Congratulations on your new appointment sir
THANK you very much.
Now that you are in the saddle and we know you have played a very vital role before now which contributed immensely to the growth of NITDA; Can you give us an idea what Nigerians and stakeholder should expect from you?
My plan is to position NITDA as a brand catalyst for national transformation and information for an ubiquitous society.
How do you intend to achieve this objective?
What we are going to do is to adopt a core strategy of multistakeholder partnership. The idea is to ensure that everybody and all hands are on deck. We will engage the industry associations and also engage the key service providers. We would have relationships with MDAs - Ministries, Departments and Agencies; who have synergic opportunities.
We are also going to drive as our name goes, the National Information Technology Agency to ensure we create presence at the community levels. For example, we may explore the National Population Commission (NPC) to establish 200,000 centres in all the localities. This is to drive what we call community level growth.
We are going to use these centres in such a way that we are going to call Community Digital Opportunity centres - enterprise Hub. In the process we are going to co-operate with the Ministry of Trade and Investment and the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN).
The whole idea is to create all together 600,000 small entrepreneurs and 1.2m jobs.
In working towards this, how many of these Community Digital Opportunity Centres - enterprise Hub do we expect to create?
As you know, NITDA is already establishing what we call rural information technology centers (RITC) which have been renamed Public Access Centres, as well as presence in schools, which are now called Knowledge Access Venues (KAV) and we will work with INEC -Independent National Electoral Commission, for instance, to explore setting up these Centres at the Ward levels. A Ward as you know, plus or minus is not less than 10,000 people and when we finish with the wards we will engage the communities.
In this case we will still work closely with SMEDAN, because I know they used to have an initiative called “one village, one product.” We will ride on that in such a way that we deploy these Centres to become the hub of activities in these communities; providing all the services for the government through e-registration and e-education or any other e-activities of the government. So, we anticipate major transformation even at the community levels.
In engaging the communities, there seem to be this particular challenge that NITDA has been facing in the sense that very often the political elements come into the process which does not allow the centre to grow to the extent these communities will benefit from the project. How do you intend to contend with that?
As you may be away, the politicians, particularly at the National Assembly, have been given what they call constituency projects. So those are different from what we are doing. So what we are going to do would involve like I said, multistakeholders partnership; village head will be involved, women leaders will be involved, and youth leaders would be involved.
A company operating in that community through their corporate social responsibility (CSR) will also be involved and of course, we will have a competitive bidding for managing the Centres.
In a broader perspective, the Communication Technology Ministry which NITDA also reports to, has this national broadband initiative, how is NITDA buying into it?
Yes, what we want is to work closely with our Minister, Mrs. Omobola Johnson and in fact work closely with our sister-agencies, like NIGCOMSAT and a number, other capacity providers like MainOne, Glo and so on.
The whole idea is for initiatives like the Centres are to be sustainable and we will ensure continuity in adequate bandwidth provision across all the Centres.
The uptake of .NG is one of your core mandate as NITDA especially on .gov.ng. Last year there was a resolution for all government ministries, departments and agencies at a meeting of Council on Communication Technology in Akure, for all the MDAs to migrate to .gov.ng. How are you implementing that to encourage them to ensure they abide with the directive from the council?
As you know, NIRA - Nigeria Internet Registration Association is supposed to be working with us at NITDA along this line in the management of .NG and you also know that Galaxy Backbone Plc is in the picture. So we are working together to ensure one way or the other that there will be encouragement for those yet to migrate to .gov.ng.
For those who want to follow the directive we can provide incentives such as helping them to develop their websites, at least the primary development of sites by giving it to professional site developers in order to set standards.
And if we encourage them this way, we want to believe it will go a long way in helping them to migrate and also to do awareness campaigns and to notify them that the resources are there to host locally. That will help in the take up of .NG.
Although some of our ministries, are already doing well and some are down. Are you concerned as NITDA for the MDAs to have functional sites?
Yes, it gives us concern and we are concerned to the extent that those agencies or ministries or departments that may be down we’re supposed to have taken services to the citizenry and the most reliable way to do that is to have a web presence. We are going to do some kind of audit to determine those of them who are really struggling and see what kind of arrangement we can make to encourage them to do something about their sites.
In the industry, especially those playing with the NITDA mandate to live up to expectation. I don’t know if you have plans to resuscitate them, like the ISPAN, so as to position them well so that Nigerians and the common-man can actually benefit from them by way of having internet access that is affordable too?
Like I said, our plan is to adopt a multistakeholders approach. That strategy will ensure that we bring probably major bandwidth service providers to a table and negotiate affordable rates for ISPs.
What is your plan for the NITDA students programme especially the Cisco affiliate programme for youth?
What we are trying to do is formalise each of those initiatives to have a formal capacity building process whereby we engage the Cisco Academy here in NITDA and I made a stopover at their office in Lagos a few days ago to ascertain their training capacity.
Before I joined NITDA I did something for the Niger Delta Development Commission; developed a five-level syllabus that started with basics, intermediate, entrepreneurship, advance and training the trainer was very successful and the initiative was to be aired by the CNN.
However, what we are going to do now is to scale it up nationally. So that the programme will have all the solution providers key into a national process of capacity buildings for the IT sector.
In other words, you are anticipating this will be replicated in other regions of the country?
Exactly! That is why the ultimate plan to get those 600,000 entrepreneurs is made up of a plan that starts with the federal government, the states and then the local governments, before the community level.
So, there will be zonal coordinations for all these initiatives. In other words there will be zonal road-shows, systems and structure to ensure a pervasive capacity building.
Trust is an issue when it comes to Nigerians to understand that this is our product in the sector. What will be your proposition to Nigerians on how to go about trusting their own products, mostly the brand .NG?
Well, we will encourage them to understand that we have put in place a lot of systems for security. So once they are aware that there are adequate security system is in place and adequate infrastructure capacity to sustain continuity, they will be encouraged to take up .NG.
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