By Emmanuel Elebeke

As Nigeria’s drive to digital economy gathers serious momentum, the Director-General of National Information Development Agency, NITDA, Kashifu Abdullahi has warned that the only set back in the journey will be that our institutions are manned by mostly analogue Chief Executives.

Abdullahi said that world over, analogue CEOs don’t flourish in a digital economy because one doesn’t give what he does not have.

However, he said that since the country has made becoming a digital economy a priority, Chief Executives Officers of various government institutions should retrain and retool themselves to be able to champions digital transformation in their various domains.

According to him, “this is the time to take the hard lessons in order not to be caught napping, because digital economy will not be sympathetic to any CEO not digitally compliant”.

Giving an example of how the agency is preparing for the digital future, Abdullahi revealed that NITDA is currently building capacity of public servants on digital skills to help government drive its economic diversification agenda.

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The capacity building, involves the training public servants on digital transformation skills at the eGovernemt Training Centre, Kubwa, Abuja.

The one week event necessary to acquire digital skills required to achieve government set objectives.

The first batch of the trainees graduated recently and Abdullahi, who was represented at the graduation ceremony by the Director of eGovernment, Dr. Vincent Olatunji promised that NITDA would continue to drive digital penetration in all public institution, because public servants have no alternative to acquiring digital skills to fit into government transformation plans.

He said: “One of the major things that this government is doing is economic diversification and the digital economy sector has been identified as a major sector to drive the economic diversification plan.

“But how can you do this without having a proper policy in place? When you have policy and infrastructure, you need human capital to be able to drive whatever you are putting in place.

‘’The training was to ensure that the agencies of government have the required digitally qualified personnel,’’ he said.

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