With all the attention on Nigeria as one of the world’s fastest growing telecommunications market, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) cannot be said to have taken its rightful place in the country – not with continuous importation of technologies and absolute dependence on expatriates to manage even the smallest of its components.
Today, thousands of foreigners throng the country to take up jobs in ICTs and several organisations continue to look for them because many locals who should have taken the jobs lack the required skills and experience.
This is not to say that there are no ICT experts that are Nigerian-born at all in the country; there are a few of them, but a thorough check on their academic background would reveal that they had either studied abroad or studied in Nigeria and later went abroad to acquire more knowledge, which raises question on the capability of our educational system to produce the right human capacity for the burgeoning ICT industry.
Incidentally, the government and other industry stakeholders have over the years raised hope of entrenching local content in ICT, just as it has been successfully done in the oil and gas industry, riding on the existing local content policy. This was recently pushed to a point where an ‘Office of Local Content in ICT’ was established by the immediate past administration of President Goodluck Jonathan. Unfortunately, the country has failed to trace the root of her problem, which is lack of local skills and expertise in ICT due to unsupportive educational system.
If we may ask, should there be any tertiary institution student that is not computer literate at this modern age, beyond just theory? In a serious society, the answer should be NO. Unfortunately, there are many computer science graduates in Nigeria without even the basic knowledge of computer; with this scenario the case with graduates of other disciplines can best be imagined.
And this is due to no fault of theirs. It is the fault of the system that produces them; where the education policy states that there must be computer education for all students at secondary level, yet no provision for computers, or internet connectivity to facilitate the teaching. In rare cases where computers are supplied to school laboratories, there will be no electricity to power them.
More worrisome is the fact that most of the nation’s tertiary institutions offering ICT-related courses today lack the required facilities to train and equip the students with the right knowledge. In Nigeria, it is common to see schools offering computer science as a course, yet without computers and where they have, these are hardly enough for the number of registered students.
Obviously, this is where the problem of lack of local expertise in ICT starts and it will continue to drag the country backward until we redirect our education system to meet these demands. There is an urgent need to retool and reshape Nigerian universities and all other educational institutions on ICT to be equipped to develop and build the local expertise that the country needs; the government should also establish ICT research centres and software laboratories, e-libraries, training and training of experts for sustainable capacity building.
At this juncture, the role of the industry certification body cannot be over emphasised. Elsewhere, this type of body sees to the standard of education in that particular field and consistently seeks to increase the number of certified professionals.
For the Nigerian ICT industry, the Computer Professionals Registration Council of Nigeria (CPN) pride itself as a body primarily charged with the responsibility for building-up local Information Technology (IT) capacity as well as the regulation of IT practice in Nigeria. Besides, as the regulatory authority in IT education and practice in Nigeria, the over-arching theme of the Council’s mandate is to provide a regulated and standard-driven environment for IT education and practice in Nigeria such that socio-economic development is engendered.
If indeed the CPN has been carrying out these mandates, the impacts are yet to be seen or felt—even though it was established as far back as 1993. Therefore the CPN needs to wake up to its responsibilities as well. Now is the time to strengthen and raise the standard of ICT education in Nigeria to such a level that our graduates will not need to go abroad for further learning before they can be absorbed into the industry.
The current trend where foreign ‘experts’ are taking up jobs that could have been handled by indigenous experts must be stopped—and this can only happen when we build more than enough local capacity.
In this, we call on the Federal Government to give all the needed support to the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) to further translate its efforts into more results in addition to what it has achieved up to now for it to deliver on its mandate on a consistent and continuous scale.
NITDA’s mandate include ‘to operate and implement the National IT policy and to give effect to provisions of the National information Technology Development Agency Act (NITDA Act) of 2007;’ and ‘to ensure that the entire citizenry is empowered with Information Technologies through the development of a critical mass of IT proficient and globally competitive manpower.’
Software development, skill acquisition and strengthening of every institution charged with the institutionalisation of software as Nigeria’s resource, should be regarded as national emergencies that deserve government’s priority – in funding, direct attention and tireless monitoring.
Thus, no budgetary issues should stand in the way of bodies like NITDA or the National Office for Technology Acquisition (NOTAP), as indeed, ICT skills must be regarded as the foundation upon which all other developments will rest. We have a chance now – with so much global attention on Nigeria; we cannot afford to let the opportunities pass us by without fully utilising them. Posterity will call us to account.