The Federal Government has postponed the ‘Smart Cities Nigeria Summit’ scheduled to hold in July.

Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, who disclosed this in Abuja, said the summit would also offer stakeholders opportunity to address possible challenges that might emanate during the implementation plan.

Shittu, who disclosed this in Abuja, said the summit was to give all participating organisations, states and foreign embassies ample time to plan and prepare for the summit.

The Federal Government had earlier scheduled the summit for June 27-28, 2017 but will now hold from August 8-9, 2017 at the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja.

Speaking on the benefits of the smart city, the minister said the summit would help government make Nigerian cities more efficient, safer and conducive for the citizens with the continued urbanization, which is adding more people to the urban population and invariably posing challenges on government.

According to him, the initiative is a conscious effort by government to forge a public private partnership  to develop scalable, replicable, interoperable and measurable solutions that will make our cities and citizens smarter.

“Through the summit, IT companies in Nigeria will have the chance to team up with cities and infrastructure companies to help advance smart city/smart infrastructure technologies and systems in Nigeria. It is an opportunity to demonstrate and scale up Nigeria IT innovations and to show how IT can be linked with physical infrastructure to deliver business and public benefits,”    he said.

In order to encourage healthy competition among Cities and States, the Ministry in the country, Shittu said the ministry in collaboration with its Partners,  Afritex Initiative  will soon launch  ‘The Smart City Challenge’. The idea according to him is to encourage Local Governments, Cities, State Governments, and the builting industry to take revolutionary steps to go to the level of digital technology.

He further explained that the Ministry with her partners intended to make the summit a yearly event designed to provide a common platform to review progress done.