eNigeria mobilises W/Africa for WSIS targets

Dignitaries at the recently concluded eNigeria conference

By several measures, West Africa is not the favourite destination of the world and neither is it an investor’ delight. The sub-region is populated by over 200 million people most of whom are poor and overwhelmed by a depressed economy. West Africa has about the lowest GDP in the world. Capital in-flow merely trickles in while Nigeria, the leading country in the sub-region, remains completely depended on crude oil export and the attendant vagaries of the international oil market.

But that may soon be a thing of the past if the political leaders, egg heads and other stakeholders that met at the just ended eNigeria 2004 in Abuja, organised by the National Information Technology and Development Agency (NITDA), find a way round executing the theme-thrust of the three days event: ‘Implementing The WSIS Process In Nigeria.’

“Singapore makes several times over the total earnings of all the countries in West Africa and they have information technology to thank for this,” said Governor Ibrahim Turaki of Jigawa State in his goodwill message. The Nigerian north eastern state has in the last four years been able to set up what is considered one of the most robust and wide-spread IT machines in an environment where IT still takes the back seat.  Turaki wants West African political leaders to build a common front to tap into the resources of an information society.  

Since its creation nearly three decades ago, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the sub-region political and economic bloc, has not gone beyond being an organ for articulating rhetoric. There have been plans for common economic agenda, single currency, one central communication network foster round the Regional African Satellite Communication (RASCOM) project, and even a regional rail service. None has seen the light of day yet.

But the entire sub-region risks being cut-off from the new world order, said President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. To the Nigerian septuagenarian political leader, the sub-region must wake up and get integrated into the fast evolving Information Society as expressed in the article of faith of the World Society Information Society (WSIS) which held last year in Geneva. The Nigerian President was at the Geneva event.

 “The ECOWAS Secretariat should give necessary priority attention to implementing the WSIS Plan of Action through the support for ICT initiatives and the synergizing and producing of a comprehensive ICT Policy for the sub-region. The Secretariat also necessarily needs to lend full support to the implementation of the framework to be designed at the ends of this conference and put in place adequate monitoring mechanism,” Obasanjo told his audience at the eNigeria event at Abuja inside the ECOWAS secretariat.

The WSIS targets for 2015 include “to connect all villages and establish community access points; to connect universities, colleges, secondary schools and primary schools with ICTs; to connect scientific and research centres with ICTs; to connect health centres and hospitals with ICTS, to adapt all primary and secondary schools curricula to meet the challenges of the Information Society; to ensure that more than half the world’s inhabitants have access to ICTs within their reach.”

In a sub-region where nearly 90 per cent of the populations still do not have access to ICT facilities, “NITDA’s theme for eNigeria is just appropriate,” said Director General of NITDA Professor Gabriel Ajayi.

“It is significant to note that this conference is closely following the ECOWAS meeting of ICT Ministers’ recently held in Dakar, Senegal These are obvious signs that we are ready in this sub-region to really embrace the current of ICT diffusion drive,” the Nigerian Minister of Science and Technology Prof. Isoun Turner had earlier declared in his speech at the opening ceremony of the event.

But for the sub-region to fully harness the potentials of ICT, it must first address the “issues of Internet governance and financing of investments for the acquisition of ICT in countries with poor or no access,” said Mr. Adama Samassekou, president of the African Academy for Languages and president of the WSIS Preparatory Committee for the Geneva Phase. Samassekou, who was a former Minister of Education in Mali, offered that one way the sub-region could address the problem of funding ICT would be to aggressively pursue the creation of a Digital Solidarity Fund as proposed by President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal.  

The three day event featured exhibitors: Omatek Computers, Microsoft, Direct-on-PC, Teledom International and Intel among others. Over 20 speakers were at the event, they include General Manager, Intel Africa, Steve Nossel, John Dada of the Fansuam Foundation, an ICT-centred NGO based in Kafachan, Kaduna State, Director of Technical Research and Standards at the NCC, Dr Sylvanus Ehikioya and Pape Gorgui Toure of the Policies, Strategies, and Financing Department of the ITU. (Word version of eNigeria communiqué available on JACITAD website www.jacitad.org)

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