By Emeka Aginam

Unless issues like poor policies, patronage lack of action, among others were resolved urgently, Nigerian local software market estimated to worth about $12 billion will continue to experience slow growth.

This among others were among the submissions of the IT experts at 2015 President’s Dinner organized by the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) recently in Lagos.

While calling partnership with the ICT sector, the Executive Secretary, of NCDMB, Dr. Ernest Nwapa, who delivered the keynote address with the theme: ‘Software and Local Content in the Nigerian Oil and Gas Ecosystem’, said strong political will was most crucial to drive local content growth in the Nigerian IT ecosystem.

Lamenting poor patronage of local solution which he believes can compete globally with foreign brands, Nwapa said that with strong political will, software development could be explored in all the sectors of the economy, including the oil and gas industry.

Warning on the implications of consumption of foreign brands, he explained that local content is about local capacity, adding that his agency was focusing on in-country value addition which includes promotion of capacity and use of local resources among others.

He said that implementing local content in any sector of the economy requires a strong political will to enforce.

Citing policy where Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) in oil and gas were not allowed to supply anything to oil companies without evidence of local content, he said that in IT sector, certain percentage of software in use must be local.

He said that his agency was ready to collaborate with ISPON the way it has done with power sector to plug into its capacity building in training engineers for structural and other electrical and mechanical design in that sector.

“A software engineer who wants to develop an application in the oil and gas sector have many Nigerians working in the sector that can explain to him what the operations are all about, which will guide him in that regard. We don’t have that big gap like before when Nigerians are not allowed in some operational areas in the oil and gas sector,” he explained.

Local content drive, he said must be championed from the top and tied to national agenda, which he described as been a long journey, but not a sprint.