By Emma Elebeke

As the nation’s economy continues to nose-dive due to the dwindling oil price at the international market, the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA, Dr. Peter Jack, has said that the agency is determined to make the economy IT-based and dependent.

To achieve this, he said the plans are already in the offing to deploy the required IT across the country.

The idea, according to him is to ensure that IT will be deeply rooted and embraced by Nigerian people.

Jack who made the declaration at a function in Abuja, expressed optimism that IT would take a dominant place in the Nigerian economy when given the rightful place and avert the challenjges usually ocassioned by the frequent fall in the oil price in the international market.

He said the plan had become necessary in view of the redemtion role IT is playing in the developed and emerging economies in the world and vowed to replicate same in the Nigerian.

Jack said a situation where the nation would depend only on oil and gas would no longer suffice, in so far as IT could be deployed to bridge that yawning gap, saying that gone were the days when IT would take the back seat in the developmental process of the economy.

He noted that the agency has initiated several initiatives to ensure the implemenation of the plan in line with the national policy on local content development.

According to him, among them are the plans by NITDA to take about 21 local information Technology, IT companies to the Silicon Valley in the United States to enable them explore possibilities that are open for them in the IT world.

The NITDA boss, said the estured was in continuation of NITDA’s effort to discharge ts mandate as the nation’s IT regulatory agency, tasked with the role of ensuringspeedy IT development in the country.

Jack said: ‘’what we decided is to have a long and medium term plan. We are taking 21 local IT companies to Silicon Valley in US and this is just the beginning of the total training programme that we are going to have, capacity building and empowerment we are going to have for the local IT manufacturers.

“ What we are trying to do is to develop IT park, incubation centres, software development centres, all of these are meant to ensure that we capture all the young It developers. So, at any stage they are, they will somewhere to be incubated, so that sometime, they are exposed to investors, in some cases, for those who need capacity building, we give them training.

“The truth of the matter is that, we are exposing young Start Up to modern IT, some of them to SiliconValley in US. At the just concluded IT event in Dubai, Two Nigerians were prominent among six top exhibitors. With that, we are playing a big role already in the global stage. “We are making effort to ensure enforcement of local content law to encourage locally manufactured IT products,” he added.