The Director General of the National Orientation Agency, Mallam Lanre Issa-Onilu today paid a courtesy visit to the Statistician General of the Federation, Prince Adeyemi Adeniran of the National Bureau of Statistics and his management team.
The visit was to discuss areas where the two organizations can partner in order to move the country and both organizations forward.
The DG and SHF spoke extensively on the mandate, roles, capacities and structures of their respective organizations.
The DG said the collaboration between the two organizations will achieve better results if they leverage on each other’s structure and strengths.
The DG went on to speak on the approaches the Agency is adopting to move the organization and country forward. He said the agency is not just thinking outside the box but have in fact gotten rid of the box entirely.
He said orientation is a journey and that Nigerians are not yet due for orientation. According to him, orientation is a journey of moving from one point to another, and one must first identify the destination before embarking on a journey.
The DG also spoke extensively on the National Values Charter and the work the agency is doing to create a culture that provides reasons for Nigerians to be motivated to be patriotic, and that this time, the leadership is not simply pushing the responsibility to the citizens alone, but is also defining what the leadership is bringing to the table, that it will be a situation where the leadership and the people work together to keep the promise.
He also stated that the agency with the support of the government is working to create institutions where all the Nigerian values will be embedded in our way of life.
He said Nigeria has something to sell, but we have to first value it, and the government will also have to protect it.
He said the agency is also working on making Nationalism study a compulsory requirement in Nigerian schools from primary to tertiary level, and will eventually be extended to vocational and artisan education/training.
He stressed that all this can not be achieved without baseline data, which is why the partnership between the two organizations is important and necessary.