By Prince Osuagwu, Hi-Tech Editor

Over a couple of years now, Nigeria has been tinkering on the idea of digital transformation but a few environmental and infrastructural lapses have remained the bane of hitting the target.
But here in this interview, the Director General of National Information Technology Development Agency, Alhaji Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi reveals that Nigeria has engaged Cisco to streamline the processes.
He is upbeat that with what Nigeria already has in place, Cisco will help the country harmonise its fragmented databases and eventually lead the nation in outperforming India which makes over $150billion annually on outsourcing processes.

Excerpts:

Surprised you attended the Cisco TD launch of EDGE in Nigeria. Does it have anything to do with national agenda for digital transformation?

Yes of course. EDGE is part of the Cisco Country Digital Acceleration Programme, which Nigeria is now part of.

Remember at the inaugural speech of president Bola Tinubu he promised to create a million digital jobs; and creating jobs in a digital economy starts by bringing technology closer to people.

What I have seen in the EDGE hub today shows that our people can come with their ideas and with the latest technology here, access the skills and talent that can help them design prototypes.

So, this will really help us to get the talents, the skills and create jobs as the president mentioned in his inaugural speech.

But as a country, are we ready, because Cisco can hardly function in environments with fragmented databases?

On the 16th of May, Nigeria signed a Memorandum of Understanding, MoU with Cisco on our digital transformation agenda.

Part of the MoU is that Cisco will help bridge the digital skills gap. We also agreed on transforming the public digital system in Nigeria; how we can build public digital infrastructure, digitise agriculture, health sectors, improve the identity system and even government services.

So, you can see the collaboration will help in the area you expressed fears.

What we have started is the process of identifying what we really need in Nigeria and how Cisco can help build them up.

Do we have the President’s buy-in on these developments?

I do not want to address this yet. We have a plan to visit the President soon and after that you’ll get to hear more.

But, what I can tell you now, is that Cisco has a huge budget on corporate social responsibility program, and they are going to invest heavily into this project. I don’t want to mention the amount now until after our visit to Mr President.

This talk about achieving 95% digital literacy by 2030, where is Nigeria currently on it and how will this collaboration help in achieving the plan?

We have a program that we have designed, with different initiatives. We started by signing the national digital literacy framework. It is to help us identify competency areas. The framework has six competence areas and 23 competencies we need to build in Nigeria.

Building this involves changing the curriculum of our educational system, we have started working with the ministry of education that will include digital education as part of our curricular. We also have people out of the school system. We have several programs like the Cisco academy where people can go and get skills and competencies.

Since last year, we have been working with COSERA, we have the blockchain initiative program, we have many more programs like Microsoft also.

We have signed an MoU with them to train 5 million people in Nigeria. Google just made a promise of training 1million people. Then we just concluded IT skills gap assessment around 36 states and FCT, if the result is ready, we are going to launch it maybe by the end of this month, so after the report we will come up with a strategy, the strategy is that we will create a partner from the talent side and the supply side. The skills gap assessment has helped us identify what is needed.

The strategy is to set a target, we already have a 95 percent target and we have other targets in terms of building.

So the strategy will help us identify and initiate the unique things to learn and help us move from where we are today to where we want to be.

Are there low hanging fruits or advantages that can naturally facilitate achievement of this target?

Under Cisco academy, we have already trained 11,000 Nigerians. And again, there are a huge population that are born digitally literate. They are the digital generation who you don’t even need to train.

With that, maybe already 50%of Nigeria are digitally literate because, today, give a child a smartphone, you don’t need to teach him how to use.

So we have to focus more on digital immigrants, the people we need to train because we want every Nigerian no matter how old, to be able to take digital devices and consume them considerably, whether they can read or write or not.

But your efforts are affected by japa syndrome?

To address the japa syndrome, we have already drafted a national business process outsourcing strategy.
The business process outsourcing is one of the key sectors we need today. It means companies ship out functions to other companies to help them carry out.

Already in Nigeria, that sector is booming, we have more than 16, 000 people working there. Young people living in Nigeria, working for companies abroad. Remember, this happens organically. Now the government is trying to come up with a strategy to make the environment more conducive.

People can live in Abuja or Lagos but work for the US government or Cisco headquarters in California.

India is making over $150 billion annually on outsourcing, is that where we’re headed?

Fortunately, we have everything working to our advantage, to surpass India.

We have a younger population than India, we have better English-speaking people as well as a better time zone. Most of these businesses, the western companies in the US market, if you look at the time difference, Nigeria is closer to them.

So we have better competitive advantages to help us leverage above what India is earning and position a strong global outsourcing country. That will help us address the japa syndrome.