The Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, has identifi ed failure to consider the peculiar problem in Ni g e r i a In f o r m a t i o n C o m m u n i c a t i o n s Technology (ICT) as one of the reasons that IT projects fail in the country.’ Pantami stated that, many laudable IT projects fail because ‘we )Nigeria) do not give priority to our peculiar needs before deploying most of our IT solutions.’
He cited the case of whopping sum of 470m USD the nation invested on the Close Circuit Television (CCTV) project which has now become moribund as a typical examples adding that as “a people we need to think globally and act locally” Th e DG who was speaking on the backdrop of the Nokia’s visit to the Agency’s Corporate Headquarters also informed the meeting that the country is not ripe for smart city projects. “Smart city is very critical to our collective development as a nation but it should not be seen as our immediate priority.
Our immediate priority is to see the advancement of capacity building, digital literacy and creation of hubs across of the country where IT startups could be incubated,” he stated. Earlier, the Managing Director, NOKIA Nigeria, Mr. Richard Edet said N O K I A s o u g h t t h e partnership of NITDA in areas of capacity building, establishment of innovation hubs and deployment of Nigeria’s Smart City projects across the country.
Edet said,” the partnership also aimed at exploring possible ways NITDA and NOKIA could establish innovation hubs to incubate and nurture startups to become viable businesses and establish a government cloud storage system which would add value to e-government initiative of the Agency”. In his brief remark, the NITDA Director of e- Government and Regulation, Dr. Usman Gambo Abdullahi, noted that the issue of cloud storage is very critical because data safety is very important and an integral part of the DG’s seven points agenda.
