The Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, in this interview with CHIMA AKWAJA, speaks on the activities of her ministry in the last six months.
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At your first public forum with the media, you admitted that there is a gap between the GSM and CDMA operators in the telecom industry and you promised to do something about it. Over the past one year, according to NCC statistics, CDMA subscription has dwindled further by 1.3 million lines; what is the ministry going to do to arrest the downward slide?
We did see some issue with the CDMA industry and many of the companies in that industry were dying – they weren’t doing very well. Yes, we are investigating that. We have spoken to a number of them to understand what really the issues are, and some of their biggest issues are the cost of carrying their traffic.
The cost of carrying bandwidth from the undersea cables to the hinterland is probably one of the highest and this is a cost to these operators. What we are doing is looking at ways we can bring these costs down, because, for them, their subscriber base is not that large.
Their calls are being terminated by the GSM operators and they have to pay interconnect charges; a number of these things are affecting them. We are beginning to have more clarity on what the issues are.
In September, I identified the problems. Now we have done some more research and investigation on what the issues are and we are working with them to see what we can do because these are indigenous players and we are going to make sure that we do all that we can to make sure that they survive – by ensuring that there is a level playing field for them.
What intervention or collaboration is your ministry involved in ensuring quality services by telecom operators and ensuring broadband penetration nationwide?
The quality of service in the telecoms industry has been a sore point. Just recently, the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) released revised service guidelines to network operators which will be strictly monitored and enforced. We are also watching very closely the actualisation of commitments that have been made by the major network operators to make value adding investments to their infrastructure to increase the quality of service.
This brings me to ICT infrastructure. We set a target to double our broadband penetration from six per cent to 12 per cent in the next three years. The Ministry? and the NCC are working to develop the intervention areas that will be critical to do this and, importantly, the industry, with the support of the ministry, will be crafting a critical ICT infrastructure Bill to protect the existing ICT assets that we have from willful or accidental damage.
You will agree with me that ICT infrastructure has become as important as the roads, rail network and power network. So, we really need to protect ICT infrastructure by making sure that there is a law on that. The economic impacts of damage to ICT infrastructure are huge in country like ours, which we are trying to make a knowledge and service-based economy. You will agree with me that this is substantial progress from a new ministry and I must thank my colleagues in the ministry and the industry for helping us to work so quickly.
Recently, your ministry unveiled a draft national ICT policy; what inputs are going into this? and what role will the stakeholders play in the final document?
We have released a draft of the ICT policy on January 9, 2012, and this is the first time that Nigeria will have a harmonised ICT policy. We have had various policies covering the IT and telecommunications industries but the convergence of these technologies has necessitated the industry to have an integrated policy document.
We had a small in-house committee working to harmonise all the existing policies and reflect the new realities, where necessary, in order to provide a working document and a take-off point that can be used for robust discussion and debate by all stakeholders.
Remember that these documents that we are harmonizing have already been through their own stakeholder debate and inputs. Some of them are quite recent – 2010, 2011 – and so the release of the draft document is really the first process in the finalisation of the new ICT policy.
Since January 9, we’ve received very good comments, both from Nigeria and from offshore, from industry groups, companies in the ICT industry and other ICT industry stakeholders. The comments are being collated right now in preparation for a public forum that will hold in March to coincide with our regular six months forum, which we promised to engage the industry after every six months.
The public forum on the discussion and debate on the ICT policy will be our second stakeholder engagement. We hope that at this stakeholder forum we will come to a consensus at what the big issues are and ensure that we have a policy document that all our stakeholders believe in, buy into it and work with us to implement.
What does the ICT policy document mean to government?
It is such an important document for us in the ministry. The policy document is really a statement of intent on what government wants to do with the ICT industry, and once we agree on this statement of intent – I hope we will do that at the forum, the next step is to develop a country ICT master plan that includes an implementation plan; it includes detailed implementation activities, timelines, resources, funding, funding requirements and funding options. In some instances, we may have to create additional policy documents because those areas are so large and they require us to really state in a much lower level of detail what we want in those areas.
The process of the stakeholder forum and the development of the national ICT master plan will be a lot more broader and it will require the deep involvement of industry stakeholders.
We expect that this process, from policy document to implementation, timelines, resources and funding, including approval, will really completed by June/July 2012. We are not waiting for this policy to be approved before we begin to intervene in areas where we already have consensus with the industry as priority areas.
What are these priority areas?
Let me just tell you briefly what those priority areas are.? The first is the establishment of the ICT incubation centres. There is a public and private sector joint committee working on it. These centres, we hope, will help to accelerate the development of commercial software industry by showing that there is appropriate support and funding for software and other IT entrepreneurs.
Again, these are not so much government bodies – just to put in place enabling environment, making little investment and we hope the private sector will take this and run with them; of course, software innovation as well. We will have a professionally managed IT Innovation Fund with seed capital by government, but we hope again that the private sector will put some money into this IT Innovation Fund and it will be the basis by which we will fund our software entrepreneurs.
They cannot succeed or thrive on the local or traditional base lending because they don’t have collateral to start with, and sometimes it takes one or two years for that idea to be commercially viable, so they don’t have the revenue streams to pay off the loan.
Through this Innovating fund, a venture capitalist will invest in people and their ideas – when the idea is commercially successful or commercially viable. That is how the venture capitalist gets his money back – like you’ve heard about Facebook, Tweeter, etc, and based on Initial Public Offer (IPO), everybody gets their money back several times over.??
We hope that we have about three or four pilots across the country by the end of the third quarter, may be early fourth quarter of 2012. Just last week, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), an implementing agency of the ministry, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Cross river State government to leverage a part of the infrastructure at the Tinapa Business and Leisure Resort. This will create a knowledge city that will attract players in the ICT industry. One of the pilot incubation centres will be located in this Knowledge City. There a number of other MoUs with other stakeholders in the works and we shall be announcing them at the appropriate time.
Before your ministry was established last year, the ICT industry was talking about convergence between the NCC and the NBC; what is government doing about it, especially now that NBC is not under your ministry?
On the question about convergence and what we are doing about it, I think there are several schools of thought on convergence. We believe very strongly in the ministry about convergence. If you’ve read the ICT draft policy, in the policy we are recommending a converged regulator that will regulate the entire ICT industry. As we finalise the ICT policy, it will then determine whether or not we need a converged regulator pending what the industry thinks, but, in the policy document that you have read or that you’ve seen, we are recommending or proposing a converged regulator. That is the stand of the Government on NCC and NBC (Nigeria Broadcasting Commission) right now.? It is converged regulator for the industry because of the fact that the industry is converged.
Therefore, with all your telephone sets, you can make telephone calls, can broadcast, can watch films – all of these? on these devices. You need a converged regulator to manage the entire industry.
What is the vision of government for Nigeria’s software industry?
With the right training and capacity building,? youths in Nigeria will not only be able to develop the necessary skills that will enable them innovate and create software applications to be reckoned with, but it will also enable them to establish IT businesses that can? thrive and make a difference.
The youth of Nigerian are dynamic, hardworking and entrepreneurial in nature, and hungry for technology. If given the chance and the enabling environment to develop their inherent skills, they will not only thrive but will make Nigerians and Africans proud. We have seen the result of what exposure to ICT can do with the remarkable achievement of some of our youths who have excelled in several local and international software competitions.? One of the priority areas of the ministry is to develop a strong and vibrant local software industry.
There is reliable information from the National Office for Technology Acquisition and and Promotion (NOTAP) that Nigerians spends hundreds of millions of dollars purchasing software from foreign firms.
Developing a vibrant software industry does more than reduce this heavy import bill: it creates jobs especially in the young population; it will serve the unique and peculiar needs of Nigeria and Nigerians and, if well nurtured and developed, Nigeria could well be the country that is exporting software to other countries.
Developing skills and empowering young Nigerians to be software entrepreneurs is an important part of building a vibrant, commercially successful and socially useful software industry, but there are still many other factors that are required to make this aspiration a reality.
What reforms are going on to transform government processes to be e-government compliant and reduce cost of governance?
We are continuing the reform process in Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST) to transform NIPOST into an agency that will not only provide universal postal services but will, through its existing and planned diverse infrastructure, be central to Nigeria’s financial and digital inclusion agenda and aspirations. NIPOST is going through internal reforms and we are supporting them at that.
NIPOST has large and diverse infrastructure, with over a thousand post offices, and two thousand plus agencies across the country. These are infrastructure that nobody else has. We’ll leverage the infrastructure to achieve our aspiration for financial inclusion and digital inclusion. We are already in the early stages of collaboration with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to do this.
Internally within government, we have commenced the process by which we can begin to leverage technology better to reduce the cost of governance and increase the transparency of governance.? In conjunction with Galaxy Backbone Plc, the provider of ICT infrastructure services for government, we are looking very carefully at government IT spending and implementing opportunities for cost reduction, especially in the areas of application hosting,? data centres and connectivity. We will also be working to increase government’s institutional presence on the social media in a more strategic manner to facilitate the flow of accurate, relevant and timely information from government to her citizens.? You have probably heard about the planned Citizen Information Centres. This is a technology-driven and technology-based initiative that will facilitate the provision of government services to the general public. You will hear more about this initiative in the coming months.
The thrust of the e-government strategy is really quite simple; it is about providing more services to the citizens using technology over the internet or telephone. It is about using technology to do that. We should realise that there are quite a number of government services that are provided using the internet. I know that some part of some friends’ passport applications are over the internet. For some foreign missions, the procurement of visas to come to Nigeria is over the internet. Many parts of the driver licence application are over the internet. There are pockets of these that are being done already, but what we need as an e-government strategy is a much more holistic and well articulated approach to doing this.
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