The Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria (DICON), says it will provide new equipment for the Armed Forces in 2021.
The Director General (DG) of DICON, Maj.-Gen. Victor Ezugwu, stated this on Thursday at the end of a three-day retreat organised for the Management Staff of DICON in Kaduna.
The theme of the retreat was tagged, ‘Repositioning DICON Through Innovation and Local Content Application’, and it was organised by Walton Solomon and Associates.
“We have just had our retreat for this year, it is a maiden one for DICON top management.
“The idea is to prepare ourselves for the tasks ahead in 2021.
” One of the major things we set out to achieve in DICON this year is to provide new defence equipment for the armed forces of Nigeria,”he said.
He explained that, some of the equipment were tactical while some were operational.
“We will also look at supplying the Nigerian Police and other security agencies with a lot of non-kinetic equipment for their operations.
” Our research and development has been up and doing and this year, we are hoping to test the equipment and by the time they pass the field trial test, we will commence mass production.
“This is the priority we have for this year because we really need to shape the battle environment for the armed forces to be able to bring insurgency to conclusion this year,” Ezugwu said.
The DG recalled that in October 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari did the ground breaking ceremony of the DICON suite cooperative wearing which was a collaboration between Nigeria and Turkey, with the main objective of setting up a first class textile factory in Kaduna.
“The construction has started, as at today, we have achieved over 60 per cent of the structure and work, we are hoping to go into production by June this year,” he added.
He said the purpose of the garment factory as envisioned by the President was to rebrand the armed forces.
“We will have new uniforms for the armed forces and all the security agencies in Nigeria.
“They have forwarded all their samples to us and with our partners, we are going to provide the first samples by next month for them to test and give us their reports which after that, we go into mass production by the time the factory comes into operations by May,” he said.
Ezugwu appreciated the Federal Government for investing a lot in establishing the DICON institute of technology.
“By the time this institute starts in September, most of the courses we send our staff to abroad, will be localised so that we preserve the resources we use in sending them for courses abroad.
“We will also gain the first hand use of the machines in DICON as teaching aids, because we have a lot of machineries.
” We will avail it to the Nigerian Air Force, Navy, the Army in particular and other armed forces to be able to build capacity of our soldiers in the technical field, our sea men and air men and women.
“We are going to collaborate with the Air Force Institute of Technology, Navy Dockyard and others. DICON will assist them in building capacity of their technical staff.
“We are having feedbacks on the vehicle we rolled out for field operations, so far, we have worked on the mine resistance capacity of the ‘Ezugwu MRAP’ and it has been able to play its role very well in resisting the impact of mines on occupants of the vehicle.
“We are also working on the subskin vehicle, we are on the prototypes for now, but we are going into mass production this year because we are already having interest from the Nigerian army and other security agencies.
“We are hoping that as we produce them, we are going to be improving on them based on the feedback we get from the field, however, we are trying to minimise the importation of the vehicles,” he said.
Ezugwu disclosed that, this year, the Nigerian army had awarded contract for 52 Ezugwu MRAP and would be supplied by DICON between June and July this year.
“The awareness, operational efficiency of our troops has been enhanced with the introduction of the vehicles and we are hoping that it will really help our operational base,.”Ezugwu said.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that series of papers were presented on ways to enhance the profile of DICON and to boost its capacity.(NAN)