NILEST seeks FG’s approval to produce specialised combat boots for military
Prof. Mohammed Yakubu, the outgoing Director General of the Nigerian Institute of Leather and Science Technology (NILEST), has urged the federal government to allow the institute to be producing combat boots for the military and other security agencies.
Yakubu made this known in an interview with newsmen in Zaria, Kaduna State.
He said that the institute can produce combat boots embedded with security features to track personnel during combat and ensure precision strikes without endangering the lives of troops on ground.
Yakubu said that the institute worked in collaboration with with Nigeria’s space agency on designing the trackable shoes and boots.
“Very close to the institute, we have a footwear production line project in Basawa Zaria. It was started by my predecessors but has not been completed. We have just completed the building and very soon we are going to procure equipment for the facility.
“The facility is such that we can produce 1,000 pairs of military boots everyday. We therefore want the government to give us the go ahead, and direct that we should be responsible for that.
“We have the capability to produce the boots and inject some security features so that nobody could get it and use it anywhere. This will make it easy to trace where it was produced and which of the barracks was given the boots.
“Not only that, we are also working on designing and producing trackable shoes in partnership with the Nigeria Space Centre.
“The shoe will be designed with inbuilt security features such that wherever you are on this earth you can be traced. We have gone very far with that. The aim actually is for the Nigerian military. If we perfect it, the market will not only be Nigeria but countries in sub saharan Africa.
“We can even make it for civilians. We can have school shoes for instance so that parents will know where their children are real time.”
On other areas of research, he said the institute has developed new products for the tannery industry using local plants, which were tested by the industries and certified to be very effective.
“We have about 27 research groups conducting research in the entire leather value chain, including what we don’t have in the country, the reagents being imported for the processing of leather, so that we can look inwards and produce what we need as a country. The era of depending on imported reagents is over, we have to look inwards, and that’s what we are doing.
“The main important ingredient is the tanning agent. We have what is called natural tanning and chemical tanning. Chemical tanning uses chromium, but the entire world is going natural. Chemical tanning has a lot of toxicity, degrades the environment and the moment it enters the waterways and is injested it can lead to some health complications like cancer. It’s an issue which needs to be addressed.
“We are therefore conducting research in many aspects of our plants Kingdom. We have done a lot of research on indigenous plants in Nigeria, and the most important one is Bagaruwa, which is been used from time immemorial by local tanners. We have also Dorawa and so many other plants.
“We have been able to get the actual agent that does the tanning from these plants. We now have the agent in three forms – gel, liquid and powder. We have sent it to the industries for trial and that has been done and certified OK. The next stage is mass production, but as a research institute we are not supposed to go into mass production of our research outputs.
“We’ll invite entrepreneurs, get the patent, and they will be paying royalty for the mass production of the reagents. We are now at the point of patenting, so that anyone who is interested can mass produce.”
The outgoing director general also said they were working on getting fat liquor from Jatropher, an important item in tanning.
“In processing leather, there is a stage when you move all the admixtures, all the natural fats, so that the tanning agent can penetrate enough to bring about the stabilisation of the pet. The moment you’ve done the tanning and you want to have back the softness of the leather, then you have to put the fat back to it, and what is used is the fat liquor, which is produced from natural oils that are non edible like jethropha. We are conducting research on that too.”
