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Female engineers lament lack of govt incentive, as centre honours members

By Waliat Musa
28 October 2022   |   3:52 am
Female engineers have complained that they don’t enjoy government patronage or incentives.

Female engineers have complained that they don’t enjoy government patronage or incentives.

They made the complaint as Centre for Values in Leadership (CVL) conferred on the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Sanzid Nigeria Limited, Idiat Amusu; CEO, Chantaly Associates, Ebele Okeke; Principal Partner, Delkem Associates, Mayen Adetiba; and CEO, Guconcia Nigeria limited, Nkechi Isigwe, the Leadership Without Title Award (LWT) in the engineering sector.

The awardees are all female engineers.

Founder, CVL, Pat Utomi, said the 56th edition of LWT leadership series focused on women in engineering to stir advocacy in that direction, to celebrate pioneer women in engineering and to make corporate leaders and public officials identify factors that slow women down.

He said: “Women are strong, much stronger than most men imagine, the strength they usually deployed when they go into labour for childbirth, that strength can translate into leadership possibilities.”

Adetiba, one of the awardees, noted that the engineering sector is supporting the growth of Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

“Government is not challenging us at all, nobody can love Nigeria more than Nigerians, bringing in foreigners to do the work is not helping the country and the few Nigerians patronised do not get paid, how do they teach the young ones? How can we employ them? So we have a problem, allow us to learn from our mistakes because foreign engineers can’t be employed to build our country,” she said.

Observing that in the technical field, the SMEs and Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) cannot perform without engineers, another honouree, Amisu, described engineering as the bedrock of national development.

MEANWHILE, the President of the Association of Professional women Engineers of Nigeria (APWEN), a division of The Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), Elizabeth Eterigho, during the panelist session on the theme: ‘Breaking the Glass Ceiling in the Engineering Sector,’ said engineering has to do with solving problem, the community and comfortability.

She called on parents to stop buying unnecessary toys for their children, rather get challenging toys for them in their formative age, which will boost the interest of the girl child in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

Founder, the Performance Upgrade Lab, Isioma Utomi, said women face self-promotion as a challenge in the engineering sector and encouraged the introduction of Public Relations (PR) in the field by women.

Chairperson of the occasion, Joana Maduka, emphasised that they have broken the glass ceiling in the engineering sector, which has made engineering easy for young engineers now

One of the panelists, Onyechi Akah, noted that women engineers take much more tasks notwithstanding pregnancy, childbirth and they are not handicapped because they need to bring up a home.

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