By Seun Adams
The Chief Executive Officer of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Mr. Kashifu Abdullahi on Tuesday tasked technophiles and technology experts to get ready for navigation of new innovations and ideas in post COVID-19 era.
The DG, spoke as a panelist during the Africa Tech Leaders Webinar Series organised by Digital Jewels with the theme: ‘COVID-19 Pandemic: The Africa Leaders Outlook.’
He said with all that has happened during the Coronavirus scourge, African countries can still key into technology and digitise its processes, adding that this will boast the continent’s economy after the pandemic.
Nigeria, he said, has already laid a foundation on which digital services can help revive the economy that were ravaged by pandemic.
The DG explained that digital transformation has positively played a big role during this pandemic in accelerating the trends of digital technologies and how it will also help us to address the changes.
NITDA, according to him has come up with different programmes to cushion the effect of COVID-19 especially in Nigeria since the outbreak of the pandemic.
He said: “For me the scourge has completely shattered so many planned events and activities across the globe, but that should not be a yardstick for innovators not coming up with new ideas that will help in reviving Nigeria’s economy.
“For me, the promising silver lining in this pandemic is accelerating technology trends and shaping the future of digital economy and digital transformation in general.
“We took digital transformation as a journey, and it started some years back. President Muhammadu Buhari redesignated our Ministry from Communications to Communications and Digital Economy.
“This is a giant step in achieving our target in transforming Nigeria into digital country.”
“The Federal Executive Council set up a policy that will be cascaded to MDAs and NITDA is issuing regulatory instruments that can help any MDAs to perform its work better. Also, we issued guidelines, standard and framework for government policymakers and other stakeholders to deliver their Technological services efficiently,” he maintained.
While answering question on a recently concluded Nigeria COVID-19 Innovation Challenge, Inuwa said that, the idea was to find a solution to the effect of Coronavirus using technology measures.
“We initiated Nigeria COVID-19 Innovation Challenge that brought innovators together to ideate digital strategy and how to contain the spread of the virus and prepare us for post COVID-19 era. During the opening of the challenge, we received over 1500 applications from different Ministries, Agencies, Presidential Task Force on COVID -19 and the Private Sector.” he said.
On the rising cost of data and poor network connectivity in Nigeria, he said, “it is not within NITDA’s jurisdiction, it is the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) that has the mandate to license telecommunication and internet service providers.
However, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Mr. Ibrahim Pantami, has been talking about improving the services, especially reviewing the cost, which is a process.
NCC, he added is already working on that and I am sure they will engage stakeholders to improve telecommunication services.
The CEO also stated that some of the policies the agency has rolled out include Nigerian enterprise architecture and Nigerian e-Government masterplan which are documented to highlight short and long term plan on what NITDA intend to achieve in IT adoption and investment.
“At NITDA, we came up with different initiatives to prepare the way for Digital transformation, among others, we have developed and implemented as follows: Nigeria e-government master plan, Nigeria eGovernment Framework, Nigeria eGovernment Enterprise Architecture, Nigeria Cloud Computing Polices, Digital First initiative and Nigeria Smart Initiative Policy Framework. These initiatives have been helping us all during this COVID-19. They will continue to assist us even after the pandemic.” he said.