ROUND TABLE

We are dominated by foreign skills

The local software industry is certainly not a complete neophyte but it is definitely not growing as should elicit appreciation. If anything, it elicits unease. For an industry that is, by consensus, regarded as potentially able to replace crude oil as FOREX earner, there is as much chaos inn it as you would have in the oily waters of the Niger-Delta region.  More worrisome is the dominance of the sector by foreign solutions, albeit software is a universal phenomenon. In growing the foreign brands, the local skill-set remains under-developed and the few local solutions rearing to grow in the market are quickly extinguished.  It is an unfeeling market; the vulnerable get smothered out.

Local software practitioners think there is a way out to reduce this vulnerability. Unmindful of their own business schedules, they flew in from different parts of the country to be guests of IT Edge. One from Abuja, another from Calabar and yet another from Port Harcourt.  They spoke in this interactive Roundtable Session on “What is wrong with Nigeria Software?”  [Unedited version available in print edition of IT Edge at major news stands all over Nigeria, Accra and Kumasi (Ghana]

The Speakers

Dr Chris Nwannena

President of the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS), and CEO Condata Limited

O’Seun Ogunseitan

Software Analyst, CEO Media Support and Computer Services Limited

Austin Onwughai

CEO Orstin O’ Perri Consulting

Segun Oruame

Editor, IT Edge

Bayero Agabi

Executive Editor, IT Edge

Bayero: Gentlemen, you are welcome to the IT Edge Roundtable Session, the maiden edition as it were and on indigenous software. We hope to sufficiently look at the challenges of developing, packaging, branding, marketing software from Nigeria as commercially viable products within global perspectives

Segun: It is actually a series and more Roundtable fora will immediately follow this. As the ancient will say, let no man’s heart be troubled. It is not war but a debate. It is good to know that we have the president of the Nigerian Computer Society (NCS) here, a developer himself, over there is another software developer, the chief architect of a software company with two solutions in the market for school management and payroll.  And here is a technology analyst and a software tester. Gentlemen, IT Edge says welcome.

The Big Question really is, what’s wrong with Nigeria software? Let us build more questions round this. What do we need to do to push our software into the global market? Are the software practitioners doing enough? If they are doing enough why don’t we, for example, have software in the mould of Finacle from Infosys of India. What is wrong? Is Nigeria software cursed?

Dr. Chris Nwannena

Nwannena: I like that question and must say that I am happy to be here.  Let me start by saying that I have always talked about software, I eat software, I dream software, and I will continue to be like this. At my age, I am still not idle but busy at my work and a number of people get amazed and everybody asks me, are you still developing? Are you still advancing? In fact, I am still developing. What is wrong with Nigeria software? There is nothing wrong with Nigeria software. What we do is exactly what others do elsewhere; it would be inappropriate to say that this software is developed in Nigerian way. There is just nothing like that. Software is software, the principles of developing is the same from analysis, from design, to development and packaging. It is the same everywhere in the world,
The point is that we are a bit of late starters and India from where Finacle, the example you’ve given, came from started earlier and they also formalised that sector. You don’t do anything half-hazardly, we have not tried to formalise the software sector in Nigeria and what do I mean by formalizing? Government has not shown considerable interest, and until they realise that this is a veritable source of income, until they appreciate it is not only oil that can make great wealth for Nigeria and that there are other avenues….

Bayero: Doctor before we go into government role in this, has the software entrepreneur, I mean the developer, done enough to warrant government patronage in terms of marketing?

Nwannena:  That is what I am saying,  if government wait till we bring down heaven before they can formalise the sector then we might as well wait forever. Government, I have said it in every forum, we have the potential all you need to do is help us unleash that potential to arrive at our destination…

O'seun Ogunseitan

Segun: So what do we need to do, as a nation, is to step up policies that would give all the professionals a sense of direction in what they are doing?

 O’Seun: There is a bit of lesson from Microsoft’s history and how the Indian government stepped to with policies that helped to formalised its sector at home. Microsoft woke up and discovered that more than 30% of its foreign staff in Washington were Indians, they still are, and that it was paying so much to bring them to the US. Naturally if you bring me to the US and I tell you my grandmother, my great grandmother want to come to America, Microsoft either brings them or refuses their service. Microsoft spent so much money bringing the programmers and their families until they decided they took the initiative to go to India and say okay we will create a village here, a technical village, develop the programmers, use their skills to produce the same package just like Dr. Nwannena said, there is no software that is Nigerian. The software is either working or not working.

If there is a problem in America, if it is a Nigerian that is able to solve it, that is it. We have a situation where government must not wait and like you said; it is government that will provide the infrastructure. It is basically the absent of infrastructures that is the problem.  If you ask me, Nigeria has the highest potential because this is the only country in the world where you have some two, three high million young men that are not engaged.                       

Bayero: Austin, as a young software developer what are those infrastructures you think you need?

Austin: The key issue is infrastructure. I fully support what O’Seun and doctor just said, there cannot be Nigerian software, you just look at the software and differentiate standards. Standard is in different levels. But the infrastructure we are talking about now is a Nigerian thing. Specifically, take this real life scenario: Someone wants to programme a software, you are writing a software, you are loading or downloading and suddenly light goes off, you are in trouble. It is either what you are thinking about, the thought process goes off immediately, and this is a problem for a software developer, the thought process is gone and for you to recover what exactly you wanted to do might take a lot of time. If they handle the area of electricity, the major part of the problem is solved.

And look at the area of creating an enabling the environment apart from electricity, look at school curriculum for example, a fresh graduate in Nigeria today does not understand modern programming techniques, he doesn’t. He will need to go for another training or work in a place for a long time to be able to appreciate certain thing.

Austin Onwughai

Bayero: What is responsible for this?

Austin: It’s the curriculum. The curriculum needs to be upgraded as technology changes. Some of the things O’Seun mentioned before we started this discussion, I never heard of them.

Bayero: Is it that the school system does not recognise that curriculum needs to change or that have refrained from imbibing changes in technological development?

Austin: The school systems cannot act on their own the way it is right now in Nigeria. UNILAG cannot introduce a curriculum without the National University Commission so it has to do with government flow. If government with its necessary agencies realises that change in curriculum is necessary to reflect changes in technology, the school system will be more alive to developments in this area. There has to be a way of alerting all the schools, allowing them to put new updates as part of their curriculum. Take ICAN, for example, if there is a new standard in accounting from the international body or locally, they will together analyse this standard and immediately they publish what they call account external, you can see it reflected in all the schools the next term or next session. They are developing a kind of environment that enables accounting students to be relevant in a global village.

Bayero: If the school curriculum is not changing, does that translate into a lack of technical competence to actually develop software that can move this nation?

O’Seun: No. Definitely not. The beauty of computing and programming is almost innate, it is you, you will develop yourself, and Bill Gates never finished from school. We are talking about the fact that we are not harnessing the opportunity we have. We have five to 10 million young minds that will love to go into computing but they have no electricity at home, they can’t even afford computers, there are no places, spaces they can practice so we are losing what we would have gained.  In the advance communities, they have different for that allows people to interact. Our schools here are defective. Their schools are not, we are in a  situation where there are graduates of Nigerian universities who still can’t use computers.

Bayero: Dr. Nwannena, you represent over 5000 computer professionals in Nigeria, in fact the largest group in West Africa if not Africa for IT professionals, why is it impossible for the software you have developed within your group, for you to package it, brand it and make it commercially viable in such a way that you can each address area that the foreign software is not looking or capable of addressing for now?

Nwannena: When you say why can’t we have commercially viable software. It is not something you can get a straightforward answer to. We operate in a market that is virtually saturated with foreign skills, now what you have to do to beat that skill is what we are trying to do now….

Segun: And what exactly is that?

Nwannena: You have to get yourself into that market. How do you get yourself into that market? This is exactly what we are striving for. It is not that what we are doing here is poorer than what they’ve done elsewhere, it is just like you now at the AIT and you want to be in CNN. How do you get to CNN? Many of the people who I see at CNN are not better than you but you have to work three times harder to get people in CNN to notice you before they can talk to you and see whether you are able to work in CNN. That is what we are struggling for in this sector. It is not an easy task. It is not very easy for me, for example, to take my software and go to America and say I want to sell it, it is not easy. I have to spend a lot in terms of marketing, in terms of contact before I can get somebody to listen to me in the first place - that contact is not easy.

Secondly, we are talking about packaging, I am not going to stay here and tell you we’ve got it all but we’ve got what it takes to go over there and sell our product. We only need government to formalise the sector and then we can go on to fully express our potentials. Marketing something abroad is not easy, is not cheap, packaging requires a lot of money. Most solutions from abroad are packaged in the most sophisticated manner and you have to pay some persons for that area of specialization, we don’t have the money.

Bayero: What exactly do you want the government to do in clear terms?

Nwannena: What we are saying is that government should formalise the sector and …

Bayero: Let us assume you are talking to the government, we want fact and figures, what do you government to do, what is actually bothering you that government need to resolve?

Nwannena: I have said this several times. To formalise the sector, you need infrastructural facilities. We want a software development institute; we want a software research and development council. A software development institute that is where you go to, it is really important to the practical area of software development that we desire in the area of your analysis, your design, your application development and so on. All these are things you can learn by experience, you can also learn through a formal area. In the United states of America, they have a number of software institution that try to bring software engineering as a discipline you have to learn and one of most popular of this institutes is part of a university, that even the whole of United States America armed forces use for software researches.

O’Seun:  I must also say it is not just enough for government to set up a council but it is for the government to set its priorities right. Take this for example,  Nigeria has always have good footballers but when it was just Odegbami and Okala,  just about twenty of them,  the world did not take notice but when you have a country with about hundred top strikers, the world will come there to look for a potential good striker. The point I am trying to say is the people like Dr. Nwannena need to be backed up by a large number of young programmers who would be producing bad, good and average software.

 It is out of those numbers that the Dr. Nwannenas would come out and then they become like cheap labour to build codes for the market. But how can this be feasible? One way is to address the issue of infrastructure and it is not just for government to say we will do that, or we will do this. It must take concrete steps to do something about power, stable electricity, that is key.

Nwannena: Sometimes last year, the government wanted to have the October 1 IT day. October 1 IT day was suppose to bring in the political angle in Information Technology. Look, the president came during the time of CHOGM. He went to Eagles Square and as he was there, all the ministers, anybody that matters in Nigeria, was there and he said this is a project that everybody must be involved in and everybody got involved in it. We want that kind of thing to be done to Information Technology particularly software development. Government has not given it up. 

I think what happens was that the key figure that was coming to promote the idea, did not come. Immediately the government gives political backing to Information Technology, you will see a lot of things beginning to happen.

Bayero: Where does NITDA fit into all these?

Austin:  That is the area I wanted to come in. I will say government is taking a step right now but whether the step is enough is the issue. The body it set up is there.  NITDA is there, they are supposed to direct IT policies, direct how things should be done and all that. Whether NITDA is active or not is another issue.  The issue of an institute is not exactly bad. But I believe that if you equip the universities that are available right now they can perform wonders. We have to ask ourselves, are you saying we should form an institute so that when you graduate, you go back to that institute and learn new programming techniques rather than equipping the universities with recent programming techniques and allow them to bring out these things? They are two different things. If you can empower the universities which are already on ground, give them systems, change their curricula in such a way that they can reflect the changes in the industry, then the role of the software institute will be more defined.  It is not enough to form a policy or form a body to just come and declare something,  let’s itemize one by one, areas that we must handle, hold the bull by the horn, handle this area, solve it, like we said one of the fundamental areas is electricity, if you handle that area, not just for software a lot of problems will naturally die. If you handle that area you can now talk about the issue of funding. Thank God, they are trying to set up Centers of Excellence where they say you can easily go in if you want to write software.  We hope such things will not become political so that in the next few years when a new government comes in, the whole thing dies naturally and another First Lady starts another thing. If we have a situation where there is continuity, then Center of Excellence will help. But more than the Center of Excellence, we need to overhaul our universities today. It is not that we don’t have people that can teach, we have lecturers, we have people that are striving and we have the students, they are ready to learn all these things but the enabling environment is not there. Like O’Seun said, computer is something that you have to develop in yourself and that is just it. But let us have the enabling environment to develop ourselves.

O’Seun: There is nothing stopping someone studying Computer Science from taking a notebook to the class. 

Bayero: Austin, you have a programme, what did it take you to develop such a programme?

Austin: Like O’Seun said, there is something that urges you on if you must be a developer, there is something within you.

Bayero: You’ve mentioned lack of infrastructure, lack of regular power supply but in spite of these, you were able to come up with a programme, so what did you have to go through to bring this to fruition.

Austin: Just like I told you that I was in Calabar and I felt that I could start living there. It  is not everybody that will like to live in Lagos but people live in Lagos and struggle through the problems, the traffic and all that and still make themselves excellent but that is through struggle. We are not talking about suffering and programming. It shouldn’t go that way because the way we brought out this, this idea was conceptualise three years before we started. When we had the idea, we didn’t have the things like notebooks and so we had to save money and gather some things it shouldn’t be that way. You discourage a lot of other people; it is not everybody that has an idea today that will still keep it until after three years. The environment is frustrating to many people. Like O’Seun said, if these things are there, people will be encouraged people to do software whether good or bad; let them go ahead and do it. If they bring out software, people like him [O’Seun], people like Dr Nwannena will evaluate these things and say this your software is not good go away, or this your software is good but needs some improvements. You don’t come out with software and tell yourself it is finished. Like some one was asking me, once you start writing software you don’t finish, you don’t end writing a software, that is why we have releases. So as you write, people will criticize: there will be questions, criticism and all that.

Bayero:  We are looking at the impact of foreign software on the local industry right now. In trying to run software from say the US and India, the local programmers are also the vendors for the foreign software, how have they been able to manage these two ends?

O’Seun:  Selling the locally developed software has never been the largest market for local software programmers.  The software from abroad also has to be customised. In a way this involves changes in currency symbol of dollar to naira, the changes in percentages you have so many reforms that it is not in our tax laws, so you have a couple of local software developers who must do most of these things. That alone is a market, a huge market. People are more comfortable with the foreign. 

Segun: Does this culture of poor software development in Nigeria not rub off on the economy for instance….

O’Seun: A lot of Nigerians will make enough more money from software development than from oil from if the right things were in place.

Bayero: Are there instances?

 O’Seun: I will give you an example of  India. As far as eight years ago, India was making $20 billion dollars from software. The Indian government to get values from Microsoft to Indian programmers and there are not bog down by the kind of problems that comes with oil.  They don’t have any problem with Ogonis. They don’t have any degradation of the land and more importantly, you are developing minds. It is the fallout of what was happening in India ten years ago that we are seeing today, you now see that India is the software development capital of the world.  It is the fall out of what happened ten years ago when Microsoft and others were paying Indian programmers and the Indian government saw to it that the industry developed. Now, you have strong software like Finacle. You now also have Microsoft Office, one of the most popular software in the world, having three major competitors that will probably wipe it out, if you ask me, and they are all from India. One of them is one-tenth the price of Microsoft Office and it comes with 27-translation packages. In other words you write in English and you can translate in 27 languages and send to different countries and it comes in the package and it is one-tenth of the cost of Microsoft Office, it comes with a speech translator, it reads what you’ve typed to you. With the Microsoft Office, you need to buy Adobe and all that. All that has happened in India because the labour is cheap as is in any developing country. The Indians made use of what should otherwise be idle time to earn money from Microsoft and still learn new skills. In America, you so much pay per hour for very expensive labour. In Nigeria, people do nothing for the first 10 –15 hours of the day. They are either discussing UEFA matches or in those days, discussing politics or who will contest for president. Nobody does that in those countries because they pay per hour. You have to show me what you’ve done in one hour before I pay you. Labour is equally cheap in Nigeria.  All we need is to set the right policies in place for this cheap labour to become an asset.

Segun: So it all adds to what in the final analysis?

Nwannena: I want to say software development is has a long gestation period. Before you can actually begin to make profit or begin to, even, get a user is not as easy as selling hardware. Somebody can come to you tomorrow and say I want to buy Compaq and you just go and pick up Compaq and make N50 profit, which is something for you. It is not the same with software; you develop software through a number of processes that take some time before it gets to the end user. If the government realises that this is the situation, then something drastic would be done to support the industry. This is one of the things I’ve been preaching on, that this young men who are developing applications, they need support.  In the next one or two years, as a developer, you may sell nothing but you have to eat, now government can make possible a loan facility, a facility to keep the developer going, say for his feeding, pending when he will bring out a product that somebody can buy. That is part of what government is supposed to do and that is what is done elsewhere in the world. If you don’t do that, chances are he will stop developing and once nobody comes to buy, he stops and goes to the area that can bring him money quickly. He becomes a trader and forgets software. Software is like a research. You can have a perfect product but to get somebody to see it before saying okay I will buy it is not very easy especially in this country. So government should come in, in those areas, we have been talking about SME loan. Is not easy to get through with SME loan. The fact is that you just try and when they want to come in they give you conditions that are almost impossible. That is one key area the government should come in. A number of countries that have taken software seriously have done that. When you do that, as a developer,  I am happy that at the end of the month there is something that will enable me eat then I will continue what I am doing but if towards the end of the month I am becoming very anxious, I don’t know how to get the next meal, the next thing is to go hawking some kind of hardware or even going to sell Gari.

Bayero: What do you think is responsible for the poor attitude of government, could it be lack of awareness or may be they feel that they cannot earn enough money as quickly as they can get from oil?

Nwannena:  Well, two things. One is we have an organisation government has set up which is called NITDA.  NITDA even by their own admission has not shown any interest in software, so whatever we are saying we are saying it to the air, government has this kind of belief that everything about information technology must come through NITDA so that is one of the key problems. The agency that is suppose to develop information technology is not interested in developing, it is interested in usage and unless it looks at development which now includes software, government is not going to show interest.

Austin: I went to NITDA myself and I met one of their key staff and I brought a software and the first thing he told me is that they have never thought of talking about software in NITDA. He said funding it or developing it was not really an issue yet and he mentioned three hardware companies that have come to them and they are doing business with them right now. He just told me to bring my software; they will try it out and see what happens. In other words, they don’t have consultants to evaluate software so you might as well give them software that will be there forever.  I have given them this one for about three months now and the thing might as well lie there for as long as they care.  I saw one of them last month and he said sorry for your letter, I didn’t pass it through the file.

Segun: We have ISPON and I expect that the CBN would be working closely with ISPON on this.  I want us to begin to round up and the last ball I think we should throw into the field is here is an extraction from Dr. statement he said “we operate in a market that is saturated with foreign skills” how much in momentary terms do we lose every year in form of licensing fees? How much goes out in?

Nwannena:  Let me start with what we lose. First, there is a high level of outflow of capital, that capital if it were here we would use to employ skills.  Number two, by buying foreign software and using them locally we are not encouraging our own developers.  The government or NEPA has a budget of 500,000dollars for a billing system from a foreign country.  We don’t know which and everybody has been asking how come is it that the billing software is something that is beyond us. I know that a number of companies in Nigeria that use billing software. People always jump on me and say when you hear this what did you do. I don’t react irrationally. I want to get the fact. So the first thing I said, they say the billing software that they are trying to replace fail. The question is who did the billing software that failed. Is it a Nigerian company? Okay if it is a Nigeria company and we are now trying to get new billing software, will Nigerian companies be allowed to bid and be given the same opportunity? When they answer these questions, one will now come out to say what is appropriate. Suppose Nigerian companies bided and they felt that their applications are not good, at this point in time, what will government do to ensure that in the next one or two years that we are not still looking for billing software from outside the country? These are the question we need to find answers otherwise; it would mean that the government is so hell bent in patronising foreign goods. Let us also believe that the skills are not available, then what is government doing to reverse that in next two to three years so that we are still not completely dependent on software import.

Bayero: Are you saying that the government does not have any vision for software development?

Nwannena: Yes. They have not shown it in any away. They have not, in anyway at all, and government says it’s NITDA and government is NITDA. As far as we are concern government is NITDA and government by its own admission has not shown any interest in it. So what else can I say, we had a software developers summit fully sponsored by Microsoft because Microsoft saw that the strategy for this kind of thing meet their own expectation and they say look, we are going to pay for the whole thing and we invited NITDA, NITDA did not even show up and we have more than a thousand youths hanging for that event which was very rich because Microsoft brought in external resource person and talked about .Net which is the next level of software development in the industry. If NITDA showed no interest, what else do we need to say that government has no interest in software. They didn’t come, there was no excuse for that, they were invited, I spoke to NITDA’s director directly and personally on about two occasions.

Bayero: Doctor, you sound frustrated. Does that mean you are going to hang up on your work towards software development?

No! Never! We cannot. We will keep saying it until someday somebody will listen to us.

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