IT sector can become Nigeria’s biggest revenue earner – Jack

   

 

The Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency, Mr. Peter Jack, in this interview with EVEREST AMAEFULE says NITDA will establish Digital Opportunity Centres in every community in a bid to power the digital economy in the country

What is your assessment of Nigeria’s information technology sector?

The Nigerian Information Technology sector (or Information and Communication Technology sector in these days of convergence) has made giant strides since 2001 when the Nigerian Telecommunications Policy was articulated and implemented. IT is the other component of the ICT sector. NITDA, the agency that was established by government to drive this sector has a history that started with a unit in the Ministry of Science and Technology. This was about the year 2000.

In 2001, the national IT policy was articulated. Thereafter, the pioneer Director General, Prof. Gabriel Ajayi, assumed office. I was privileged to work with him as a technical assistant. We had a good plan for the IT sector in Nigeria. Some of the initiatives were not localised at the time. However, a good number of those initiatives are what you see today. Some of them might have been renamed.

The one we used to know as the Rural Internet Resource Centre under Prof. Cleaopas Angaye became the Rural Information Technology Centre. That type of initiative has been able to touch people at the community level. It has been well received by the Nigerian community. As I became DG three months ago, I was motivated by the need to touch people at the community level. So we are looking at an even grander scale where we are looking at one centre for each community.

There is the impression that NITDA over the years has not been able to interpret its mandate. How is it going to be different during your tenure?

I will like to see this in two dimensions. NITDA’s mandate has the policy and regulatory component. It also has implementation or intervention or development component. Of course, it is from the development component that NITDA derived its name. I will not really want to dwell on the past. I will give credit to the DGs that were there before me for their efforts.

In this dispensation I will run, we are going to start by engaging the sectors. The truth is that NITDA working alone cannot deliver anything to Nigerians. So we are ab initio adopting a multi-stake partnership strategy; an all-engaging strategy where we will have buy-in of the entire Nigerian communities.

We will involve the Presidency and our supervising ministry. We will involve all the sectors. As you know, IT is pervasive. We see IT as having the credibility or the potential to replace oil and gas in the near future as the primary source of income for Nigeria. With that understanding, we are going to aggressively campaign for people to understand, to promote and support young developers. We will create IT parks, innovation centres and hubs.

The truth is that we are going to create an enabling environment for information technology to play a central role in the economy. We are going to also engage the sectors one at a time – the health sector, the agric sector; developing e-Health policy, e-Education policy and so on.

Information technology also has the capacity to drive growth across all sectors. As you can see, we have peculiar understanding of what IT can do and we are familiar with what it has done for countries like South Korea, India, Bangladesh, Singapore, and a host of them.

So we are looking at Nigeria as being the forerunner of IT in Africa with the potential to grow the economy to be among the 20 largest economies in the world in accordance with the Transformation Agenda. So we are looking at IT being central to the achievement of Vision 20-2020 of government and we are going to do this by addressing and campaigning to let the public know the performance capability of ICT and IT in particular.

You were talking about the Rural Information Technology Centres. What exactly do you want to do with them?

In the past, I will say that these centres have a generic name known as tele-centres. The truth is that all the cybercafé in Nigeria fall within this categorisation whether it is publicly or privately owned. In the new dispensation, we are aware of the limitation of the sustainability. In literature, there is known to be up to 80 per cent failure. But even the 20 per cent success is a fantastic experience. So, we and indeed, my particular research interest, is sustainability of the tele-centres. We will bring to bear our experience, our hands-on experience of sustainability issues of this kind of centres and deploy or design the type of centres that reflect the need of the community.

In community engagement, you don’t go and implement centres without engaging the community. You engage the community to know whether it is the women cooperative that can run this kind of centres on sustainable basis. You also know if there is a successful youth NGO operating in the community or if the village head is articulate enough to engage and take over and ensure that these centres are run optimally.

We also have this school model from our minister called the knowledge Access Venue. We have the community model called the Public Access Venue. Whichever model, the plan is to ensure that when we intervene in a community, the centre will be sustainable.

The new name is Community Digital Opportunity Centre Enterprise Hub so that we can relate IT’s role to drive business at the community level. So these centres will become enterprise hubs for the community. Every aspect of business is considered. People are trained on how to do business. People have access to business information.

The whole plan is to engage entities like Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria, engage other state based enterprise agencies and chambers of commerce that we have an all-engaging centre that delivers e-Government services; one-stop shop for government services and business information; one-stop shop for general national information.

In the new dispensation, the centres are almost guaranteed to succeed. We take into consideration power sustainability from day one by ensuring that where appropriate, we deploy solar solution and where appropriate we deploy wind power solution and so on. We already have a grand sophisticated plan to ensure the sustainability of the centres as we deploy them.

Talking about deploying the centre in each community in the country; how feasible is this?

In the spirit of partnership, we have recognised that the National Population Commission already defined communities and at the last count, there are about 200,000 localities. So one of the major stakeholders we are going to engage is the population commission. Working with them, the plan will be to deploy one centre per locality. This is in the hope that when the commission is planning to recruit enumerators, these enumerators will be potential candidates for managing the centres.

We are looking at triangular business model where we encourage them to run a corner shop; an eatery as well as the tele-centre collocated in a triangular business model. This again ensures continuity.

If we can establish presence in each locality, MDAs will begin to take advantage of this presence. All the initiatives that have community-level intervention can now take advantage and you can see a lot of activities in the localities. We are even looking at the possibility of using post offices. Many of them are in the communities and some are no longer operational. We are in talks with NIPOST to explore that potential. The idea is to explore existing access.

You mentioned e-Government. That was a promise of NITDA many years ago. It seems remote even today. What happened?

There were issues in the past but I am aware that with our minister, Dr. Omobola Johnson, coming on stream in 2011, she has aggressively engaged this aspect of e-Government. Before I assumed duty as NITDA DG, she had engaged South Koreans – Korea Office for International Cooperation to aggressively deploy an e-Government agenda. They are developing National e-Government Masterplan. I was present when the draft was presented to her recently.

With that partnership, we plan to develop e-Government Institute to be located at the Public Service Institute but NITDA is exploring the possibility of collocating the institute on our property along the Abuja Airport Road. It is 2.7 hectares of land where NITDA headquarters will be located. It is still on the drawing board but the land is fenced and ready. So any moment from now, when the agreement is ready, we may start constructing the centre there.

Our sister agency, Galaxy Backbone Plc, has also been working with the minister in developing an open government architecture. So be rest assured that under the minister, we will deliver e-Government in a short time. You may be well aware that a few government agencies are already transacting online.

Outsourcing was touted as one of the new areas the nation would tap into to generate resources and provide employment. An outsourcing unit was carved out in NITDA, but the dream has not materialised.

What you will probably like to know is that I was involved at the time in drafting the National Outsourcing Policy. But there were challenges at a time in terms of finalisation of who manages the outsourcing programme. However, we (NITDA) managed to wrest that responsibility from other competing organisations. I may very well tell you that it was part of outsourcing fund that the NITDA annex office was constructed. We have also taken considerable steps in the outsourcing arena. We have encouraged all the outsourcing players as well as a few outsourcing associations to form one association. There has been outstanding progress.

The good news is that the Indian High Commissioner paid us a visit last week and we (in fact after this meeting with you) will be going to the Indian High Commission. When we spoke to the Indian High Commissioner, he said we are not just sitting on gold mine but on a diamond mine. So you can be rest assured that our discussion with India being the most successful nation in the world on outsourcing programme, our performance in outsourcing will soon be different.

I wish you the best in this endeavour but my reservation is how India will share their secret in outsourcing with a potential competitor.

It does not work that way. The truth of the matter is that they are beginning to suffer high cost of staff. In this outsourcing thing, what is important is what you pay the call centre operators. Their costs are increasing that they are looking for an alternative location for their call centres. India is beginning to look at Nigeria as their number one choice for location of their call centres.