Whereas other sectors of the economy are most hit by the prevailing recession, the Minister of Communications technology, Barr. Adebayo Shittu has disclosed that the figure on foreign direct investments on the sector has moved up from the N32bn to the current $38bn as at August 2016.
In his Keynote address at the flag off of the 4th National Council on Communications Technology (NCCT) in Kaduna, the minister rolled out several statistics to buttress his claims.
He said apart from geometric jump in Teledensity which rose from 107.67% in August 2015 to 109.14% in August 2016, recording an increase of 1.47%, “Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the sector has increased from $32B in 2015 to $38B in 2016”.
He recalled that “the performance of the Telecommunications industry has also improved. There is a positive increase in the number of active telecoms subscribers with an increase from 148,70 million in august 2015 to 152.28 million as at August 2016, which is an increase of 5.9%.
Broadband penetration has reached 20.95%, while the percentage of internet penetration has reached a milestone 47.44%, making Nigeria, second only to South Africa in the whole of the African Continent.
On how the government is driving ICT integration, the minister said “Following its success in conceptualizing 1-GOV.NG, government is now focusing on cost savings in service delivery and leveraging economies of scale by prioritizing services that have direct bearing on the administrations’ priorities and classifying them as shared services to be provisioned from the National Shared Services Center (NSSC)”.
“This will ensure optimization of the productivity of government officials, increase experience, enhance security and make government services open and transparent.
“Other initiatives introduced for a more modern, efficient and effective workflow process is Government Document Management System GDMS, Government Revenue Collection & Payment Systems, Identity Verification and Authentication and e-procurement. Government is also continuing its collaboration with the South Korean Government for the successful implementation of the e-government master plan.
