The Senate Committee on Defence says it is high time to properly address the issues hampering visible productivity of the Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria (DICON).
The Chairman of the committee, Sen. Ahmad Lawan, said this while speaking to newsmen after an oversight visit to the DICON factories on Tuesday in Kaduna.
He described DICON as a massive opportunity for providing the nation’s military and other security agencies with the needed arms.
Lawan said the corporation equally has a massive opportunity to dominate the market for arms in the West African Coast.
He said, “Very soon, every nation will be concerned with its own security, and of course if everybody is fighting, nobody will give you his weapons when he produces them.
“We need to have our own well functional and established DICON,”he said.
Lawan stressed that no investment would be too much for security in Nigeria.
He, therefore, said the armed forces and other security agencies must be funded within the nation’s means to enable them perform their responsibilities better.
“We need to secure these agencies of government so that when they function and security of Nigeria is better, every other thing will fall in place and make it easy for the country to develop and grow,”he said.
The committee chairman commended the DICON Director-General and his management for working under difficult situation.
He thanked President Bola Tinubu for showing so much interest and commitment to the military.
Lawan restated their commitment to work with him to better the security of the nation, saying,”this is the government’s top priority.”
DICON’s director-general, Maj.-Gen Aniedi Edet, said they chose to celebrate more of the corporation’s prospects than its challenges.
He expressed optimism that with the support from the Senate Committee on Defence, the issues of DICON would be escalated to the strategic relevance it deserves.
“The efforts we are putting in place is just what we need to do because we don’t want the corporation to be moribund like our neighbors.
“Around us, the Nigerian textile and Peugeot automobile have folded up, but we refuse to because we are resilient.
”At the worst of the situation, we are still producing and will keep producing more to support the country,”Edet said.
He thanked the president for signing the DICON’s Act into law speedily, hoping that when its receives the necessary support, the country would be in the rightful place it was supposed to be.
Edet also thanked the committee for its support toward ensuring that the issues of defence and particularly DICON were at the forefront.(NAN)
