By Pepetua Onuegbu
Abuja – The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) says non utilisation of the Internet Service Point gives room for many illegal online news, radio and television stations across the country.
The Director General, NITDA, Dr Isa Pantami said this in a statement signed by Mrs Hadiza Umar, the Head, Corporate Affairs and External Relations of the agency on Friday in Abuja.
Pantami expressed his dismay on non utilisation of the Internet service point at the Galaxy Backbone headquarters in Abuja.
“It is our collective responsibility to respect the Nigeria’s Internet service point in order to coordinate the activities of internet usage in the country.
“Many illegal online radio and television that have sprung up today is due to non utilisation of this point.
“Most of these online radio and television stations are being abused, used to canvass for agitations and they are causing disunity in the country,’’ Pantami said.
He called for service improvement on the part of the service providers, especially Galaxy Backbone and urged the company to prevail on other service providers to adopt NITDA policies in discharging their services.
He said that recently the agency got reports from some Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) complaining of poor quality of service.
“Charity they say begins at home. We are using this visit to also urge you to build on your achievements.
“We are proud of your recent achievement on the attainment of the ISO 2000 certification.
“It is our collective success and I believe we can still do better because there is always room for improvement,’’ he said.
While advocating for the local hosting of data, Pantami said that recent event that made Microsoft to establish a data centre in South Africa was regrettable.
He added that NITDA was working assiduously to forestall future occurrence of such action.
“We are seriously putting in place a strong data protection policy that will put a stop to such action. It will also aim at motivating service providers to host data locally.
“The issue of data sovereignty is also critical; we are talking with some MDAs to bring back their data to Nigeria.
“Some of them have come to our office and we gave them time frame to achieve this because it is secure, reliable and available for us to host our data locally,” he said.
Reiterating the need for collaboration between NITDA and Galaxy Backbone, he said it had become necessary for the two organisations to strengthen their relationship.
“We need to support each other, strengthen our relationship and advise ourselves on how to move the industry forward and deliver on our mandates to Nigerians,’’ he said.
The Managing Director, Galaxy Backbone, Mr Yusuf Kazaure agreed that there was still a lot to be done in Nigerian ICT sector and called for collaborations among stakeholders.
He said that capacity to move the country forward was actually lacking within the highest form of government.
He acknowledged that ICT was the greatest catalyst to the development of Nigeria as nation, therefore, there was need to move in the speed of light to catch up with technological developed countries of the world.
Kazaure said that training in standards and frameworks were highly recommended for people to catch up with trend in ICT.
He said that NITDA as a custodian of ICT in the country should champion the call for hosting of data locally and assured that Galaxy Backbone has the infrastructure to host data locally.
“We are keen to make use of the infrastructure but there is need to build capacity.”
On data centre and cloud service, the Managing Director said Galaxy Backbone was working with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) for compliance on how to keep data in the country.
He said that the recent ISO 2000 certification was part of the effort to ensure that it provided world class services in Nigeria.
“We are very willing to adopt standards created by NITDA. We will act as laboratory to test these standards and frameworks so other service providers can emulate,” Kazaure said.
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