By Angeline Mgbele, Bureau Chief, Northern Nigeria
In its sustained commitment towards the implementation of the present administration’s Renewed Hope Agenda, particularly in the area of improving governance for effective service delivery, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), is intensifying efforts to create a one-stop-shop portal for all government services, Cyber Era NG has learnt.
In a press statement e-signed by the Director of Corporate Communications & External Relations at NITDA, Hajia Hadiza Umar, the initiative aligns with the President’s directive to digitise 75 per cent of government services by 2027, a target that is now actively being pursued by various stakeholders.
This was made known when the Director-General at NITDA, Mallam Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi and his team played host to a delegation from the Ukrainian Embassy in Nigeria led by its ambassador, Ivan Kholostenko to the Corporate Headquarters of the Agency in Abuja to discuss possible areas of collaboration between the two countries on ways of enhancing productivity, transparency and trust in government processes.
Despite efforts made for several years at establishing a centralised e-government portal such as the OneGove.net, the Mallam Abdullahi noted that the Agency had been playing a pivotal role in shaping the design, standard guidelines, and implementation strategies towards its establishment.
Abdullahi however stated that renewed commitment and extensive research into global best practices had reignited the drive for pursuing the agenda.
While stating that the Agency had been doing research on how other countries had been able to implement the unified digital government services platform, the NITDA DG said, “We have been doing research on how UK, Kenya and other countries have achieved this, so I believe we can learn from you as well to see how we can build our own.”
“While such models are not entirely transferable between nations, we can learn from their experiences to develop a framework that works for Nigeria,” he added.
Proposing an introduction of legal frameworks to back up the initiative, Abdullahi disclosed that NITDA had identified multiple models from other nations that allowed government agencies to provide services through an Application Programming Interface (API) while other countries provided services exclusively through designated portals backed by law.
“If we want to achieve this, we need to have these laws in place and kickstart the process of enacting the laws in other to facilitate a smooth and effective digital transformation,” he averred.
Abdullahi also disclosed that the agency was engaging with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to ensure alignment with global digital governance standards and the engagement was expected to provide valuable expertise and insights into structuring Nigeria’s digital transformation roadmap.
“This initiative is seen as a critical step towards enhancing efficiency, reducing corruption, and promoting transparency in government operations. By leveraging global best practices in alignment with national policies and digital transformation goals, Nigeria will have a smart, seamless and citizen-friendly government service experience, “he concluded.
In his remark, Mr. Kholostenko said that Ukraine ran a digital platform known as the Diia application which was an ecosystem that encompassed all of the state registers, databases and could perform all the state and government services for citizens in one place.
Kholostenko disclosed that it was the intention of his country through its Ministry of Digital Transformation to expand the reach of this initiative and provide full support for other countries to create such kind of system.
“I want to note that we are interested to expand and help other countries to make a digital state, reduce bureaucracy, reduce time for getting state services and of course, to reduce corruption risks, because human-to-human interaction is minimal,” he said.
