The Nigerian House Committee on Information and Communication Technology, ICT says that harnessing the potentials in ICT will boost revenue generation for the country.
The Chairman of the Committee, Mr Lado Suleija, stated this during a briefing by Galaxy Backbone, GBB Ltd, in Abuja.
Suleija said since the country was now in the 4th Industrial Revolution, which is the digital transformation age, leveraging on the potentials would provide great opportunities.
He explained that Galaxy LTD as a government-owned company was saddled with so much responsibilities on ICT, especially in the area of centralising database of all the Ministries Departments and Agencies of the government.
Quality Service
The Chairman gave an assurance to look into the GBB’s challenges, amend and enact new laws that would enable the company to provide quality services to their customers.
“Actually based on the submission of the presentation of the managing director galaxy backbone we are able to notice the challenges galaxy backbone are facing and why they are not giving available services to their customers. It has to do with some laws and also policies. We will look into that with the view to make amendments and enact new laws that will give them a conducive enabling environment to give good quality services to their customers.
“We will work together and make sure we look into the laws and also policies so that they will be able to discharge their responsibilities for the team,” he said.
The Vice-Chairman of the Committee, Mr Solomon Adeolu, urged the government to synergise amongst MDAs by giving them a lot of attention because of the roles they would eventually play.
Adeolu said that the document read during the briefing was impressive and revealing, that the GBB had the responsibility to drive the 4th industrial revolution in the country.
He advised that a platform should be provided for startups to look into the technology and create programmes that would bring solutions to the Nigerian markets.
“The responsibility in this era is to drive the 4th industrial revolution; we have gone through the 1st, 2nd and the 3rd industrial revolution…….The 3rd industrial revolution was the dot come era and a lot of people made so much money, countries, cooperations, individuals and right now we have the 4th industrial revolution.
“I will like you to look into providing the platform for startups, there are a lot of startups and you need to look at these technology startups and see if you can create programmes that will enable the startups bring solutions to the market,” Adeolu explained.
The Managing Director of Galaxy Backbone, Professor Mohammed Abubakar, while making a presentation noted that despite the state of art infrastructure, it was increasingly difficult to compete with private sector companies because of compliance requirements that were peculiar to public sector institutions.
“With constraints imposed by the government process on compliance obligations, budgetary provision fails to match a steep rise in demand for Galaxy’s services; Internal Infrastructure readiness issues with some MDAs. Lack of access to LANs and other internal infrastructure of MDAs by GBB staff,” he added.
Funding and Legislation
Abubakar appealed to the Committee to intervene in the area of funding and legislation to make the company more variable.
He also urged the Committee to support proper enforcement of the SGF’s circular on GBB’s mandate, directing all MDAs to consolidate and centralise government Data Centres, transversal applications and Communication networks.
Source: Channels TV
