As Lagos State government explores the advantages of emerging technologies to assume the status of a Mega City through automation, the state commissioner for science and technology,  Dr. Kadri  Hamzat, in this interview with Emmanuel Elebeke , speaks on how automation has enhanced gover

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nance in the state, boosted  the state internal generated revenue, what his ministry is doing to achieve 100 percent automation, collocation, job creation and state of Information and Communications Technology in school curriculum, among others.

He also believes that collocation of telecom infrastructures, if pursued vigorously would help the Lagos dream of becoming a Mega city.
Excerpt.

Lagos state has been regularly described as a strong ICT state, can you tell us ways in which you have employed the tools of ICT to affect the lives of Lagosians?

The essence of the ministry is to automate all the processes of governance. Apparently, that,  to an extent is a huge task in terms of responsibilities. You must have seen the hospitals automation in the state. For example, what we have been able to do is that we started with three pilot hospitals in Isolo general hospital, general hospital Lagos and the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital.

What that means is employment of ICT to capture patients’ information in such a way that  when you go in there, they will be able to take your picture, put it on line with your medical records. And when you come next time, all you need to do is to mention your name and at a click, everything will appear. The essence of that is to allow collaboration with those three hospitals.

Now the governor has approved 10 more hospitals for automation and  when completed, they will also be linked up with the first three hospitals. The idea is to reduce the number of time spent in our hospitals before a patient could be taken in for treatment, and possible lost of lives. The new system can also allow for reduction in drug interaction. A research has shown that  a lot of people worldwide actually die of drug interaction more than the illness that took them to the hospital. To add to that, we are also organizing retreats for all stakeholders from both private and public schools, parents and guardians  in all the ministries to equip them with all necessary information about automation.

In the area of education, we are also automating all the schools so that we can track all the students from primary one to SS 3, so that every child will have a particular unique number .With this, you can know the progression of a particular child, you can know his class mates and  monitor his curriculum etc. Again, we have automated the state’s examination board, and now people can check their results online. We are also trying to do project monitoring through IT, where the governor or commissioners can actually check the stages of projects awarded. This will be done in a way that somebody will be doing the monitoring, taking pictures at the various stages and put them on line.

We have automated about 100 schools. We have been doing the same in about 1600 -700 school in the state primary and secondary schools. 634 senior and junior secondary schools and over 900 secondary schools. The essence of our ICT programmes in the schools is that, every child will have access to computer. It is an ongoing project. We are also looking at a way to automate our buildings. It is all about transforming Lagos state land and science sector.

Now Lagos is aiming at a Mega City, but telecom operators are building towers everywhere even as the regulator, NCC, has   asked them to begin infrastructure collocation. Where does this leave the Mega city dream?

If you remember, we are in court because of this madness.  A mast is a structure, its like a house. Normally, in other parts of the world, you get a permit before installation. You cannot build anywhere. But that is not what is happening here. However, it is not the duty of Lagos state government to catch them, it is that of the NCC.

What is important is for us to understand the essence of planning as it obtains in other countries of the world.
We are not co-sharing when thousands of masts in the state are doing when four or five masts can do the same job.
So, it is important that collocation is encouraged while we work behind the scene to make alternative arrangement. This informed the reason why we are supporting NCC in this regard, because we know that it would help our dream of becoming a Mega city. Remember that NCC is not an agency of Lagos state government, but we have the right to address the issue on application basis. It is not a confrontation issue because there is no need for that. It’s just for us to be sensible in mounting them in this our bid to build a Mega City.

I think the telecom companies in Nigeria have started doing that now. Ordinarily, what NCC should have done is to have a map for all these masts before mounting them. With that map, it will be well spread and the operating companies will come together and share according to agreement.

What about Job opportunities. A Mega city where the rate of unemployment is high, defeats its beauty. Have you also used ICT to check this in any way?
The issue of unemployment cannot just be treated in isolation. Is a total package. First of all, you have to look at the education, the quality of the graduates in the country, you must look at the state of the infrastructure, you must look at the priority, economy and the regulatory framework available. Nigeria is a palsy  country because we have people, and when there is people, there is commerce. And when there is commerce,  people consume.

When there is commerce, there is movement of money and economy must grow. So, what the Lagos state government is doing in area of job creation is to create jobs through beautification projects. Enormous jobs haves so far been created through this means both direct and indirect. Right now, we are training over 600 people on various skills acquisition programmes with particular focus on IT. Unemployment is a very serious issue we must tackle. If we cannot produce quality graduates, then it will be difficult to solve the problem of unemployment in this country.

We engage them in various skill programmes in our projects and from there they earn income and also pay their tax. For every project we carried out, there were some people we provided jobs for.
You talk as if you’ve got it all right, are you okay with the level of ICT deployment for e-governance in Lagos state ?
We are not where we want to be actually. That is why we  are even asking outsiders to look at what we are doing, so that we can know our mistakes and be able to plan how to do it better, in terms of improving various sectors with ICT.

Making it more transparent, and  easy for people to interact.  We are making progress, but I must tell you that we still have much to do. We cannot finish it once because as you solve one, another comes up. America got independence in 1774 and up till today, they are still solving societal problems.
IT curriculum in Nigerian universities. Is Lagos state doing something in contrary or are you satisfied with the level, countrywide?

I do not want to talk on the dynamism of ICT curriculum in Nigerian schools because Lagos state is not controlling that. But take for example, Nollywood is now said to be bigger than Hollywood. Is there any university in Nigeria that is doing film production?. None could be the answer, but there should be, so that we can produce people who can understand the concept and the way to do it. It should be so, if we really  want to turn the sector into a huge market it deserves. It is good and must keep improving. Those in the industry are extremely doing well, they have agreed to improve. So, this is the type of things we do. LASU for example has just started transportation management. We cannot be static.

We must move with time. The student will not do well if nobody examined them at the initial stage. Even though we use it to teach them, it is important that we overhaul the  curriculum so that we can start examining our children, irrespective of their chosen profession. We must continue to improve because technology changes so drastically and what you think is superb this week will be rubbish tomorrow. The essence is to get better and make the platform easy for the students.
How have automation help the government in generating revenue?

We have been able to do that through connectivity between the banks and our tax agents. It was done in such a way that  as you cash in the money in the bank  we will be able to pick it Through this, we have been able to block all the loopholes that existed in the past and today the internal generated revenue of the state has risen from N10 billion to N14 billion monthly .That is why Lagos state government says don’t give cash, pay to bank. When you pay to the bank, we will not have problem getting the money. It has actually help us tremendously.
The budget of Lagos state government this year is very well detailed and thorough. By the time you look at it, you see that everything is a miracle. Every agency of the government put every thing on the laptop so that every body will see how each ministry did  it and want to spend it.

And we can harmonize how to achieve a total delivery. So we are able to do that today through the instrumentality of ICT . We hope things will continue to get better.