Technology has taken centre stage in the affairs men. From medicine, agriculture, education, and even modern warfare where drones are used to exterminate ‘enemies’ and many more, technology has become engine room of development. The Special Adviser to Lagos State Governor on Innovation and Technology, Tunbosun Alake, says Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu is deploying multi-dimensional approach to fix the state, LUCAS AJANAKU reports.
Challenges
We have looked through different areas of concern in Lagos State and as you know Sanwo-Olu’s administration has a broad agenda and technology is the pillar that all other pillars sit on.
To advance in any of the areas whether it is health, education, transportation or agriculture, we need to implement the use of technology to get better results, be more efficient and more optimised. There are a number of things we are doing to realise that.
One of the first things we did was the ‘Art of Technology’ that was hosted by Lagos State, in conjuction with Eko Innovation Centre. That event was to bridge the gap. What that means in essence is that we are bridging the gap between government and the innovation ecosystem.
As we know, we have young people who are tech-oriented in Lagos. Looking at a place like Yaba, you know there are a lot of companies there, young people, startups. So, it’s a new and broadened industry. The event was to bring people in that ecosystem and government to co-create solutions together.
It’s not just enough for the government to be innovative. The government must be seen to support innovation. The idea was to talk to the private ecosystem and ask them the things that would help youths to become much more innovative in the state.
So, the event was the gathering of enthusiasts, developers, venture capitalists, government agencies from different areas, for us to sit in a room and co-create what the next agenda should be.
What should the government be doing to empower the ecosystem because we see that 80 per cent of the GDP is the private sector and we see that if we empower the private sector, they can create more and better jobs.
So, we want to encourage this innovation and tech industry; we want it to be our next big industry, our next oil. We had to ask them their problems, the things we see in the industry, the barriers that we can remove and because of that event, we came up with four main pillars that are contained in our innovation masterplan for the state.
Pillars in masterplan
The four pillars are: Access, Infrastructure, Funding and Talents. These are the broad areas that we are going to empower.
In the area of access: Access to market, access to infrastructure, access to data. These are fundamental things that the ecosystem needs to remain innovative. We are looking at them one by one. Some of these programmes have already started. One of them is called the Open Government Initiative.
If you go across the world in the most developed climes, government data is queried. You go to a platform, you can query the government data on what exactly it is doing. Somebody asked us at one of our conferences: “Why is it that African governments hide data? It doesn’t help you develop. It doesn’t help you make better solutions.
So, what we are doing is an open government initiative that would provide a platform where people can query government data, where developers can get critical data to build better products to serve the citizens. For instance, if you do not know the kind of traffic patterns we have in Lagos, how can you build a traffic solution.
That’s one of the key areas we want to address. We want to address the availability of data. The more data we have, the more intelligent our products will be.
Another is infrastructure. As the governor and the commissioner for science and technology have said, there’s a metro fibre project coming on stream from this year. And it’s going to have 3000km of fibre optic cable around the city.
We are opening up the city, not only that, not only are we providing fibre optic cables, we are providing duct infrastructure. What this does is that it reduces the cost of deployment for other fibre operators; so it’s not that the government is coming to take over the fibre market, we are reducing the cost for other operators so they can put in much more than the government.
We need to empower the private sector, the players that are already in the private sector to get to the market faster and that is part of the 3000km of fibre optic cables that we are building around the city. Phase two will be another 3000km, which would be in total 6000km of fibrotic cable and dots within the city.
What this also does is that it opens new areas and not just provide infrastructure. Imagine providing fibre optic in Ikorodu, we can start another tech city there. It’s by no accident that Yaba is what it is today. Yaba was a project initiated by the government, which MainOne laid the cable and now you have people flocking there.
Government’s delibrate planning and implementation is very critical to the success of the economy. Government and the private sector need to work hand in hand to unleash the potentialities of this economy. You know the government can not just be executing projects. We are empowering the private sector.
Another thing we are looking at is to improve the talent pool. One area we are looking at is the developers space. We noticed that there are a lot of junior developers, the senior developers have been poached by more advanced countries, such as Canada, US and the UK.
How can we have an assembling line of top notched developers in software development? You are only as good as the projects you work on. We need to give them complex projects to develop. So, we are looking at doing the open platform initiative, where the government can give complex projects to developers, the government gets back the products that these developers build and those developers also improve their skill level.
In doing so, we are fulfilling two things: increasing the talent pool by giving the people things to work on so that their skills can be harnessed; we are also getting the products that they build and we empowering them through entreprenueship programmes like, Lagos Innovates that is run by the Lagos State Trust Fund.
We can help some of the people that come up with the product to get their ideas and product to market. So, there will be acceleration programmes, funding events, all kinds of catalysts, to help them become industries. People always take gambles on new things.
That’s why people like Thomas Edison and Nicholas Tesler in the US at the turn of the century, they were big financiers that put money into their new electric dynamos. It’s because of those gambles that we have electricity today.
So, we must take calculated gambles on our young people who want to build amazing things for this nation. We need to empower them with the right tools that are necessary.
So, the open government platform is one of the areas where we can give this young people tools to build these products and help them to see the products to maturity and when this is successful they can hire people, jobs are created. So, you can see the cyclical effect of some of the things.
Project sustainability
In terms of the sustainability of projects and plans we have in Lagos, that is something we are keenly addressing. What happens is that during the scoping session of a lot of these projects, either they are not scoped properly or the plans for continuity are not put in place, which is why we are coming up with a master plan and some of these plans and projects are going to be monitored by the private sector so that it doesn’t fall off a cliff.
A lot of the projects we are going to be doing, for example, the Smart city project is being implemented by a private sector player. There’s a monitoring committee that is composed of other private sector players, so that these projects have the continuity and we are also doing quite a lot of reforms inhouse to staff the right people to these projects so that the momentum is not lost.
It’s all about the scoping. It’s about the personnel, the processes. As long as we follow up, there would be no abandoned projects. These are the things we’ve seen even from the last administration that we are re scoping and continuing because some of them are good from inception but maybe not properly scoped, so we are rescoping and providing the elements that wouldn’t let it fall off a cliff. Those are key elements of avoiding abandoned initiative.
Smart city
On the smart city masterplan, we are at the planning stage. The plans have been on for months and it’s a project that has been on for more than a year and you know if you plan properly, your execution will be seamless. We just went through the number of quality control value point that we have during the project execution.
So exactly when things are not going right as planned, we already have plans and contingencies to move, either to get equipment much faster or second another contractor to make sure that the value point is executed.
Drones
The drones are tools that would be used in the Geographic Information System (GIS) project. The drones are to map the entire landscape in Lagos. Why is the mapping necessary? It’s because the land administration is a very critical thing to the state.
This mapping makes land administration much more easier and efficient. For instance, if you approach the ministry of physical planning for the purchase of land, already the officers know the exact location your property is going to be and even the soil type that will be on your property.
The drones are part of a much larger project. Those drones, once the maps are captured they are digitised and connected to different systems, such as health or emergency issues. Once the police have access to the map, they would be able to curtail criminal issues or disasters.
The access to these mapped data of Lagos helps their operations much better. Drones are part of the larger GIS project that is going to make land administration, emergency services, police services and health services better across the state.
Some people use drones for other forms of business. Some use it for delivering goods, some use it to deliver blood to bloodbanks.
NCC came up last week with the idea to license the usage of drones in the country. What is your take on it as a Lagos state government?
I haven’t seen the mundality of the criteria for the licensing but I know there are some things you have to fulfil and there are different categories of drone uses. Until I study it before I can give you a more informed opinion. But from a personal standpoint, there are different uses for it.
In Rwanda for instance, it is used to deliver critical medical supplies. I think there needs to a licensing regime, so we don’t have discriminate use of drones. I also think the licensing should be industry- friendly, so that legitimate users are licenced and business can run properly and more efficiently, critical health care gets to the people that need it at the right time and e-commerce services of the likes of amazon that are testing drone delivery, that enhances their business processes and customer satisfaction.
It is important that the regulations from the NCC are industry-friendly. So, I totally support some kind of regulations of the drone use in the country.
InfraCos
The infracos initiative was basically implemented by the Federal Government and NCC. Based on my limited knowledge on it, it was regional infrastructure company that was suppose to lay communication critical infrastructure in different regions of the country.
Why it wasn’t implementated could be because of planning or financing issues. It is important we create an enabling environment for our operators and we also provide the critical infrastructure needed.
Once we implement the fibre optic cables around Lagos, we are going to be connecting primary health care centres and schools for free because we are going to be increasing learning and innovation in schools. Primary health care centres need critical communication facilities to be able to run their services properly.
Multiple taxation
Let me correct a notion. I came from the private sector as well and now being in the public sector I understand both sides. The telecoms companies are not just cash cows, they are critical sources of infrastructure deployment across the state.
At the same time, we need smart regulations so that companies will not take advantage of the citizens, so we need to balance the two.
There’s an infrastructure regulatory agency (LASIMRA), which recently had a new general manager and a new deputy and their plan is to smartly regulate the infrastructure ecosystem so it does not cause inconvenience to the telecom operators but still leave the dividends both for the citizens and government as well because we need order and most telecoms company are profit oriented and they focus on their own bottom line.
You need a liberal regulator to balance things out that has a holistic view of the entire state and the citizen. That is why I believe this new regime LASIMRA has, I believe there would be a smart regulations, so that the telecoms companies expand to the needed areas.
and also with the citenzry in mind and deploying smartly and according to the rules and regulations.
Infrastructure is key but when the road was being constructed, alot of fibrotic cables were destroyed. Now the government is planning to lay private companies are also involved. So what plans are in place to sensitise people so as to not disrupt services?
I am quite hopeful of the new leadership of LASIMRA. Lagos state wants to really stop indiscriminate deals of the road and infrastructure. That’s why the first set of 3000km fibrotic cables would be a big strategy and that’s why we are laying dots that are like tunnels cover the cables.
We are laying those docks so that other telecoms operators can just put the fibre in the already laid tunnels. So it’s a big one strategy that would bring about minimal disturbance to the already laid infrastructure.
When is the project covering 3000km fibre cables starting off in Lagos state?
It’s definitely starting in 2020. We are at the planning stage that will engage a number of implementation partners that will be executing the project. There will be a plan that would be
