With Adekunle Adekoya

LAST week, shape of the newly-created Ministry of Communications and Technology became clearer. The minister, Mrs Omobola Johnson announced during a visit to NigComSat that agencies under her ministry would include Nigeria Communications Satellite Limited which has been in the Ministry of Science and Technology, Galaxy Backbone, Nigeria Postal Service (NIPOST), Nigeria Communications Commission, and the National Information Technology Development Agency of Nigeria (NITDA).

As far as parastatals go, these are indeed enough to constitute the ministry.

Given the Nigerian way of doing things, what remains is formation of another bureaucracy, headed by a permanent secretary to complete creation of the new ministry. That, of course, will be in addition to the already vast bureaucracies of these different agencies.

And that is what is giving me concern. By the time the ministry’s bureaucracy takes shape, with all the appurtenances that define the civil service, not a small amount of money will be dedicated to overheads in form of salaries, perks, allowances and other things that specify the status of mandarins in our civil service.

If care is not taken, and I don’t see how this care can be taken, all the funds needed for implementation of policies that will impact meaningfully on Nigerians will vaporize in the mill of bureaucracy.

Afterall, a ministry, headed by a cabinet minister will have a permanent secretary, while the various departments will be headed by directors, who will in turn have units headed by deputy directors, assistant directors, and other designated officers.

Worse, some of the departments in the ministry will have functions that already exist in the various agencies under the ministry, but we’ll have them all the same.

For instance, only God knows how many departments of research, planning and statistics exist in our MDAs, all headed by mandarins of diverse rank. Anyway, that’s Nigeria!

One other thing the minister talked about during the NigComSat outing was the Startegic ICT4 Development Plan.

Anybody who has seen that document will give kudos to the team of Nigerians and non-Nigerians that worked hard to produce that blueprint.

Nigeria owes a debt of gratitude to the resource persons that produced the ICT4D plan, especially the UNECA Consultant, Professor Clement Dzidonu and the ICT4D Chairman, Dr. Armstrong Takang.

All the modules in the blueprint covered diverse areas of our national economy like health, agriculture, education, governance, national security and law enforcement, e-government, and infrastructure to mention a few.

If we had implemented that plan, it is certain that Nigeria and Nigerians would have begun to inhale fresh breaths of air in several areas of endeavour.

Since that plan was for the four years from 2008-2011, and the nation is yet to feel the impact of the plan, I think what we need do is find out what was behind the non-implementation of the plan, and deploy solutions.

Then, since it is a knowledge document, and knowledge is dynamic, the plan should be updated and implement with the needed vigour. There might be no need to spend huge sums of money generating another blueprint we may not implement.