The Federal Government is said to
lose about N156 billion revenue to software licensing due to the patronage of foreign
software and applications incursions into Nigeria.
The President of Institute of
Software Practitioners of Nigeria, (ISPON) Mr. Chris
Uwaje, made this known at the 2013 National Software Conference and Competition
organised in Calabar by the institute and attributed the losses to the
inconsistent version upgrade, processes leading to failed software products,
project implementation and services.
Uwaje posited that unregulated
state of foreign software products in Nigeria, non-existent national policy and
legislation on software, implementation of e-government, e-education,
tele-medicine and protection of cyberspace for national security and
survivability as other factors confronting the growth of Information and
Communication Technology (ICT).
DigiatalSENSE Business News
recorded from ISPON that the annual capital flight to software licensing,
delivery services and technical support in the nation’s economy has been
conservatively valued at N156 billion ($1 billion) annually by the institute .
The Minister of Communications
Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson also
lamented about this economic
losses to increasing patronage for foreign software while delivering a paper on
the theme, ‘Software strategies for retooling the workforce’ and argued that for Nigeria, software strategies
must not only be about improving productivity but taking
promising software developers and software engineers and helping them to become entrepreneurs that can take
advantage of the opportunity of transforming the economy, creating jobs and
creating wealth.
Omobola said that Nigeria’s
software industry landscape needed two things – innovation process which will
be tailored towards the process of creation or ideation that ultimately results
in a successfully executed software solution or platform and secondly, focus on
companies not code and to keep tab to the fact that “brilliantly written lines
of code must still be considered as building blocks for the successful software
companies that must be our ultimate target in building a viable software
industry.”
pix:The President of Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria, Mr. Chris Uwaje
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