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About 17 Nigerians left for Turkey, over the weekend, to resume their studies in various IT and related fields courtesy of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) as the regulatory agency resumed overseas sponsorship of Nigerian postgraduate students.
The 17 ‘NITDA Scholars’ are the first in a national sponsorship that is designed for 40 scholars in all.
The Director General of NITDA, Mallam Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, while addressing the 16 masters degree and one PhD candidates urged them to be good ambassadors of Nigeria, NITDA and their various families.
Abdullahi, who was represented at the event by the Director of Information Technology Infrastructure Solutions, Dr. Usman Abdullahi Gambo admonished the students to consider themselves extremely lucky to be selected among the over two thousand applicants across the country through a keenly contested exercise.
“This set of students represents the first batch of forty postgraduate students that scaled the hurdles and prove their mettle to enjoy NITDA’s scholarship this year. The students are expected to pursue a postgraduate degree in Masters and PhD at the prestigious FIRAT University in Turkey,” said Abdullahi.
“The selection of masters degree students whose duration of study is between one year or 18 months was based on one student per state of the federation including FCT, while the PhD students, whose duration of study is 3 years, were selected on the basis of one student per zone,” he added.
He further reminded the students of their enormous responsibilities as representatives of Nigeria and NITDA because they will henceforth be regarded as NITDA Scholars. They will have to justify the confidence repose on them by not only coming out in flying colours but with destabilizing innovations that will take the world by storm. They were equally reminded of their signed contract with NITDA to return to Nigeria after their studies to give back to the country for a minimum of three years. This, among others, is another way of fulfilling NITDA’s mandate and priority areas of capacity building in Information Technology Development.
Speaking on behalf of the students, the only PhD candidate in their midst, expressed joy and thanked NITDA for restoring the love of Nigeria in their minds. His words: “I had earlier lost all hope in the country believing that nothing good can happen to a commoner who has no God father but with this seamless exercise that was strictly based on merit I now wish to pledge my love and loyalty to the country with a promise to give back to the society from what I have benefitted.”
