The Minister for Communication Technology, Mrs Omobola Johnson has declared that for any people-oriented leadership to bequeath good leadership, it must embrace electronic-governance (eGovt) so as to foster governance.
Addressing participants at the 2013 Edo State Technology Day
with the theme: Fostering Governance with Technology, yesterday, Thursday, Mrs.
Johnson said that the term
“Governance” should be seen with
the aim of
understanding how Information
Communication Technologies (ICTs) could
be used to influence, improve and foster
governance.
Congratulating Comrade
Governor, Adams Oshiomole
and Mrs Yemi Keri, Managing
Director of the
Edo State ICT
agency, she also told DigitalSENSE Business News:that “Governance” in
21st century is all about understanding how ICTs work.
Governance, she noted, has been defined as “The traditions
and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised.”
Johnson pointed out that similarly, the World Bank’s Poverty
Reduction Strategy Papers
(PRSP) define governance
as “The way power
is exercised through
a country’s economic,
political, and social
institutions”.
She further pointed out that the World
Bank (WB), United
Nations Development Program
(UNDP) and the Organization for
Economic Co-¬operation and
Development (OECD) have
dimensioned governance around
progress that individual
countries are making
in property rights, rule
based governance, often refer to as
the rule
of law, quality of budgetary and
financial management.
Equally of importance, according to her, is the efficiency
of revenue mobilization, public expenditure, transparency, accountability,
the internal rules
and restraints built
to combat corruption.
These dimensions, he
said, could quite easily
be aligned with
those used to
routinely measure country
competitiveness such as the World
Bank “Doing Business”
survey and the
World Economic Forum
(WEF) Networked Readiness
Index (NRI).
“These two widely
accepted surveys and
the resulting country
rankings measure the ease
of doing business in Nigeria,”
she said.
Johnson advocated that for countries to foster governance with
technology, they must embrace egovernment wholeheartedly.
eGovernment, she said,
refers to the
use of ICTs
by government agencies
to transform and
improve, the traditional
interactions between government
and its citizens
as well as
the business community.
Using ICTs this
way, she said, could result in
more efficient delivery
of government services
to citizens, improved
interactions with business
and industry, improved
document management and
archiving, citizen empowerment
through access to
information, and more
efficient government management.
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