By Thompson ABISOLA
An ICT expert, Mr Chiedozie Ihueze on Tuesday urged government at all levels to develop necessary infrastructure and roll out ICT programmes that could contribute to the country’s economic and social development.
Ihueze said in Abuja that poor infrastructure mitigated the rapid development of ICT in the country.
He expressed the view in his assessment of development of ICT as Nigeria marked its 58thindependence on Oct 1.
According to Ihueze, Nigeria offers a good case study of a country that recognises the importance of ICT in advancing economic growth and improving quality of life.
“But like many other countries, Nigeria also faces many challenges in developing the necessary infrastructure needed to boost ICT.
“Power has remained a major challenge. For instance, many ICT experts have the skills to produce software but are limited due to lack of power.
“We have come a long way in terms of software production but epileptic power supply is affecting production.
“This is because it is very expensive to run generator with the attendant cost of petrol.
“We don’t lack the capacity or manpower to develop our ICT and software, but we lack power to host the servers that host our domain as it takes months to develop software.
“The software used in JAMB is locally produced. Nigeria has launched SAT-1R, which was designed by a Nigerian but built on a foreign soil.
“So the challenge lies with government being able to support us with power,’’ Ihueze said.
He emphasised that the country needed to create bandwidth using Nigerian satellite in order to force down the price.
The ICT expert, however, rated Nigeria as one of the highest consumers of ICT in Africa.
According to him, development of ICT in Nigeria had provided the needed platform for building content and the applications necessary for social, educational, political and economic interactions.
“This has greatly promoted e-commerce as platform for cultural integration whereby people meet on-line.
“Aside some of these benefits, Nigeria embraced globalisation from the onset and as such ICT development should be a priority of the government,’’ Ihueze said.
