Director General of the National Information Development Agency Mr. Peter Olu Jack, in this interview with Dele Ogbodo, acknowledged that information technology penetration and development in Nigeria is high relative to other countries across the continent.
Excerpts:
What gains has Nigeria recorded from post-2014 GITEX exhibition in Dubai?
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
Well, post 2014 GITEX, quite a number of achievements have been made. We have received interests both from India and the Middle East countries on Information Technology development and collaboration. Also, companies, global IT experts have been visiting and some are on the verge of planned business trips to the country. Groups from India are coming and we are also talking to some United Arab Emirate group. They are all interested in our innovation centres, and of course they are aware that we have built substantial capacity in the area of software development. We now have a good number of very successful solutions and it makes me very happy to tell you that recently, we have a meeting with Intel Corporation and they have attested to the fact that some of our local software developers are beginning to add value to some of their global brands. We have examples of some of our local software developers who are increasing the sales volumes of their global partners. That is how far we have come since then. We also have the case of interest being shown in specific software development centres. In particular, there is the Abuja Technology village (ATV), where NITDA has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with ATV to provide space for NITDA to build a new computer village. We are relocating from where they are right to their permanent site. So even in that particular case, Intel is also showing strong interest to be part of that process and they say that they are willing and we are therefore going to forge a stronger tie with them. We are doing a similar thing with Systems Applications and Product Development (SAP). The idea behind this partnership is to use our two innovation hubs both in Lagos and Calabar. The Lagos centre is collocated with the creation hub, known as information technology development hub, which is in partnership with our parent ministry. A similar idea hub is in Calabar, in partnership with SAP Corporation, we are looking at making the Calabar centre a booth camp for building ICT skills in several specialised areas. Just last we commissioned our software testing centre located in the South west zonal office. I can tell you that there have been in flow of foreign direct investment into the country post 2014 GITEX.
What is the status report on local content initiative since it was launched two years ago?
It is gladdening to note that the software testing centre had been commissioned in Lagos. This is a 4 four-flat building that is housing both our initiative known as the National Content in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which is as a result of launching the local content guidelines in September 2013. So we have in our new South west zonal office, software testing centre that was also commissioned just last week. The entire South west is working from there and the office of the National Content is also working from there. We also planned to provide space for the new initiative called Office of ICT Innovation and Entrepreneurship. This office will be responsible for coordinating all our innovation efforts, in other words there is a new director for this office who is going to coordinate all the activities of our incubation centres and the software development centre. However, we need to recall that another initiative called Demo-Africa, is also part of our efforts to provide access to ‘angel’ investors for the local software developers. If you recalled at Dubai, we had opportunities for 6 of our developers to be part of the global competition and we all went there to vote for them and even the representative from one of our sister African countries is was actually a Nigerian. So you can see that we are achieving across the borders of the country and not just within Nigeria.
NITDA’s initiative at curtailing Cybercrime
It is good news that the cyber-crime bill was passed into law in May. However, we must realise that there are two aspects, cybercrime challenges within the national security framework and that of all other types of issues like financial crimes. Also here, we are worried about the exposure of our children to online threats. The curtailment is however coming from the Office of the National Security Adviser (NSA), that office has taken leadership in driving the national cyber security policy and strategy. NITDA’s role is to coordinate the non-military aspect of cyber security, and in doing that we have done capacity building for all the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). We are encouraging them (MDAs) to be aware of the issues of cyber security and we have been training nominees from the various MDAs, in such a way that we have started building substantial capacity when it comes to cyber security, but most important is at the cradle where our children are continuously exposed to all types of threats on the internet. Here, NITDA has provided some opportunities through the Child-online Protection Initiatives. So, any moment from now we shall launch the child online protection initiative which we hope to involve the presidency. We want to start addressing these issues with the children and those that we consider as being the vulnerable groups.
Has any website considered undesirable been brought down or hacked?
We have the capability to stop threats that is considered undesirable, whether for security reason or like rightly observed the hacking of some pornographic sites in India. We have fully equipped Cyber-Crime Emergency Response Centre (CERC). Most of the training that we do is from that centre and the point here is very clear as we have a plan to engage the office of the NSA to come up with an agreed framework for managing all these kind of threats. However, on our part we also organise and build capacity to be able to stand up to this type of hacking challenges. And our part, we were recently called upon to bring down a website that was a threat to national security and we quickly brought it down. So it is a continuous process and part of our responsibility is to build capacity so that whenever we are called upon, we deploy or unleash that capacity to ensure that the goal of security is achieved.
What is the update on the development of smart cities in the country?
In fact the main private sector promoter made a visit to my office recently strictly on the way forward and where we are. We made provisions really and as you know, this a multi-stakeholder partnership initiative. What we are trying to building a model on the entire concept for now based on a 48 hectares site of land at the Lekki Epe express way, just by the Lagoon at the foot of the fourth main land bridge, very close to the Pan African University on the other side of Lekki express way. I want you to know that his kind of project is not consummated overnight as it takes time. I can assure you, that this is part of what we are going to showcase this in Dubai in October. We are going with models and a whole stand will be featuring the development of smart cities in the country. Since our last meeting in Dubai, there have been sufficient interests coming from development partners and countries in the project. For instance, Intel is interested in this project.
Government’s assistance to local Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)
We however have several constraints facing some of our local Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), and what we are trying to do is to build the local capacity producing some of the components and not just the case of being an assembler of equipment alone. So that is the plan and we shall bring pressure to bear on Intel Corporation as we want them to lead the campaign, because they have successfully done the same thing in Rwanda and Gambia, which are smaller countries compared to Nigeria, so we should be able to do the same for Nigeria. When Intel recently paid us a courtesy call, I brought sufficient pressure on them as possible and also for us to approach the major equipment manufacturer to be able to develop at least one facility within the smart city concept. So there is good news as Intel is willing to work with us to consummate that opportunity. More so, you may recall that I have severally mentioned that in the past what we used to called Rural Technology Centres, the price for each of them even if we have them in each local government area headquarters, the impact at the community level will not be felt, so we came up with the concept of community digital opportunity centre enterprise hall, which is a small kiosk in a triangular business model, where you have the solar kiosk with solar power, here you can sufficient resources and facility within the same centre charging points for over 200 phones. That kiosk could operate as what we call the corner shop, where consumables are sold. Then, there will also be two adjoining buildings, one for Nollywood and may be another premier league titles and then the other building will be for serious issues like web browsing or filling forms online. We are therefore looking at creating a one stop shop within an e-governance business service centre where everything can be done like Jamb registration, registration of national identity card etc. What has been missing is that in the past people go from their remote communities to the local government headquarters to do these things.
Collaboration between NITDA and the National Population Commission (NPC)
We have plans to approach the National Population Commission to explore how we follow their community delineation centres across the country towards the 2016 census enumeration. We need this kind of centres to act as enumeration centres for data collection centres for the population enumeration which we planned to approach the NPC to strategise on how we can follow their locality delineation. With NITDA’s triangular business model, we can deployed 200,000 centres across the localities as that will automatically create through the triangular business model of 600, 000 entrepreneurs and if two people are employed through this model a total of 1.2 million jobs will be created. We also hope to present this soon to the presidency and in a multi-stakeholder business strategy, this can achieved within a very short time.
What is the update on standardisation, guidelines and regulations for IT operators in the country?
Well, as of today, we have 29 guidelines, standards and regulations. Some of them are the point of publication and some are at the point of draft being considered by stakeholders. Immediately I became the Director General DG of NITDA, what I realised was that the agency’s mandate is in two clear parts: Standards, guidelines and regulations and IT development. In IT development, we have done a lot, but in terms of standards and regulations most of what we are doing are still on paper and so I charged the directorate to immediately commence on a process to determine what it will take us to make all those guidelines published. Here, our role as an agency is for regulations and standards, we don’t need to spend monies to establish data centres as we have ceded some of our mandates in this regard to Galaxy Backbone so that they can handle the infrastructure in terms of connectivity as well as data centres. There are however private data centres in the country and the National Identity Management Centre (NIMC), has a well-equipped data centre as well. What we are doing is the provision of standards and guidelines for the building and operations of data centres and we are going to play that role during this harmonisation process.
On national e-governance framework
On our part and in partnership with our parent ministry, we are in a bilateral arrangement with the government of South korea and with their consultants, we were able to develop an e-government framework for the country. The framework is such that any moment from now we are planning to present it to the Federal Executive Council (FEC) for approval. This was developed within the twilight of the last regime. However, where we are right now, is to get the approval of the presidency for its implementation. The entire concept is coming as a form of national e-governance master plan. Our goal is to build the capacity as well as provide the space for building government training centres and in terms of the capacity NITDA will be training 23,000 officials. The process has started at the Public Service Training Institute (PSTI) along Kubwa express road at the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). We are well on course for the deployment of e-government in the country which will give rise to good governance across the country.
Date : 28th September, 2015
Source : thisdaylive