What is the state of the implementation strategy?
We can actually talk about how far because we are now at a stage we called “Product roll out” and we are starting with advertisement in the newspapers and we are to appoint of some alliance partners called e-distributors, e-dollars, e-agents and this is a completely new system of businessmen who are going to be e-entrepreneurs and, in this case, they will be alliance partners to our national government’s strategy so that it would be possible to offer e-services to every Nigerian, irrespective of location.
Most Nigerians are ignorant of the government’s policy on e-strategies. What are you doing to enlighten the citizens?
Yes, that is what we called the level of illiteracy. We are actually talking about the level of information available and we have a schedule in the last two years.
E-government is on course and we are now ready to go out because the bottomline for the issue of e-strategy is the provision of e-services and we also know that, most of the time, e-services actually promote themselves. What we are saying is that take your mobile phone for example, you need to advertised mobile phone but because the services provided by mobile phone is always there to advertise itself, so you need to talk; you need to communicate and so this is the same thing we are going to do. Take for example, the registration of teachers, every teacher now knows that he is to register online and when they start to do this, it will spread and the fallout of this would continue to grow in multiples. So, the advertisement of e-services will get to the grassroot, to the national government down to wherever we have a citizen centre for the dissemination of information. As far as the government is concerned, the implementation is on course, I can assure you.
Is the implementation model working?
Yes. Going by the structure of the Public Provided Partnership (PPP) itself, that is the model the Nigerian government adopted. This model was initially recommended to developing countries but it is now also being adopted by the developed countries. So, that plan is okay. But what we worry about is the implementation because everybody seems to have his own job and in this case, the provider is allowed to participate, not only because he was appointed to be a stakeholder but also because of the fund, because of the resources and because of the discipline.
Is the project properly funded?
E-government goes much more beyond acting; it is for providing citizen and assisting government to get its data in a way that it can be properly integrated. For example, I am aware that it is now mandatory that one per cent of the budget must be computerised and so on. This is been done very actively on the passport for example. Work on the e-passport is actually going on with heavy government support. Government has spend a lot of money to do what they called public services network which is (PS net) with the integration of all the ministries. And at this moment, I think about eight ministries have been integrated, including the National Assembly itself. E-government is an upshoot of the reform agenda, and again for e-government to take notice of some of these areas, some of these reforms have to be done like in the National Bureau Service. A couple of people were retired and government payed a couple of billion of naira to them.
The NNPC is building a huge network for itself. So, that network is going on and it is funded by the government. We can never have enough resources to do all of these; so we did a couple of them with partnership with private sector on a basis that looks like build, operate and transfer or build operate and hold. So that is where the PPP comes into it. In the case of the national e-government, the aspect of e-government that is been connected to the public is been funded by the private sector. That aspect have easily been sold back to the citizens and the private sector can get its money back. So, to get national network for better base, the National Open University network, national and News Agency Nigerian Network, and some several others, are funded by the government.
Now you have been talking about e-government, you have not mention anything about e-democracy, e-participation, e-voting and e-registration. Is this not hampering the implementation of e-strategies?
The situation is evolving. Internet access is low but it is growing. Two years ago, one million students when online for NECO. One year ago, 2.5 million students went online for WAEC. Now 1.5 million teachers would have to go online to register to be licenced. Then, an estimated 10 million parents would have to go online to pay their children’s school fees. And it is estimated that 1.5 millions hospital patients and doctors were to go online to make payment.
This is evolving and the banks are actively participating here. There are banks in every local government and they are all connected. So, as far as we are concerned, there is only are bank in Nigeria because all the 35 banks available are connected to interswitch and so from anywhere you can have access to your bank account.
Then, the participation of the banks at the local government level is again to create a new level where we are now trying to put e-kiosk, which are also to be run by the e-entrepreneurs. So, they will provide internet access to allow about five million readers to receive access in their villages without coming to the urban centres.
You have talked about e-government but you have not mentioned anything about e-democracy. What are you doing about e-participation and, of course, e-voting?
What is going on is not just e-registration. E-registration means you go to register. But this is a computerised e-registration which can be needed for e-voting and time is required-we need enough time; we need enough voter’s registration materials to go round. But in the other parts of the world, this happen permanently so that the people can continue to update their data. This is the first time it is being used in Nigeria. So, we expect that there would be one or two crisis in which the agencies involved will continue to solve. It is a matter of tilling the ground for e-voting. E-voting is already going on. If you go to our site, you will see voting going on; you will see that people are voting there to say, ‘I like this, I don’t like this’. But now to put that into political voting, it is yet to be perfected. Nobody can stop anybody from writing a petition but what we are trying to encourage, formalise and to institutionalise is for this to happen.
Take the e-form for instance. Government had directed all agencies to submit their forms to NEGST so that we can put them online. When they go online and the president commissions it in the next couple of weeks, if the president gives the go ahead, the forms will be filled online. But some of the agencies will not have servers to fill forms online. So, what we have done is that they will come in to our own server and we will now deliver to them. What we are trying to do now is to apply that to the feedback form to the ministries so that we can go on e-Nigeria portal and any petition or comment on any public agent, whether that public officer has an e-mail address or not, the NEGST office would now make sure that such petition was delivered and get the feedback.
Now elections will become easy for government than in 2001 when the Minister of Power and Steel and the Minister of Justice were communicating with people via e-mail. Now, we have formalise it and some people are doing that at the moment. I know that the president gets e-mails and he replies them, but that is not true of all his ministers. So, we are going to set up on the e-forms a space where you can have the feedback. But the issue again is that Nigerians have very low confidence in how these things are operated. So, if they fight you online, it then means that they are beginning to show confidence and you can see the inputs. When the system go into full operations, you can actually report accident online or through your SMS as many as can talk to the policemen.
How would you rate e-government implementation?
I will say that so far, the stage that we have passed has been successfully done; the stage we are now is the planning stage. E-government goes much more beyond acting; it is for providing citizens with e-services and assisting government to get its data in a way that it can be properly integrated: What is that agenda? What is the framework?
Who will work with us and how will it be?
This was done in 2004. It was presented to the president on October 18 same year and it was endorsed by the president. Now, the quick win aspect of it is this: Because the private sector is investing-in the private sector in Nigeria, you don’t invest money and say you want to wait for 17 or 18 years- as a way to assure the investors that they have not thrown away their money, we now devised a quick win approach to it so that while long term actions are being taken, money can come in at the same time.
The agenda was now presented to the Minister of Science and Technology on January 17, 2005. By the middle of that year, we had been called to the presence of the minister for his consent and to say this is how it would be done. This was also done before the Chief Economic Adviser to the President and it was also endorsed in August that year. We re-presented the total concept to all the ministers and the permanent secretaries in a retreat that lasted for three days. By November of the same year, we then presented to the whole world that this is the agenda; this is what we want to do and this is the marketing plan. It is the marketing aspect that the public would see. That is why agencies that deals with the public, like the Federal Road Safety Commission, the Police and the Immigration were contacted.
In between then, we have launched the e-registration and we have also launched the tenancy and e-health programmes on October 18 and 19. By October 20, when we were set to roll-out, it was coming on a gradual basis and it has been tested. We have been leased a platform to do this, that is the e-Nigeria platform. There is the need to attach to that platform the tenancy gateway and as you can see, it is a platform that is based on a window-a shopping mall where everybody brings his wares to sell.
There are common services that would be provided and that is the essence of e-government in Nigeria. Most different government agencies share common services so that they can concentrate on their own primary functions and so that they won’t go and solve the same problem that the ministry has solved. In a shopping mall environment, the common services are security, parking lots, removal of waste and payment. This is because everything that goes on there requires currency to be paid. So, instead of coming with all the currencies of the world, we provide them with one uniform currency which should be online payment. So, all these, having been tested and okayed, we have started now, since last October, to do what we call e-residence.
With this programme, 20,000 civil servants will have to be shown what is the linkage between the government reforms and the governed; what is the line between government reforms and economic survival; what is the link between that and the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) and what exactly are the alternatives? How does this link with the National Economic Empowerment Development Strategy (NEEDS) and NEPAD? What has it taken to put these policies into place and what are the types of policy?
For instance, every ministry must have a website as a government policy. Then, what is the website? You, as a ministry, what are the things you put into the website? Do you put the photographs of the minister and the occasions that he has attended and his curriculum vitae or you put there a petition or a feedback? Or you put there the service offered by the ministry? The government has directed that all ministries and agencies must obtain e-forms. Government has also directed that all civil servants must be e-literate; all state workers should be computer specialists as well as all the instructors and so on.
Now, how do we implement? We need to show them the minimum standards that are required and the basic guidelines. Infrastructures are not very strong, the people are not okay but what are the minimum things that we must put there. Each ministry must hire a consultant; each ministry must have a webmaster and each ministry must have an e-mail so that a particular ministry does not use the mail of somebody @ yahoo.com as its e-mail. So, it should be e-mail@ministry of education org.ng for example. This will enable you to know from any part of the world that this is an authentic ministry or mail from Nigeria.
Then, what do we need to teach them? What is the change management? What should we expect as this change is being implemented? We decided, with the Head of Service, to go and tour about 45 per cent of the country and ensure that 20,000 civil servants must go through the procedure.
How would you rank Nigeria in the African continent in the implementation of e-governance?
I will use the United Nations (UN) ratings of 2005. In that year, the UN ratings says that Nigeria was number 139 out of 291 countries; in 2004, the country was at number 141. This means that we have only moved two spaces up the ladder. In Africa, out of 43 countries, we are number 24. We have countries like Rwanda that were rated higher than us, countries like Kenya, among others. That is the rating which is a fair rating due to the indices that were used. But in reality, if you look at Macao which is a small island, next door to China and which is rated much better than us, they said the way that country implemented the e-government policy was absolutely fantastic. But there is just only one job that they do in Macao-gambling; Everybody gambles. Secondly, it is only made up of 27,000 people which is less than one ward in Osun State.
So, the rating for Nigeria is not taken into consideration at all. When you talk about that, how do we get to the Ministry of Education through the net? Now, is the Ministry of Education all connected together? The ministry, when linked together, has about 22 parastatals and one of them, like the National University Commission (NUC), has about 80 universities. Another one is the National Commission for Colleges of Education which has 87 colleges of education. So, some of those parastatals are already more than the entire government in some of these other countries.
Again, compare Nigeria with Singapore, which is like the number one or number two in the world, talking about e-governance compliant. I think it is about the next to Canada and Sweden in that order. But Singapore is smaller than my local government.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Olawale Rasheed
Quelle/Source: Nigerian Tribune, 12.02.2007
