The Permanent Secretary of the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA), Olusade Adesola, has warned school principals and head teachers not to patronise or get involved in any form of book piracy.
Mr Adesola who spoke at the 26th FCT Annual Book Fair organised by the Education Resource Centre (ERC) in Abuja on Thursday, drew their attention to “the hydra-headed monster termed ‘book piracy’ and the serious harm it poses to our education system and the country’s economy.”
Represented by the Director, Legal Drafting in the FCTA, Ismail Ahmed, the permanent secretary said piracy short-changed the system, as well as robbed authors and writers of their rewards and exclusive intellectual property rights.
While noting that there is a sharp decline in the reading culture in Nigeria, Mr Adesola said there was an urgent need to revive and sustain the tempo of reading among the populace.
He, therefore, commended the ERC for sustaining what originally started as in-house but had metamorphosed into a yearly tradition of the FCT Education Secretariat.
Earlier, the Director of ERC, Neemat Abdulrahhim, said they organized the fair to enable parents, guardians, proprietors, readers and others to have access to recommended books directly from the publishers at discounted prices.
The Chairman of the FCT Publishers, Innocent Agbonu, said although the publishers were finding it difficult to survive due to the high cost of materials since the advent of COVID -19, he reassured that they would continue to produce quality books at discounted prices.
