The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Digital

  • A digital revolution in Kaduna

    A digital revolution in Kaduna

    Education is believed to be the bedrock of development in any nation but in Nigeria it is facing serious challenges. Not much attention is paid to the development of skills and capacities through information and communication technology (ICT).

    It is in the face of these challenges that the digital revolution of Hon. Usman S. Bawa, popularly referred to as Shehu ABG, in Kaduna is worthy of emulation by all stakeholders in the education sector. Shehu ABG, the member representing Kaduna North in the House of Representatives, is the son of Alhaji Bawa Garba, a Kaduna-based business tycoon and telecommunications magnate who founded the first Cable Satellite TV in West Africa. As a businessman, his father digitalised TV network with the state-of-the-art technologies in Nigeria, at a time when cable network was out of the reach of many Nigerians.

    Although, he is a member of the House of Representatives on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC), he has brushed aside partisan politics and political sentiments to develop the education sector in Kaduna State, not minding that the state is governed by the opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which is indisputably responsible for the development deficit in the state. Shehu ABG sees his mission as a partial fulfilment of his covenant with the people of Kaduna North, his primary constituency and the state at large.

    In the first phase of his digital revolution, eight schools in Kaduna were selected for the laudable ICT Programme. The schools include Kaduna State University; Kaduna Capital School and Sardauna Memorial College; Government Secondary School, Doka; Government Secondary school, Ungwan Sarki and Government Girls’ Secondary School, Independence Way Kaduna.

    Others include Nuruddinil Islamic Society school, Malali and Government Junior Secondary School, Badarawa. Importantly, letters have been sent to these schools, notifying the appropriate authorities about the timely commencement and implementation of the ICT projects in their respective schools few weeks from now.

    From available statistics, over 100 computer sets have been donated and distributed to each of the selected schools by Hon. Shehu ABG. In addition, Kaduna Capital School and Kaduna State University each boasts a new ICT complex constructed by Hon. Shehu ABG to house the ICT centres with brand new power plants. The other schools have not been left out, as they have equally benefited from renovation of blocks of classrooms that have mostly been converted to ICT centres, in addition to the solar panels provided to power the centres. Considering the importance ICT to effective learning, the computer sets provided to the selected schools have been accompanied with unlimited internet access.

    Personally, I happen to be part of as an external observer when the lawmaker paid a courtesy call to some of the schools. It was, for me, an eye opener to the noble cause of the honourable member and his faithfulness to his covenant with the people. I, therefore, wish to commend the lawmaker for his impressive contribution to education in my state, especially Kaduna North.

     

    •Muhammad writes from mukycent@gmail.com

  • Lagos goes digital

    Lagos goes digital

    •Lagos Judiciary attains another landmark that could expedite litigation and ease judges’ burden

    Lagos State has continued its laudable court reforms, which started during the Bola Tinubu era, of easing judges’ load and speeding up the judicial process. The latest continuation of this reform is digitalising the judicial process in such a way that you can sit in your office, and with the touch of the computer, file an action.

    For the computer-literate, this would go a long way to lessen the tedium of filing cases, as well as saving costs – transport costs, for instance – as well as lessening routine physical exertion in hitherto going through such court processes. It is indeed a thing of cheer and other states will do well to follow this laudable step.

    As part of the processes of reform, judges have not only been provided with i-Pads, the computer tablet, a batch of no less than 22 judges has also received training by a Lagos software provider on the new digital operational status.

    The training, tailored to deepen Chief Judge Ayotunde Phillips’ vision of expedited justice in the state, with the aid of information and computer technology (ICT), included robust case/document management system, monitoring and viewing cause lists on the computer. The document management system includes the National Judicial Council (NJC) monthly report form for judges, through which they can, online, prepare and file their monthly performance returns to the council.

    The software on which the batch of judges trained would also help to monitor their performances online, aside from judges themselves monitoring their performance weekly or monthly. Also, peer review would be easier, with judges online exchanging ideas. Aside from judges, the government also plans, as part of the reforms, appropriate training for court registrars to bring them in sync with the new dispensation.

    The stress on training and retraining, on the new digital dispensation, is welcome. Indeed, adequate training holds the key to its success. It is imperative therefore that the government sustains training for all cadres of judicial workers. It must be noted: computerisation is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end – and that golden end is speedy but accurate dispensation of justice.

    Resources may be scarce. But money spent to strengthen the judiciary is a patriotic investment to deepen democracy. A robust judiciary is vital to democracy. Democracy itself is vital to development, which itself engenders prosperity. So, the Lagos State government should continue along this progressive line.

    As other states are advised to follow the Lagos example, the federal authorities should not tarry in releasing funds meant for the judiciary, charged through the Consolidated Fund. Just as investment in gadgetry is important, investment in judges’ welfare is even more important. If everyone does his or her job well, Nigeria’s judiciary can only be better for it.

    But even as all these reforms are going on, the judges themselves must commit themselves anew to delivering justice without fear or favour. A just nation is a healthy nation. So, the judicial health of the country, where truth and justice prevail, is in the hands of its judges. Judges in the Lagos judiciary should take up that patriotic challenge.

    Still ICT, like a car, is a good and pleasant servant. But it could be a hideous master. That is why every step should be taken to protect systems integrity in the new dispensation. Every ICT system of necessity should guard against hacking. It would be tragic indeed to digitalise the judicial system, only for it to fall victim to hackers.

  • Analog is to a single mirror image as digital is to a hall of mirrors: reflections (2)

    Analog is to a single mirror image as digital is to a hall of mirrors: reflections (2)

    Since it was only a few weeks ago that I asked the NEPA/PHCN service vendor whether the replacement of my old analog meter with a new digital meter could be expected to lead to better power supply and fairer and more honest assessment of charges and fees, it is perhaps premature for me to give a precise answer to that question that is based on actual experience. But I have no doubt that like me, most of the readers of this series do not expect that the new digital meter will make much of a difference, especially with regard to power supply or delivery. I will come back to this point later in this piece, but for now, I think it is instructive to give an account of how, long before my encounter with the NEPA man, I came to a rather acute awareness of this whole subject of the widespread, indeed worldwide replacement of analog technology and appliances with their digital equivalents.

    As I live and work part of the year in the United States, this event took place in that country, specifically in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Regretfully, I did not record the year, the date, though I am fairly certain that it was sometime within the last eight years. [I moved from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, to Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2006] The occurrence involved an aspect of some habits of mine that I am not particularly proud of, this being procrastination when it comes to keeping up with the routine demands of daily existence. Here is what I happened.

    For a very long time, COMCAST, my cable television provider, kept sending me regular notices and warnings to change the box-like decoder that made it possible for me to enjoy their services from the old analog version to a new digital replacement. But I procrastinated and did nothing about the notices and warnings. These notices had also advised me to replace my television set with one made specifically for digital technology, even though the notices also said that keeping my old TV set would not make reception completely impossible; only, it would be significantly inferior. This “reprieve” perhaps added fuel to the fire of my procrastination and long after the expiration of the recommended date of the changeover, I still kept using my analog decoder and TV set. I finally – and very promptly – made the transition when I visited the home of a colleague who had made the change. The difference between what he was seeing, what he was enjoying regularly as the owner of digital equipment and appliances and what I had become used to as a consumer of the services of COMCAST, our mutual services provider, was like the difference between day and night. Sound, visual clarity, color and tone, all were of infinitely superior quality in my colleague’s appliances. Dear readers and compatriots, may we never be left behind by the great, beneficial changes in life and history! [Also: may we never lack the means to make it possible for us not to be left behind!]

    To get back to my encounter with the NEPA vendor, one big issue is of course the fact that this comes almost a decade after my experience with COMCAST, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, service provider. In other words, the fruits of the digital revolution got to us in Ibadan/Nigeria almost one decade after digital it had entered the currency of common experience in the United States. Another difference is the unsurprising fact that consumers in the United States enjoy vastly superior services and rights than consumers in Nigeria. For in Nigeria, I never received any notification, any warnings that I should change from analog to digital. One day, Lukman, my neighborhood NEPA vendor, just showed up in my house and said, “Prof, I advise that you replace your analog meter with a digital one; it will cost you some money, but you will not regret the change”. Indeed, Lukman left it completely open to me whether to make the change or not as NEPA, it seemed, was perfectly content with whatever choice I made: stay with analog or change to digital. But for me, the most important difference lies well beyond the relative advantages and rights of consumerism in Nigeria and the United States and go to the fundamental issue of how technological advances in our world impact the rich and the poor nations of the planet to the detriment of the poor nations and, especially, the poor and the marginalized of those nations. Because this is a subject whose complexity demands far greater exploration than I can give in this piece, permit me to deal with only its most salient aspects.

    From my brief encounter with Lukman, I surmise that NEPA is not insisting that all its costumers make the transition from analog to digital. And I think we can take it for granted that even if it did, as long as electricity can still be delivered and its charges assessed to its millions of customers through the subsisting or old analog meters, the great majority of the customers will stay with analog meters for the simple reason that that is what they can afford. In other words, in Nigeria as in most parts of the developing world, one age, one epoch in the technological organization of services and facilities enjoyed by the populace hardly ever completely supersedes another; rather, for a long time (and perhaps even forever), different epochs coexist side by side. This observation requires a concrete illustration.

    To this day and in the homes of many of my friends from my childhood at my neighborhood in Oke-Bola, Ibadan, the TV sets you will find are not of the variety of sleek digital, flat-screen models; for the most part, they are bulky, weighty analog sets that have been around, it seems, almost forever. True enough, these analog sets do receive services from DSTV whose programming and delivery are entirely run on digital technology, but the services received are of an abysmally low quality. With a little ruefulness and without the least bit of smug self-satisfaction, I can report that these friends seem content with what they receive from DSTV through their outmoded analog TV sets. But I should also point out that when they wish to fully enjoy a crucial game involving their adopted English Premiership clubs, they come to my house and submit themselves to the delighted viewership of ultramodern, digital flat-screen television set!

    But this is not an idle chatter about relative middle class and upper middle class privileges and allurements in consumerism in our country. Beyond consumerism, beyond what I and some of my friends at Oke-Bola – most of whom, by the way, are retirees who have put in long years of meritorious and dedicated professional service to the country – enjoy or don’t enjoy through our analog or digital TV sets, the topic we have been exploring in this series goes to the heart of survival itself, either as a national community or as the human species as a whole. This is because the ongoing digital reorganization of the recoding, transmission and reception of sound and image affects virtually all areas of the production, maintenance and reinvention of human life as a sustainable and fulfilling project whose end is not and will never be in sight.

    At its most elemental level, the digital revolution involves listening to and looking at nature, at the universe and at ourselves and recording and transmitting what we find at infinitely more efficient and valuable levels than analog technology had ever been remotely capable of achieving and consummating. Medicine is definitely one of the greatest beneficiaries of the digital revolution where, among other things, imaging technologies that were unthinkable only a decade ago now enable us to look at, record and transmit the most intimate processes going on in the innermost recesses of the cells within our bodies. The whole field of R&D, of research and development, is another big beneficiary of digitality: research projects and hypotheses that could not have been conceived, let alone accomplished a decade ago are now routinely fashioned in virtually all the disciplines of the natural sciences. As I am not a professional scientist, I can only talk about what I have been told and what I have read concerning the work of some of my scientific colleagues. Some of their projects are so unprecedented that it sometimes appears to me, with my background in the arts and the humanities, that some of my colleagues in the sciences are peering at and listening to the very heart of existence itself. Other areas where the displacement of analog technological processes by digitality is causing epochal shifts include food production; the production of new drugs and medications; and the study of the heavens and the oceans in their depths and vastnesses.

    But how is this unprecedented digital revolution impacting the life chances, the present and future prospects of the masses of ordinary women and men, both in our part of the world and in the world at large? To go back to the opening question in this series, it is extremely doubtful that any truly beneficial changes in power supply and delivery will redound to our benefit with the coming of digital meters to Nigeria. And more generally, who really thinks that by itself alone, the digital revolution will significantly affect the endemic crises of security and community that we face as a nation?

    One can wax lyrical about the achievements and benefits of digital technology, instruments and appliances, but ultimately it all boils down to that question. For us in Nigeria in particular, it is difficult not to be worried that the digital revolution has come not to relieve, but to spread a mystifying, talismanic cloud over the challenges and dilemmas of existence in the new millennium. Far from moving closer to a semi-advanced scientific and technological power, it seems we are becoming more and transfixed by and mired in superstition, sterile religiosity and facile, self-serving irredentist attachments. This leads me to wonder whether or not digitality is a fertile breeding ground for these deeply disturbing psychic and spiritual states of many of our peoples at the present time. For to think of digitality in its essence in our present social and historical context is to think of the accumulated effect on the mass consciousness of cameras that don’t use film; recorders that don’t use magnetic tapes; and cell phones that are not only “wireless” but are also unlimited in the uses to which they can be put (camera; calculator; clock; radio; torchlight; and miniature television screen). Absent from this symptomatic list are microscopic imaging devices that weigh less than one ounce and travel with the blood stream over the whole terrain of our internal organs; measuring instruments that are calibrated in billionths of meters and seconds; and tracking instruments whose objects are not airplanes, ships, cars or persons but totally imperceptible motions of sonic, visual and virtual waves.

    As I am not a Luddite, I celebrate these instruments, devices and accomplishments of the digital revolution, but as I am Nigerian, I wait for the day when they will take their places side by side with cell phones, digital cameras and recorders as the fruits of the supersession of analog technology. Let that day come soon – on the waves of secular hope and faith.

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Local govt gets digital library

    Local govt gets digital library

    A digital library with five reading rooms and other modern facilities has been built for public use by the Mushin Local Government Area in Lagos State. The aim, according to the chairman of the council, Hon Olatunde Adepitan, is to change the mindset and psyche of the residents of the council, expose them to material that can enhance their economic wellbeing and draw youths from all forms of crime.

    He said although his administration has embarked on projects to improve the welfare of people, none of such efforts was able to change the psyche of the people.

    “It was for this reason that we decided to embark on the construction of this library in order to help build the minds of youths, through reading and writing. It is an investment we believe can help us to develop the minds of the youth through curious research.

    “The internet facilities here are free, but shall be monitored to guide against abuse. It is strategically located in order to serve a large percentage of the target audience; the youth. It has five large reading rooms, children library, archives, library for the aged, among others,” Adepitan said.

    He, however, used the opportunity to appeal to philanthropic organisations to assist in equipping the library in order to meet the council’s expectations.

    At the event were state legislator, Bolaji Ayinla Yusuf; Commissioner for Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs, Ademorin Kuye; Auditor General for Local Govts, M.M. Hassan among others.

    Kuye said the inspection exercise was part of government’s effort to ensure transparency and accountability in the councils , just as he appealed to all officers that will be part of the inspection to be diligent, objective as well as protect the interest of the government.

    “The inspection is not meant to witch-hunt anyone, or suppress information but it is to complement government’s effort at providing dividends of democracy to the masses, he said ”

     

  • Analog is to a single mirror image as digital is to a hall of mirrors: reflections (1)

    Analog is to a single mirror image as digital is to a hall of mirrors: reflections (1)

    I finally knew that I had to write on this subject of the crushing blow that digital technology has dealt analog technology in our world when, a few weeks ago, the NEPA service vendor for my neighborhood in Oke-Bola, Ibadan, advised me to get a digital meter as a replacement for the old analog meter that I, like all other customers of NEPA, had been using up to the present time. The man more or less sang or chanted hymnal praises in celebration of the superiority of digital technology over the utterly disgraced analog instruments and appliances. But when I asked him to tell me precisely what this superiority and the advantages that came with it were, he did not exactly lose his métier, but beyond very broad generalities, he did become rather imprecise. This sent me into some rather cloudy thoughts concerning what I myself knew and did not know about this presumed universal and relentless epochal shift from analog to digital in virtually all parts of the globe. By the time the NEPA man left, I was convinced that I had to sort out things for myself on this very important subject, especially as the man seemed completely nonplussed when I asked whether with the replacement of my old analog meter with its digital equivalent I could assume either that power generation and supply by NEPA would improve or that I, like other costumers of NEPA, could expect more honesty and transparency in the determination of fees for electricity provided by our hapless national power provider. This piece is the first fruit of the project of self-clarification that began with that encounter with the NEPA vendor.

    We can, I assume, accept that everyone reading this piece has seen his or her own image, her own reflection in a mirror. But I think I am not far off the mark if I suggest that most people reading this piece have never seen reflections of themselves thrown back at them in a hall of mirrors. But what we lack in direct experience we can make up with the exercise of our imagination. Thus, I doubt that anyone reading this piece can have any difficulty at all in envisioning the great, incommensurable difference between seeing oneself as reflected in a single mirror image and seeing the endless duplications of the image of the self that one encounters when one wanders into or is plunged into a hall of mirrors. That difference, that incommensurability between the single mirror image and the vast and vanishing horizon of images and reflections of the self is the metaphor that I deem appropriate to the task of giving a concrete differentiating image between analog and digital technologies. I am not certain that this is the best or the most appropriate metaphor that I could have come up with, but I ask the reader to please bear with me as I tease out the implications of this metaphor for the subject of this piece.

    Now since I am a professor of English and Comparative Literature and not of Electronics or Engineering, the reader must take seriously my humble confession that I do not have expert or clear knowledge of the defining technical processes of analog and digital technologies. Although over the years and decades I have tried to make up for the unhappy fact that in high school I was not among the best students in mathematics and the sciences, I do not have the knowledge and the vocabulary to explain to myself and others what exactly is happening when the physical laws of nature and the universe are deployed or even manipulated in engineering in general or electronics in particular. For instance, I am greatly impressed in learning that in both analog and digital technologies, sound or visual waves are converted to electrical signals so that they can be transmitted and then reconverted at a point of reception into the original waves that had been converted into electrical signals. But please don’t ask me about the finer points of exactly how human or natural sounds and sights are either transmitted into electrical signals in the first place or how, at the point of reception, they metamorphose back into the sounds and sights that we hear and see with our human faculties.

    These highly technical processes require some contextualisation in real life experiences. I did enough of Physics in high school to know that all that we see and hear in this life come to us in invisible waves. From that basic knowledge that is backed by my own natural instincts comes my layman’s appreciation of the fact that the essential thing that distinguishes analog from digital technologies is the fact that the transmission and reception of electrical impulses in the former (analog) are much closer to real time and experience than in the latter (digital). This is because in digital technology sound and visual waves are not only changed to electrical signals that are then transmitted and received as recorded, but they are further electronically “refined” by being converted to codes that can be stored and used later in circumstances completely removed their production or occurrence in nature or human activities. Again, please don’t ask me exactly how electrical signals made from sound and visual waves are transformed into codes in digital technology. I have faith in the “explanation” available in the jargon of the experts in the fields of engineering and electronics that states that the analog signal is a continuous signal close to physical measurements while digital signals are discrete or discontinuous codes generated by digital manipulation. This “faith”, though made possible by the powers of abstract reasoning, is in fact rooted in actual experience. Permit me to explain this claim by reference to two key instruments or appliances of analog and digital technologies, these being tape recorders and computers.

    Both in my professional career and in my personal or social life, I have worked a lot with tape recorders. For this reason, I can affirm that it was a great moment for me when the “tape recorders” that I used stopped being tape recorders and became, quite simply, recorders. This, as we all know, was marked by the fact that the magnetic tapes on which recorded sounds were “captured” were simply discarded and that was the end of it: you no longer needed those highly brittle and eminently degradable tapes to record sound. That phenomenon has now been absorbed into my (and our) stock of common knowledge and experiences that we take for granted, but I can never forget the wonder and elation that I felt the very first time when I recorded sound without using tapes and without having to worry about how and where to store what I had recorded. I can now assert – with some regrets – that if digital recorders had been around when I did the research for my first published book that dealt with the traveling theatre movement of Hubert Ogunde, Duro Ladipo, Kola Ogunmola, Amos Olaiya and the others, I would have been spared hundreds of hours of work and worry having to carefully label and preserve every single magnetic tape that I used.

    Since I have written on the subject several times in this column, my remarks on computers in the context of the move from analog to digital technology and appliances will be brief. I never learned completed the task of learning to type on the old, sturdy and for the most part reliable typewriters, whether Remington or Olivetti. Perhaps it was this previous experience that made me at first resistant to learning and mastering typing on the computer keyboard. But once I discovered that digitalisation made the task of typing not really a “task” but a facility that, in comparison with the typewriter, was endlessly much easier and less cumbersome to operate, I quickly became avid in typing on the computer keyboard and producing my own essays, monographs and books. What used to be a chore that I somewhat resented and left to others to do at great cost to my financial solvency became something in which I found much pleasure and fulfilled aspirations.

    I have focused on these two electronic appliances largely because they are so central to my own personal encounter with the digital revolution, the epochal move from analog to digital technologies. For other people, the “totemic” instrument or appliance might be cell phones in comparison the old large and weighty landline phones. Who among us now leaves his or her house without the cell phone? Who in the past could carry their landline phones with them? Perhaps the clearest and the most ubiquitous sign of the “faith” we all now have in digitalisation as inscribed in the cell phone revolution is the fact that cell phones are now deemed indispensable in all the marketplaces of local, national and global communications. If you lose your cell phone, its replacement is swift and relatively uncomplicated. I do not recollect that anyone I knew had such “faith” in landline phones that were the epitome of analog technologies.

    No reflections on digitalisation and its impact on our country and our world can be complete without mentioning the replacement of analog television sets with their digital equivalents, their digital nemesis. At the most obvious level, the picture and sound values are infinitely better in the latter than in the former, apart from the fact that analog sets tend to be bulkier and weightier. I am not making a plug here for flat screen television sets, though I confess that I am susceptible to the aesthetic allure of their sleekness, their élan. I am alluding more properly to the programming and reception that digital sets make possible beyond anything one could have hoped for or received from analog sets. Here I must confess that it was only with the arrival of digital technology on the scene that television broadcasts in our country looked anything close to what you see in other parts of the world with advanced scientific and technological cultures. This particular observation needs some emphasis: television is one of the great cultural legacies of the last century; in the new millennium, it has become even more decisive in bringing national, continental and global communities closer with regard to programming and reception. Nigerian television programming and reception came of age, perhaps could only have come of age, with the advent of the digital revolution. South Africa is far ahead of Nigeria in continental programming and reception. This, I would argue, has a lot to do with which of the two countries had the infrastructures in place to make the most of the digital revolution.

    My own preferred way of understanding and coming to terms with the digital supersession of analog technology lies in critically unraveling the term “digit” that is the root word for “digital”. I think intensely of the digits and integers that are the codes into which digital technology transforms the electrical signals made from human and natural sounds and sights. Sounds and sights as digits and integers? Doesn’t this abstraction, this extreme technological reification of nature and experience carry with it some risks, some hints of alienation and anomy? Is the hall of mirrors a place of utopic fulfillment and/or a site of the loss of the self in empty, confounding amplitude? In plain language, does the digital revolution, in being so dazzling, so talismanic in its instruments, appliances and effects, not carry with it some risks for us all, individually and collectively? These will be the composite starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series as we go back to my query to that NEPA services vendor: Will my new digital meter lead to improved services and more fairness and honesty in NEPA billing practices?

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Digital registration for NBA conference

    Digital registration for NBA conference

    The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) has concluded plans to employ online and digital facilities in the registration of members for the forthcoming Annual General Conference of the association.

    This was disclosed by the chairman of the Technical Committee on Conference Planning (TCCP), Chief Joe Agi (SAN) in a chat with our correspondent at the NBA secretariat, Abuja.

    The conference, which is regarded as the largest gathering of lawyers in sub-Saharan Africa is usually held at the last week in August when most courts are on vacation.

    Agi said: “ We are working very hard round the clock to give Nigerian lawyers the best conference. We started early, we have got the theme of the conference, we are trying to get the speakers and putting things on ground and we believe that Calabar will be the best conference for lawyers . This year’s conference will hold at Tinapa Holiday Resorts, in Calabar, Cross River State.

    On how the TCCP intends to use the recently launched NBA portal and website, Agi said: “ We are now moving from analogue registration to digital registration, people will now sit in the comfort of their rooms and register for the conference without having to go the banks, get tellers, forms, fill and send to the NBA through couriers, registered mails and all the rest of it. You can see that the NBA is really going digital, this is a great improvement and giant stride that we have taken.

    The conference fee was approved during the Makurdi National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting and has been forwarded to all branches of the NBA. For those lawyers that have been verified, once you go to the portal and click your year of call to the Bar, the amount you will pay as conference fees will come out. On the challenges facing the committee, Agi said: “Well, we have not really confronted any challenges in the course of carrying out this assignment.”

     

  • Abuja hosts digital Africa confab, exhibition

    Federal Capital Territory has been selected to host the inaugural Digital Africa Conference & Exhibition, slated for April 23-25, this year.

    According to a statement by the organisers of the event, based on the latest statistics from the International Communications Union (ITU), Nigeria, has the largest telecoms market, and the highest number of internet users in the continent as at today.

    The three-day Digital Africa Conference & Exhibition will be held at Nicon Luxury Hotel, in Abuja, the capital city. Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja Sheraton Hotel, Bolingo Hotel, Protea Hotel Asokoro, Chelsea Hotel, Rockview Hotel, and Hampton Suites have been designated as official accommodation hotels for guests expected from around Nigeria, African countries, and the rest of the world.

     

  • Chanchangi goes digital

    Chanchangi Airlines is set to introduce electronic ticketing to enable passengers to book, pay and check in for their flights without coming to the counters at airports.

    This is part of the rebranding measures put in place by the airline, which has secured funds from Unity Bank to acquire more aircraft under the aviation intervention fund packaged by the Asset Management Company of Nigeria (AMCON).

    The funds will assist Chanchangi Airlines to acquire at least four aircraft in the next few months. The airline, however, did not disclose the amount accessed.

    Its Group General Manager Mr John Disley, who stated this in an interview in Lagos, said it has become imperative to introduce electronic ticketing to meet the demands of passengers, who continue to seek improvement in services.

    He said in the next three weeks, work would be completed on the portal of the airline, which will offer passengers a robust window to book and pay for their flights from the comfort of their homes and offices, instead of wasting man hours rushing to the airport.

    Disley said as the “peoples’ carrier”,: Chanchangi will soon acquire additional aircraft to boost its operations, affirming that its officials will continue to promote safety and security as the selling point of its flight in over a decade that it had operated flights in the Nigerian airspace.

    Disley said since the airline resumed operations after a recess to fix its aircraft in Belgrade, passenger traffic has remained steady on its traditional Lagos/Abuja and Lagos/Kaduna routes.

    He said that some of its crew members are currently undergoing simulator training in the United Kingdom, ahead of the arrival of its second aircraft to consolidate its operations.

    He lauded efforts by the government to assist domestic airlines acquire aircraft.

  • Digital Migration: concerns over Nigeria’s readiness

    Digital Migration: concerns over Nigeria’s readiness

    After 52 years of television broadcasting in Nigeria, the onus is on Nigerian government to make the best of a full digital revolution that will kick off in 2015. VICTOR AKANDE, who was part of the recently held Digital Dialogue Conference in Johannesburg, reports.

     

    IF the forum, which had journalists from all African countries, had taken place at the Cocoa House, Ibadan, and sponsored by a Nigerian government or private organisation, Nigeria could have been said to have kept pace with a precursor tradition, as creator of the first television station in Africa, with the establishment of the WNTV by the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo in 1959. But leading private broadcasters, Multichoice Africa facilitated the credit for South Africa, and the Sandton Convention centre, a stone-throw to the popular Nelson Mandela Square, provided a united front for African journalists to deliberate on the best possible ways of unlocking and exploring the digital migration process, which has begun around the world, including Africa.

    The conference evaluated the timeline agreed by Europe and Africa that by June 2015, there will be a complete switch over from the current analogue broadcasting to digital. The implication, according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) treaty, is that after June 2015, analogue television transmissions will no longer be protected from harmful interference caused by digital TV transmissions. In the same vein, analogue TV transmissions will not be permitted to interfere with digital TV transmissions.

    The revolution has already begun, with countries like France, United States, United Kingdom, Sweden and New Zealand already advanced in their migration programmes. Finland and Mauritius have already switched off from analogue.

    Experts have predicted that for a smooth transition to take place, proactive measures must be taken by the government, and stakeholders must be involved in the deliberation process. The question is that since South Africa, which began the process years back, is yet to overcome the complexity of the transition, what hope is there for other African countries that they will meet the deadline with just three years to go?

    South African technology journalist, Aki Anastasiou, who was moderator of the forum, provided the background to the wizardry of communication technology and how Africa is fast taking advantage of the devices to improve its lot. Anastasiou, who noted that eight out of 10 fastest growing economies in the world are situated in sub Sahara, explained that new technologies like the digital migration can only benefit the people more by increasing. He said this to dismiss the fears in some quarters that new technologies are associated to job loss. “Agriculture and Tourism are hardly being touched in Africa. The digital advantage can only let the world know that Africa alone has the potential to supply the world with food,” said Anastasiou, who predicted that the world next internet technology entrepreneur will come from Africa within the next five to 10 years.

    Vicki Myburgh of PriceWaterhouseCoopers took the lead in a series of presentations by seasoned facilitators at the conference. Her paper: Entertainment and Media Outlook 2012-2016: The End of the Digital Beginning, set the mood for this reporter whose concern is primarily on the content that will possibly feed the spectrum expected to be expanded by the digital technology.

    According to Myburgh, digital innovation accounts for majority of the growth we are seeing in the industry. She observed that in 2011, spending on digital advertising and consumer formats increased by 17.6 %, compared with only a 0.6 % rise in non-digital, adding that digital’s share of total spending will grow from 28% in 2011 to 37.5 % in 2016, accounting for 67 % of all E&M spending growth to 2016. In a chart, she revealed that while there are several differences in each of the industry segments, one consistent driver is digital.

    For Koenie Schutte, Managing Director at LS of SA Radio and Secretary, Southern African Digital Broadcasting Association (SADIBA), his brief was to take the participants through the process of migration from analogue to digital. He noted that the most important variables in the transition process to Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) are the consumer and the home environment.

    He said that content is key in the transition process, as viewers have been promised more channels. He said no incentive to the consumer could be greater than great content. He observed that many TV households today use poor antennas and rely on marginal analogue TV reception. He said DTT will be on frequencies not necessarily covered by current antennas and new antenna, while installation may cost more than the Set Top Box (STB).

    The next speaker, Ms Beth Thoren spoke on the importance of communication in the migration process, emphasising on the need for government to get stakeholders involved from the start. Thorem, who is the UK Digital Communications Director, said that adequate funding and a good communications strategy were the ingredients that gave the UK attempt a headway. She noted that UK became the first country in the world to switch to digital broadcasting this year, after seven years of educating the masses and laying out the communication messages.

    She said the country was lucky because it had 200 million US dollars for the project, which was primarily funded by BBC, being the major donor. “We were able to switch over because apart from the funding, which is essential, we ensured that we were honest to the people about extra costs to them, we corrected and responded to all articles that were written about the campaign and we were firm about the date that we would be switching over,” said Thoren.

    If the UK model is anything to go by, it would be observed that its government had evolved proactive and systematic line of actions to ensure that they are not caught napping when possible interference from neighbouring countries hit them.

    The deregulation of broadcasting by General Ibrahim Babangida government through the Decree No. 38 of 1992 can only be said to have created better understanding between the government and the governed in Nigeria, but industry watchers in Nigeria are worried that the relationship between stakeholders and relevant agencies is not utilised well enough on the issue of digital TV migration.

    Perhaps this shortfall in communication is not peculiar to Nigeria alone, as various governments in Africa do not seem to have engaged the stakeholders well enough on this digital revolution that is set to herald more channel choices and value to television viewers. But Multichoice, a big private sector stakeholder in the scheme, and the largest pay TV company in Africa, has set an enviable agenda based on its Social Responsibility objective. Multichoice began a test-run of the digital TV innovation in Nelson Mandela’s town of Soweto.

    The households visited in Soweto confirmed their choice of more channels on the new device. Reason for this is not far fetched – the digital signals take up much less bandwidth than analogue signals. The result is that the DTT can broadcast up to 10 television channels in the same bandwidth – giving you the potential of many more channels to choose from. Another benefit that this gives the people of Soweto is that they are for the first time, able to access many free-to-air TV channels. They agreed that truly, the new innovation renders sharper picture, and better sound quality; such difference as it is between an old video cassette and a DVD.

    Mnet Technical Director, David Hagen, observed that many players in the migration process still habour several unanswered questions. “Taking the South African experience, digital migration is proving to be extremely difficult and slow because people don’t know the fate of the television sets they own, where they will buy the devices, who the manufacturer will be, the cost implications and when it will actually start,” he said.

    Hagen said he was sure the South African experience was similar to many other African countries’ experiences, where the roll out is very minimal because governments and regulators were still debating on the standard and technology of the devices they wanted to use.

    He said that for a smooth transition into digital broadcast, there was need for content that isn’t currently on analogue- He noted that local content is vital and should be readily available.

    A Nigerian Digital Migration Communication expert, Mr, Jenkins Alumona, does not think that Nigeria is ready for the digital migration and consequent switch off of analogue broadcasting by 2015. Put succinctly, Alumona’s response is, however, that of optimism. “Are we ready for migration? No. Can we be ready? Yes. But we have to move at a faster pace. At the current pace, the 2015 date is not attainable.”

    Alumona, who was a participant at the Digital Dialogue Conference, expressed dissatisfaction over government’s effort on the project when he said: “government’s effort, if it exists, is not known to the general public. I understand some things are being done at the policy level, but nothing is visible yet.”

    On the insinuation in some quarters that digitalisation may add to unemployment, the expert differed. “On the contrary; it should lead to more employment across several sectors. Freed spectrum may lead to more telecoms that will provide more employment. In the broadcast industry, more content will be required and by extension more jobs.”

    Does he think that Nigerian broadcasters have enough content to fill this spectrum? Alumona said: “At this point, No! But Nigeria has the capacity and potential to provide the required content. Do not forget we have already proven that with the prodigious nature of Nollywood.”

    On the two grades of the decoder for digital transmission, Alumona recommends the T2 for Nigeria when the time comes. “T1 is basically obsolete. Countries currently on T1 will eventually have to move to T2. The UK, which was one of the earliest to migrate, used T1 and they are already planning to migrate once again to T2. So it’s a no brainner. We need the very latest and T2 is the very latest. One of the DTT operators in Nigeria, GOTV already uses T2.”

    Alumona, who believes that for certain categories, government has a responsibility to subsidise the decoders, spoke on the future that digital migration portends for pay TV business when he said: “The premium market will always exist and so the impact will be minimal.”

    Alumona’s views further buttresses the insinuation that the government of Nigeria is under-estimating the huge complexities to be faced in implementing the migration and probably needs to first focus on pushing the NBC to action or make it more efficient .