By Adekunle Adekoya

I doubt if Communications Technology Minister, Mrs Omobola Johnson has returned to Abuja in the last few weeks since she came to Lagos to attend the Broadband forum organized by NCC.

She has been going round Lagos since, visiting OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), as pictures published elsewhere on these pages, and other sections of Vanguard show.

That is hard work, and policy statements made during her tours of different establishments have been encouraging. In particular, visiting the Computer Village and seeing first hand, from a ministerial perspective what the situation on ground there is must be very enlightening to her and the experience, I am sure, will impact positively on future policy initiatives coming from her and her ministry.

Some issues on which she made pronouncements stand out. One is the disclosure that the Federal Government has plans to power ownership of personal computers by students in institutions of tertiary instruction. This initiative is to be lauded.

Another issue on which she pronounced was that import duty waivers would be actualized, or reinstated for OEMs with proven pedigrees.

Just these two, if scrupulously implemented are capable of firing this economy into the kind of orbit where you find countries like Singapore, Taiwan, or South Korea. I am optimistic these two policies alone can make us join BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa to make that acronym become BRINCS. The N there would be Nigeria!
But, caveat emptor!

The minister must be doubly sure that the fabled Nigerian factor does not come to play here; the political sharks and barracudas who need money for 2015 elections must not be allowed near this policy or its implementation under any guise.

Knowing my countrymen for who we are, merchants might take over and SEE to it that contracts for the supply of personal computers (be it desktops, laptops, or tablets) are awarded for the 600,000 students or so in our tertiary institutions. If that is done, we would only have enriched other countries while impoverishing ours, and perhaps setting ourselves back by more than two decades in the process.

We lost a good opportunity last year as INEC prepared for the 2011 elections. That election should have been used to reassure the Nigerian ICT community of faith in its abilities, but instead, we opted to squander billions to empower people whose interest in Nigeria does not go beyond the colour of the US dollar.

Similarly, the import duty waivers. If care is not taken, the mandarins in government and their compradores in the private sector might hijack this initiative, and as it happened before in other sectors of the economy, import computers here that would have become obsolete by the time they are cleared.

Personally, I wish the minister well on these two initiatives, and I pray she succeeds, like her Indian counterpart, Kapil Sibal, who commissioned the Aakash tablet PC project in an effort to link 25,000 colleges and 400 universities in an e-learning effort.

Since we do not have to reinvent the wheel, let the initiatives take cognisance of all efforts in this regard. Again, I wish the minister, and Nigeria, success in this effort.