The leadership of the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) has called on the supervisory agency, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) to rise to the occasion of deepening deliveries in line with its mandate on issues concerning local content policy.

Otherwise, the group wants the federal government to expedite action on the implementation and enforcement of the various executive orders on local content as given by the presidency few months ago.

In his remarks at the 2018 President’s dinner of the group, the ISPON head of affairs, Olorogun James Emadoye, noted that advancing local content drive in areas of software development will empower more and more Nigerian practitioners to deepen innovation and grow the emerging knowledge economy.

He said “The most important resource in any endeavor has been widely recognized as the human resource. Every other resource, processes or even automation, in most cases, are objects that are under human control”.

“We cannot thank God enough that he has endowed us with smart, strong and enterprising people.  Other nations are looking for Nigerians in every sphere of human endeavor to help build their system.

“Nigerians are doing exploits in every nook and cranny of the world which of course has become a global village without boundaries, made possible by technology of which software is the domain,” Emadoye noted.

While stressing that “ISPON believes that Nigeria can record significant achievement in the world software business and global market, if Nigerians and relevant government agencies support local content,” he argued that “Nigeria must remove the conditional statement ‘if’, we must support Local Content; we must ensure that the letter and the spirit of Executive Orders 003 and 005 are brought to the fore and remain our guiding principles in all our business transactions, in the overall interest of our national development”.

ISPON boss who argued that “enforcing these presidential orders will require the utmost vigilance by all enforcement departments of government as well as security agencies,” also noted that “Active collaboration with professional associations like ISPON, NCS and CPN is also significant and required”.