Digitisation has become the fad in the information communication technology (ICT) age. From health, agriculture, learning and governance, fetters have been broken through digitisation. The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) is central to achieving this goal in Nigeria. Its Acting Director-General, Dr Vincent Olatunji, highlights the challenges, reports BLESSING OLAIFA.
Turning ICT into cash cow
When the Minister of Communications Technology, Mr Adebayo Shittu, came, he promised to make ICT a credible alternative to oil; and he started that by inviting people to Ibadan to discuss and propose a road map for the ICT sector and how to develop the road map. He titled it “continue innovation innovative continuity” towards a SMART Nigeria and we have been working closely with the ministry because in most of the work he will be doing to move this sector forward, NITDA has a very big role to play, especially on local content. We really want to go deep into the sector and make our contribution.
The most important thing to do is to grow the sector through local content initiatives. Our mandate includes encouraging the growth of ICT products and services; encouraging Nigerians to use made-in-Nigeria products and services; encouraging initiatives to make Nigeria the ICT hub for Africa; encouraging initiatives that will take our local products to global platform to enable it to compete in the global ICT market; encouraging production and services that are valued and could create jobs and contribute to our GDP.
These are part of the core mandate of NITDA and we are already working with the ministry to ensure that these initiatives are achieved. For instance, we have a full fledged office in charge of local content; we have a national local content guidelines in place and we have another office for ICT innovation. All these are meant to develop the sector and promote home-grown solutions.
Home grown solutions, local content
Local content is targeting home grown solutions; for instance, the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in terms of what they are contributing, those young chaps, software developers, those who have ideas and solutions to our peculiarities here. How do they take their products to the next level? How do they take the products to the people and market them and ensure their products are used by Nigerians? These are the main targets. The assembly plants that we have; what have they achieved? Are they doing things up to optimum level? If not, it may be because of lack of patronage.
So, if we don’t put in place a deliberate policy to drive the patronage of these products and services, there is no way they can produce more. If they cannot produce more, there is no way they can employ more people and solve part of the unemployment problems we have in the country. And they would not be able to form part of the economy. For instance, for people who lack entrepreneurship skills or basic funding to function, we are already working with certain organisations and other software developers on how we can bring these people on board. We have about 21 software developers across the country, so these people need encouragement on how to contribute to the economy.
Funding challenges
It is not what one organisation can do. It is a partnership. NITDA is there, we also have state fund for them so we are working with developing partners to see how we can attract funding to the sector. Also the private sector organisation that is reasonably rich, we are trying to work with them to encourage them to invest in ICT. Many people have been investing in manufacturing and in the other sectors, but we have a deliberate policy to pull them to invest in ICT.
For instance, people have idle money, instead of stashing them abroad where they are not contributing to the economy, we want to encourage them by saying whatever you have, go the ICT way so that in the next four or five years, we want to see what we can attract to the sector. It takes a lot of encouragement to let people see what you are trying to achieve because they don’t belong to this sector, and what we do here is intangible; it is not what you can see physically and it takes time for the investment to start yielding profits, but for every one dollar you invest in ICT, you are making six dollars in the long run and for every single job you create, you are creating between 200 and 300 jobs in SMEs.
In fact, you are growing the sector, so we need deliberate policy that will create the enabling environment and we need them to come in and invest. And more importantly, the sector is very pervasive, it cuts across all sectors; there is virtually anything you can do in any sector without involving ICT be it health, education agriculture, tourism and solid minerals. You can imagine the services that ICT will drive to those sectors, so to invest in it is to invest in all sectors of the economy.
E-governance programme
We have now developed a successful National e-Governance Master Plan programme under the leadership of the Federal Ministry of Education in collaboration with Korea Office of International Cooperation (KOICA). We developed the master plan with them and we submitted it to the Federal Executive Council (FEC) of the previous administration. By the time we finished with the work, it was close to the end of that administration. So we have to wait for the present FEC for approval and then we assign roles to everybody.
Even before then, we had started laying the foundation which is capacity building, already we are training people. We have trained over 3,000 Nigerians through assistance of KOICA and the Public Service Institute. We are even going ahead now to build our headquarters; to build e-governance training institute and NITDA headquarters along Airport Road because no matter the kind of infrastructure you put in place, no matter the kind of plans you have, if you don’t have those that will drive the process, you cannot achieve anything.
So we believe the first thing is to develop the human capital that will drive the place so that we can develop and allow the programmes to run. So that has been done. And there are so many infrastructures that are already in place, all we need do is integrate and ensure interconnectivity so that data and information can be shared, so that the MD of agency A can talk to the MD of agency B. That is what we need to do to grow the sector. Now putting a cost to it may be difficult because it is a very dynamic sector. ICT keep changing every day.
That is why we need to develop home-grown solutions to assist us in the e-government programme. But we are working under the auspices of the ministry, the states and some partners to develop the national e-governance programme. There are several e-government initiatives that are already going on across the country, all we need do is to bring them together and make sure that we have one holistic view about it.
For instance, e-passport is e-governance, what JAMB and WAEC and other organisations are doing is e-governance; now you can stay here and talk to your doctors and even on your phone by the time you talk to your doctor and say you have headache and he prescribes drugs for you, it is e-governance, writing exams via computer is e-governance. So what we need is to elevate them, bring them together and ensure they operate with ease. We already have ICT departments in MDAs to drive this programme.
Private sector’s role
Ideally, in an average economy, the private sector should drive the economy. They should drive whatever you are doing especially in this era of ICT, we are here to give policy direction, to give proof to concepts that this is possible in Nigeria.This is doable in Nigeria, the private sector would now come in to deploy. These solutions you are talking about, we don’t develop solutions, for instance now in NITDA, we don’t develop software, but we encourage people to develop and sell; we don’t manufacture, we don’t produce, but we create enabling environment and encourage them, that this is how you go about it, this is the global standard. So they are the major drivers and that is why we have to create a lot of awareness that this is what we want to do and these are the roles we want you to play.
Power supply headache
I think deficit in infrastructure is part of the problems of developing nations. You cannot run away from it and it is even worse now because we didn’t plan for all this kind of things before. If we had planned properly, as our population is growing, we should have allowed the infrastructure that would drive the development of the country to grow as well.
The population is growing; we are not growing consumption of electricity and others. Under this condition, there is no way you would not experience deficit in infrastructure on roads, water, power or anything. It is the level of urbanisation and population growth that far outweigh the kind of infrastructures that we have. For instance in South Africa, a country of about 42 million people, they generate about 40,000 megawatts (Mw) of electricity, in Nigeria, we are about 180 million, we are moving between 3000Mw and 5000Mw, at times it dips to 1000Mw, because we did not plan for the population growth. If we had planned, we would not be here.
So it is not peculiar to ICT alone, it is a general problem but what we are trying to do in this sector now is that there are several alternatives now that are available. For instance, most of the things we do, we do them with solar, the infrastructures we deploy, we ensure that we have solar as part of it .So if you can have normal power for substantial hours of the day, it can sustain your infrastructure. Yet for the big players in the sector, the telcos, in terms of money they spend for instance, many of them depend on diesels almost 24 hours.
There is no way it would not affect the cost of services. So these are part of the problems we have to contend with for now and with the efforts that the government is putting in place, the IPP projects, by the time they bring all of them together, things we get better. But we have to be consistent in our plans and not that we plan to a stage and somebody will have to change it again. No, we have to be consistent with our plans, follow them through, so either you are there or not, the system runs.
It should be a national plan, not individual’s plan, so either you are there or not, it should flow and we should take national interest as priority. In fact, that is what caused the infrastructural decay that we have. By the time we are able to change our mindset and our psyche, thank God we have somebody of high integrity in the helm of affairs in Nigeria today, I mean the President and that is one good thing that is changing the mindset of people in the country.
We have a president that is not corrupt; you cannot bribe him, he is not looking for money, money that he did not put eyes on when he was 30, 40 year old, is it what he will be looking for now at over 70 years? He is somebody that is contented, and most importantly, he has the interest of the country at heart. So the challenges we are having, if we give him the support and there is consistency,I am sure we will overcome the challenge of infrastructure and it will affect all sectors of the economy.
Ensuring global +competitiveness
First, the major thing we can do to make our economy competitive is to be consistent with our policies and its implementation. Second,it is partnership, because you cannot do it alone; several countries have gone far ahead of us; we cannot just stay here. We need to encourage partnership especially on the national e-governance issue. For instance, we are in partnership with the Korean government and they have been assisting both within Nigeria and outside the country and they are even ready to spend their money in training on human capital development and on our part, we are already assisting in highly trained, and skilled persons on ICT.
Under the scholarship scheme, we have done over 300 across the country and we have given scholarship to over 36 PhD students. This year alone, we are going to give about 37 PhD students scholarship. This is to grow human capital in the sector and ensure that your global outlook is being improved. They can even stay here and work for some hi-technology companies by providing them different services.
By the time we are able to drive our local content initiatives, and we have hi-tech products and services that we can sell in the international markets, the story will never be the same. The truth is that we are already players in the international economy, making our way to becoming an important part of the global information system.
Integrating states, local government councils in ICT
One thing that we have started doing with the states is the ICT policy for states. For instance we have the national ICT policy at the national level which NITDA is promoting. We believe we cannot just stay in Abuja and believe we are making progress for the country. We are now going to the states to develop ICT to drive their competitive edge. For instance, if a state says my competitive areas of strenght are agriculture, and education, how can you use ICT to drive the growth of these areas? If another state says it is tourism and culture, how can you deploy ICT to drive tourism and culture in that state? If another one says it is transportation and waste management, what can ICT do to drive those areas? So we are working with different states, encouraging them to deploy ICT to develop. So these are the objectives, these are the strategies we used to get the states involved. We have already done 10 states; we are going to do another five states this year. We intend to cover the 36 states and Abuja. We have done that of ministries and parastatals, so by the time we go to the states we will cover more, we also develop some ICT infrastructures for them, especially for public schools and agencies.
Job scam
It’s been challenging. I came in during the job scam crisis, but one thing I thank God for is the kind of people we have in the house, especially our management team. Immediately I came in, we called ourselves and said yes, this is the situation we are, we need to move on because NITDA is bigger than anybody. NITDA is to provide services for all Nigerians. So we agreed to put all the past behind us and move forward. And that has worked for us because one, we discipline ourselves, that you cannot come to work after 8am, two you can see me with my ID-Card and other workers; that no file would stay on anybody’s desk for more than 24 hours. Four, we put electronic document management system we deployed it and all our activities, we make sure we share information. So we agreed on what we wanted to do; this is the way to go, if it is not good enough, we say okay convince us, so we take collective decisions. Having being in the public sector for 26 years, almost 15 years in NITDA, so I know all of us in NITDA, I know our weaknesses and strenght and capability. So we are trying to restructure to put the right people in the right place, to see who works where, what is his/her qualifications and where can s/he perform best and what can you do to add value. Even the employment that caused crisis, we are trying to look at the individuals, what kind of skill they have and what kind of skill do we need and what the ambition is; what do you want to do for Nigeria and key into the idea of transforming the country into ICT economy? So we need to be empowered in-house so that we know where you are coming and when we go out to work, what we can achieve collectively. So that has been assisting us a lot, my thorough understanding of this office and the system, these are things that have been working for us and more importantly, we believe NITDA is strategically positioned to turn around things for Nigeria. The oil prices that remain a two level digit, we are not seeing it as a problem but as challenge because we believe we have more credible alternative in ICT. You can imagine Nigeria earning like $20 billion yearly through deployment of ICT; you know what that means and the private sector is there and we are already working to see how we can partner and achieve innovations, talking to people, promoting foreign direct investment. The kind of legacy I want to leave is that of someone that transformed NITDA in a way that it will transform Nigeria in such a way that we will forget about our natural resources and deal with knowledge economy which is a global thing. I want to see that Nigeria in the next two years become fully integrated into global economy through ICT.
