By Emma Elebeke

RECENTLY, the Nigerian Computer Society, Lagos State chapter held its annual conference and Golden award ceremony in Lagos. The conference, which is a new version, attracted information technology professionals within and outside the state, with the aim of celebrating past outstanding senior members of the society. Shortly after the conference, the new President of the Nigeria Computer Society, Mr. Demola Aladekomo was cornered by journalists to speak on his new office, IT curriculum, policies and what the award portends to the industry. Excerpts:

AS a new president of NCS, what level of collaboration do we expect from your members and the Federal Government?

It is important for us at the state and national levels to collaborate with the both the states and federal government. Government is the largest employer of labour. IT can also be the largest deployer of labour. We are looking at a situation where IT will generate more employment than the oil industry and the Federal Government will contribute.

In the next two to three years, we are targetting between one million to five million jobs. NCS is going to be used to create these jobs. We are not going to employ people; we are going to work with the Federal Government towards providing these jobs.

What do you make of the IT curriculum in Nigerian schools?

I must recognize what our fore fathers have done in the past, setting up committees to look at the curriculum. The primary, secondary and tertiary schools have been working with the NCS to upgrade the curriculum in collaboration with NITDA.

In so doing, they have been ensuring that the curriculum is properly articulated and implemented. For me, there is still a lot of work for us to do, for primary schools especially. We are going to be working with NITDA especially and the related ministries of education and ICT to ensure that IT takes root in primary and secondary schools.

We must also recognize the latest effort by the Federal Government to take IT to secondary schools. Recently, they empowered over 387 secondary schools students with IT facilities. It is a drop, but a good effort, and we are going to encourage government to do a lot more in spreading this noble initiative.

It is not just spreading computer knowledge and skills, it is also empowering the students to be self reliant. These are more ways of creating more jobs. For those 387 schools, at lest two IT teachers are going to be deployed because, one teacher can’t teach a whole school. That means at least 387 times two teachers. So, the federal government is not wasting money on computers, it is creating jobs by so doing apart from bringing knowledge to our kids.

Do you think our IT policies are still relevant to the modern trends?

We are going to work with committees of the Technology ministry to come up with a robust IT policy for the country. We are glad that the minister mentioned it last week, and she is going to take on the initial briefing on our constitution, during the up coming stakeholders summit on this issue.

ITAN, ISPON, NITDA, ATCOM, ALTON, NCS and others are going to sit together and come up with another road map, so that in another two to three years, IT will be in the fore front of creating employment, fighting terrorism, unemployment, armed robbery and transforming the way our country is governed.