Owerri, Nigeria. Sseptember 4, 2026
“We operated that industry. We never owned it.” Oguzie delivers 2nd Obioha Distinguished Lecture
“A bridge does not fail all at once. It fails one ion at a time.”
Professor Emeka E. Oguzie, FAS, Director of the Africa Centre of Excellence in Future Energies and Electrochemical Systems (ACE-FUELS) and immediate past Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research, Development and Innovation) at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, delivered the 2nd HRH Eze Engr. R.A. Obioha, FNSE, Distinguished Lecture on Friday 4 September 2026 at the Immaculate Hotel, Port Harcourt Road, Owerri.
The lecture was hosted by the Orlu Branch of the Nigerian Society of Engineers under its chairman, Engr. Dr. Chinedu Reginald Okpara, MNSE, and chaired by the President of the Nigerian Society of Engineers, Engr. Ali Alimasuya Rabiu, FNSE, FASCE, FAEng, MFR, represented by Engr. Dr. Vernatius C. Igiri, FNSE.
The lecture, titled “Engineering the Energy Transition: Infrastructure, Innovation, and Africa’s Sustainable Future”, has been deposited open access and can be read in full at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22643784
Professor Oguzie argued that the global shift to clean energy is not a fuel switch but an infrastructure reconstruction, comparable in scale to the rebuilding of the East after the Civil War, and that Nigeria is at risk of entering it in the position it has occupied before, as a customer.
He drew the warning from Nigeria’s own history. Coal production at Enugu peaked in 1958 and 1959 at roughly 900,000 tonnes a year, supplying more than seventy per cent of the country’s commercial energy. Within a decade of the discovery of oil at Oloibiri the industry was effectively gone. When government later attempted to revive the mines through mechanisation, the attempt failed, in part because the imported mining equipment proved difficult to install and to maintain.
*”We operated that industry,” he told the gathering. “We never owned it.”*
The failure, on his reading, was not that Nigeria stopped using coal but that it never domesticated the technology of it. Roughly 2.8 billion tonnes remain in the ground.
“The coal outlasted the competence.”
He noted that 1958, the year Nigerian coal reached its peak, was also the year Engr. Obioha and his colleagues founded the Nigerian Society of Engineers in London, in defiance of a colonial policy that placed qualified Nigerian engineers under the supervision of British technicians.
He applied the same test to the present. Africa hosts seventy-eight proposed green hydrogen projects representing some 38 GW of announced electrolyser capacity, against 17 MW actually operational across the whole continent. Nigeria carries the largest electricity access deficit of any country on earth, alongside one of the world’s most generous solar resources and a population of which more than six in ten are under twenty-five.
Against that, he set the case that the climb can be made, citing China’s progress from contract assembly (original equipment manufacture, OEM), to original design manufacture (ODM), to original brand manufacture (OBM) within a single working lifetime, and arguing for what he called living innovation factories: research centres that carry work through to pilot-scale production rather than stopping at publication.
The lecture also reported current work at ACE-FUELS, including perovskite solar cells fabricated at the Centre’s ElectroLab-X facility with power conversion efficiencies rising across successive generations from 5.67 to 15.60 percent, cobalt-free sodium-ion cathode materials, and hard carbon anode precursors produced from Enugu coal, coconut shell and scrap tyres. On the last of these, he observed that the coal Nigeria walked away from in 1959 may yet return as a battery anode, this time as a material rather than a fuel, and this time processed by Nigerians
A substantial part of the lecture dealt with the chemistry of conventional infrastructure: the interfacial adhesion between bitumen and aggregate that determines whether a road surface survives the rainy season, and the electrochemical degradation of reinforcing steel in concrete. Nigeria’s difficulty, Professor Oguzie argued, is less the construction of infrastructure than its survival
“We build, and then we watch it dissolve, and then we build the same thing again, and we call the rebuilding development.”
ACE-FUELS runs postgraduate programmes in Corrosion Technology and Electrochemical Technology, and holds materials characterisation and testing capability directly applicable to these questions. The Centre is open to collaboration with ministries, agencies, consultants and contractors on the durability of Nigerian roads, bridges and coastal structures, and on the validation of imported construction materials under local service conditions.
He was careful about what he did not claim. “I will not tell you that we have a working sodium-ion battery. We do not.” Nigeria, he said, has suffered enough from announcements that outran their evidence.
The lecture honoured HRH Eze Engr. Sir Richard Akanihu Obioha, FNSE (1927 to 2021), a foundation member of the Nigerian Society of Engineers, who led the reconstruction of war-damaged roads, bridges and culverts in the East and trained thirty-five registered engineers through his firm, RICHBEN Nigerian Limited.
The honouree’s son, Engr. (Prince) B.U. Obioha, FNSE, FNIHTE, FNICE, KSM, PHF, Eze-Elect of Okwuabala Duruegeruo IV of Okwuabala, was in attendance. Professor Oguzie opened by noting that it was at his invitation that he had accepted the lecture.
It closed on a philosophy drawn from that life:
“Build capacity. Build locally. Build for permanence. And build people while you build”.
The Lecture Series Committee is chaired by Engr. Chidozie Okereke, FNSE, FNISafetyE, with Engr. Chibuzo Ejiogu, MNSE, as secretary.
Citation Oguzie, E. E. (2026). Engineering the Energy Transition: Infrastructure, Innovation, and Africa’s Sustainable Future. 2nd HRH Eze Engr. R.A. Obioha, FNSE, Distinguished Lecture Series, Nigerian Society of Engineers, Orlu Branch. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22643784 Click here
