By Emmanuel Elebeke

The National Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA on Tuesday, 5th April, 2022, organized a one day capacity building workshop for Public Servants drawn from various agencies of government.

The idea was to equip them with requisite skills needed in dealing with Service Providers when it comes to contract awards and procurements.

The initiative by NITDA, was driven by recent findings that most public servants are already presented with prepared Master Level Agreement, MLA by Service Providers, which they adopt because they are not trained to cutinize the contents, leaving government as the ultimate loser.

According to our findings, so many white elephant projects littered all over the country by various government agencies as a result of the lack of capacity by the Public Servants to interpret the SLAs.

But NITDA said with the training of the Public Servants on the Service Level Agreements, SLAs, and the strict application by public institutions and service providers, wastage of public funds on white elephant projects and needless litigations in the court will become a thing of the past.

Declaring the training open, the Director General of NITDA, Mallam Kashifu Abdullahi said the training will not only curb wastages in government and avoid government losing litigations to Service Providers but also equip civil servants with requisite skills that will enable them resist service providers from dumping Master Level Agreements (MLAs) on the government.

The DG, who was represented by the acting Director, Corporate Planning and Strategy, Dr. Aristotle Onuma, Abdullahi said: “We are here to understand and agree on how to draft standard SLAs in order to ensure provision of adequate warranty, after sales service agreements on our IT products and services and adequate provisions for downtime and after-sales support.

“We are training government agencies on how to draft SLAs. SLA is very essential and very technical. Most of the service providers have used the opportunity to cheat the government and in submerging SLAs into what we call Master Level Agreement (MLA).

“NITDA is taking this opportunity to train most especially lawyers in government agencies to know the importance of SLAs and to insist in having it.”

According to him, the training is expected to take the trained through the basic ingredients of SLAs and how to negotiate with service providers and avoid being shortchanged.

“This workshop is taking them through the ingredients of SLAs, functions of SLA, so that they will be trained in requisites and minimum best practice function of what is expected of them to do,” Abdullahi said.

One of the resource persons and Managing Solicitor of Consecrated Law Firm, Ukauzo Chukwuemeka, said, ‘‘We have discovered that most public servants are already presented with prepared Master Level Agreement by Service Providers, MLA and you see them adopting it because they are not trained. And when these Service Providers prepare it, they come to MDAs and dump it, and because they do not have the expertise, you see them adopting it.

‘‘But with the training, the public Servants know what the content is, what and what not supposed to be involved, in doing that, it will help government not to indulge in wastages because it will help them to have value for money. What we are also doing is to prepare them as foot soldiers for government, because when they are trained, they will begin to insist on certain rights accrued to government,’’ he said.

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For him, the training, will certainly reduce littering of white elephant projects and litigations between Service Providers and MDAs ‘‘because when they are trained, they will discover certain advantages in the drafted agreements, things that are not supposed to be in the SLA and some that are not their but should there.

‘‘Our expectation will help government to reduce some of the litigation drastically. As solicitors, what we usually advise our clients to do before going to court is to review the agreement on the part of government, and if they do, government will not be cheated out and litigations will be reduced.

‘‘When there is no lacuna in the agreement and no party defaults, there will be need for litigation. NITDA is taking up this training be SLA is an emerging area of IT that will ensure public servants are not cheated out by Service Providers. They will know exactly the service they are expecting from a particular Service Provider and what role they are to play.

‘‘What we are proposing is continuous training and extension of the training so that when service providers send in SLA, they will know what to expect and what not to expect when they are presented with SLA,’’ he added.

Even though, the training is a pilot, Chukwuemeka said it will be encompassing and so cannot be tied only on IT projects but can be used for other agreements agencies of government will be entering going forward.

Vanguard News Nigeria