big challenge to the country. The normal proportion is that if you have one engineer, you have two technologists, four technicians and 16 craftsmen; unfortunately the situation is so bad in Nigeria so much that craftsmen are being imported from Togo and Benin-Republic.

"So we are trying to find a way of resuscitating all those old technical colleges that have been allowed to deteriorate, we want to see how we can bring them back to live so that they can teach and produce the required number of professionals."