By Jimitota Onoyume
PORT HARCOURT— TO ensure that children in Rivers State are productively engaged this long holiday,  the state government has begun a one month free training programme for them on information and communication technology, ICT.

Declaring the programme open in Port Harcourt, yesterday, Secretary to the State Government, Mr Magnus Abe, said: “Besides making sure that the children become computer literate, the programme is part of effort by the government to take the young ones off the part of indecency and deviant conducts.
“If we do not invest in our children, then what we have done is to prepare for a future of disorder, insecurity and poverty. Anybody who is aware of the way global trends are moving, knows that any person who is not familiar with the computer has no place in the world in the future because there is software application in virtually everything today,” he said.

“If the Rivers State Government under Diete_Spiff was irresponsible I would not be a lawyer or a Secretary to Government today”, he said.

Adding, Special Assistant to the governor on ICT, Mr Goodliffe Nmekini whose office is handling the exercise said the programme was designed to make the children computer literate, afford them the needed capacity to interact with a wide range of people and develop their future aspirations with ICT as baseline. He said it was one of the steps towards building an ICT literate society    .