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Nigeria: ICT Is Crucial for Inclusive Development |
| Source: |
http://allafrica.com/stories/201208050265.html |
| Source Date: |
Sunday, August 05, 2012 |
| Focus: |
Knowledge Management in Government
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| Country: |
Nigeria |
| Created: |
Aug 06, 2012 |
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Interview
In her speech at the fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2012) at Georgia Institute in March 2012, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, the Minister of Communication Technology, stated: "The mobile phone, indeed any mobile device with internet access, can become or has become more than an instrument of communication. This seeming plaything for the more affluent has now become an instrument of development, and inclusive development at that".
Johnson, a passionate advocate of ICT's power to bridge the digital and poverty divide and enable inclusive development across all levels, is one of the professionals behind the success of public policy in Nigeria. The Minister, who has the quality and depth of a thorough professional required to manage public service in a growing economy like Nigeria's, holds a bachelor's degree in electrical and electronic engineering from the University of Manchester and a master's degree in digital electronics from King's College, London.
Prior to her appointment as Minister, Omobola was nearing completion of a doctorate at Cranfield University, focused on corporate leadership practices in emerging markets. She joined Accenture, an international management consulting firm in 1985 and was there for twenty five years (five years as Country Managing Director). She is also the founding Chairperson and member of Board of Trustees of Women in Management and Business (WIMBIZ).
In this chat, Johnson explains the role of the ministry in alleviating poverty, the challenges facing the one year old ministry, the opportunities that abound and what the ministry is doing to enhance the country's development among other things.
From your own point of view, why do government policies fail to achieve their goal?
A lot of things have been said about policy implementation in the country. We have a lot of very good policies, but the challenge comes when it gets to execution and execution is about capacity, it is about staying power, sustainability and of course funding. I think these are the areas where we could do with some improvement in policy implementation, but overall as a country we have very good policies.
The challenges that are facing the nation are enormous, the role of ICT in national development is quite challenging. Since coming on board, what steps have you taken so far at making sure that ICT of today meaningfully impacts Nigeria's development?
I think first of all ICT is already contributing to the country's growth. I think what we need to do is to accelerate that contribution to national development. More recently, studies on socio-economic development are showing that ICT not only has an impact on development but is actually a necessary and required ingredient for development.
Adoption of ICTs lead to development in social, health, education and business sectors. At the Ministry, we are presenting the general policy direction, policy intervention and creating the enabling environment for inclusive development in Nigeria.
For example, we are facilitating the buildout of a robust, ubiquitous and cost effective broadband network aimed at increasing broadband penetration within the country from 6% to about 20 - 25% by 2015. Broadband or fast access to the internet is a key success factor for national socio-economic development. We are setting up incubation centers geared towards facilitating an enabling environment to promote software development.
Before the end of the year, two incubation centers, one in Abuja and the other in Tinapa, Calabar, will be on stream to increase the skills and capabilities of software developers and the commercial viability and quality of software developed in Nigeria The centres will unleash the creativity of our young people in both software and hardware. Imagine what will happen if these young people can produce the software required in banking, security and telecommunications.
The Ministry is also in the process of developing a national internet based portal that will facilitate easy access to government information such that by December 2014, every single Federal Government MDA will have a functioning information websites domiciled on the portal.
We are working on local content guidelines that will be issued in Q4 of 2012, that will result in an increase in domestic value added to the ICT industry. The MCT is working to ensure that made/assembled in Nigeria brands are more favourably positioned to achieve our national objectives of job creation, domestic value added and growth in the ICT industry.
There is also the issue of e-governance?
Also to promote egovernance, the Ministry by the end of the first quarter of 2013 will set up a 250 seat contact centre that would foster government-to-citizen engagement. These are primarily call centres that citizens can call to obtain information about government services.
For citizens that have access to the internet, accurate and up to date information will also be available on websites as well as some of the forms that are required to procure government services. We will pilot one centre before the end of the year or early 2013. The success of these initiatives will mean that regardless of where you live in Nigeria, how much you earn, how educated you are, you will have access to similar levels of basic government services.
On the business side, what we are looking at now is local content, how do we improve the participation of Nigerians within the ICT industry? I think the opportunities are enormous.
Imagine the benefits of broadband educatio n- in the area of e learning, health-telemedicine, patient data collection and health records access, to the business community-wider customer and supplier base for SME's, Agriculture - create access to information on good cultivation practices for farmers as well as access to market prices, removal of intermediaries etc
What are you doing to ensure that the benefits of GSM is not truncated due to bad services?
Phones has taken a life of its own; really and truly. As each day goes by, voice penetration gets deeper and demand for data increases. The voice segment is the first revolution; the second is data. The focus of the ministry now is around the second revolution which is data. When l say data, l mean broadband: that is what we are focusing on right now. We have a lot of internet capacity on our sea shores.
What we are working on right now is how to get that capacity to all of Nigeria at reasonable costs and to the satisfaction of every Nigerian. Data is critical to enabling developments in education, in health, in business and in agriculture. The ICT policy is being finalised and will provide the overarching direction for the ICT industry. It also includes the expected result in the industry when the policy is fully implemented; and implementation ofcourse means working with NCC, infrastructure providers and other stakeholders.
Consumers are not happy at the quality of service being provided by telecoms operators. What is the ministry doing about this as the supervising ministry?
It is a case of the demand. The quality of service is like this because we don't have adequate infrastructure for the amount of traffic that operators are carrying. This has an effect on what is going on. There are issues that network providers are facing in providing infrastructure. Issues like vandalisation of infrastructure, multiple taxation, right of way etc. What we have been doing in the ministry is to remove some of these bottlenecks inhibiting infrastructure provision such that impediments to infrastructure provision is removed.
One of the steps that we have taken and which will ultimately address poor quality of service in the telecoms industry is the issuance of new Right of Way (RoW) guidelines in collaboration with the Ministry of Works that will henceforth guide the laying of fibre cables on federal highways in the country. We are also currently working with the Ministry of Environment on modalities that will ensure that Base Stations are no longer closed down.
But while we do all of these the network operators also have to invest in the upgrade of their networks to carry the increased voice and data traffic that we expect. The NCC is monitoring KPIs of operators and the level of compliance by the operators very closely to ensure that service quality delivery is attained in the sector.
UN sees ICT as tool to fight poverty, how is the ministry helping to achieve this task of using ICT to fight poverty?
The way you fight poverty is to educate and create jobs. Look at what is happening right now. The way you leverage ICT for education matters in poverty eradication. Quality of education depends on where you are living. If you look at health: how do we fight poverty in health?
It's possible if ICT infrastructure is leveraged. We know of telemedicine- qualified doctors can stay in urban areas and do the diagnoses of people in the rural areas where qualified doctors are lacking. Jobs can also be created with ICTs. Rural ICT centers are a tool for facilitating entrepreneurship. These centers can serve as a means of entrepreneurship for individuals in communities and provide services for the benefit of people in the community.
What is the role of the ministry in the transformation agenda of the government?
If you look at the centrality of the transformation agenda, it is premised on job and wealth creation. ICT provides a tremendous opportunity for Nigeria to create new kinds of jobs especially for our young people. It also provides a clear opportunity for the diversification of our economy. Today the Ict sector is growing at about 30% and is contributing 5.4% of GDP. With execution of the right policies, especially local content this growth can be sustained and contribution to GDP increased.
In the last one year now, what has been your achievement so far in telecommunications?
Let me say that it is just not about telecommunication. This is the ministry of ICT. Firstly, the ministry was created and it started on the 17th of July last year. The ministry is functioning and running. What we have done in the last 12 months is articulate the first national ICT policy, after a harmonisation and finalisation process that will soon be concluded. In government's strategic intent for ICT, we have identified seven key result areas that we are prioritizing between now and 2015.
These include; cost reduction and transparency in governance; a ubiquitous and cost effective national ICT infrastructure; a multi-faceted strategy that enables equitable access to the infrastructure; citizen engagement and convenient delivery of government information and strong support for the development of education, health, agriculture and financial services on the ICT infrastructure.
We are promoting Skills development initiatives to sustain the industry and ICT entrepreneurship and innovation have been identified as a core requirement for the development of a strong and vibrant ICT industry. We are working on what I call the next revolution -software and data. Software in the sense that we have, 90 million subscribers who need applications.
Internally within government, in the last one year, we have been working to leverage technology to reduce the cost of governance and increase the transparency of governance. Thus a 250 citizen call center will be up and running by the end of the year to facilitate the provision of government services to the people. We have commenced the process of re-engineering a number of processes in a few key Ministries before they are put online.
These initiatives should serve to reduce the cost of and ensure the effectiveness of governance. There is no doubt that if you put more information online, it is a more efficient government you will have. We are in the process of doubling broadband penetration from its current level so that the number of Nigerians with access to the internet will be more than doubled by 2015.
Currently 45 Million Nigerians or approximately 28% of our population have access to the internet. In the last one year, we have been working on reforming NIPOST to transform it into an enabler of financial and digital inclusion.
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