By Prince Osuagwu
As Prof Attahiru Jega racks his brain to pick a company out of the seven that scaled the first huddle of the INEC contract scramble, Managing Director of NigComSat, Engr Ahmed Rufai may have Advised that there was no reason for anybody to develop migraine over the smooth delivery of the DCC machines only if the local content policy of the federal government would be applied here.

Rufai

According to Rufai, the open and close strategy of the issue would be to look inwards and allow local companies like Zinox, Omatek or Brain computers to handle the hardware aspect of the deal while his NigComSat deals squarely with the software aspect. That way, he believes government would have saved over 30 percent cost and also show that the local content bill is not a lip service policy.

Perhaps Rufai was echoing the voices and beliefs of many Nigerians who have expressed dissatisfaction that INEC even considered foreign companies for bid in the first place let alone allowing any of them to clinch it when the country was not only struggling to keep its ICT base high but is crying over the high level of capital flight from the country on daily basis.

The general belief is that since Nigeria is making waves today in the area of Information Technology due to the activities of some few brave indigenous companies who brace the seeming harsh Nigerian business climate to establish their business at home, it would be ideal to encourage them so that when such jobs call outside, they can also bid using the ones they did at home as referrals.

Maybe, that was why Rufai queried “where else do we expect the local content policy of the government to apply if not in this type of case. We should believe in ourselves and look inward in developing this country because for every one naira you throw out of this country, you are developing the economy of another country.

So to what extent or what policies are in place to see that Nigeria have developmental agenda. The local content bill, should not just be restricted to the oil industry alone, it should apply in so many other areas of the economy”

To buttress his claims, Rufai went memory lane reminiscing when before the oil industry, government tried to domesticate the textile industry by banning the importation of lace material. “But I don’t think it is just all about banning, there should be efforts to enhance our local industry for them to be competitive enough over and against other foreign counterpart.

If we look at our textile industry, we see a reason why empowering indigenous companies in this INEC deal is inevitable. One can only imagine the number of materials that over 140 million Nigerians are using, and still textile went down in the midst of this envious population because we just developed appetite for goods, services and companies that are foreign.

“The textile industry used to be the largest employer of labour in this country, but today we are talking of creating employment and reducing crime, and we are not encouraging those who would genuinely key into that even if for patriotism sake. I think we should be able to match our words with action”.

The case Rufai was making was that the totality of INEC’s demands in the DCC machines could simply be translated as the simplest form of software engineering which two Nigerian companies can easily collaborate and deliver perfectly.

According to him, “the major hardware required is a laptop equipped with a camcorder, that’s all. Now a whole laptop is less than one thousand dollar, you can even get some also equipped with camcorder, for eight hundred and fifty dollar. But what makes the e_registration complete is actually the software platform, the template and the intelligent table that will enable them connect together. That is what we have designed.

Our intelligent table, has a command and template used for data analysis, storage and production, specifically for the capturing of picture, of finger print and capturing of biodata of the voters”.

Rufai’s NigComSat, believes that as a creation of the Federal government, whatever it owns becomes automatically government’s own and can be used by government, even for free and so he wants the government to use what it has in_house to further flex its muscles in the global world as a nation that also builds some of her technological needs and not just depend on importation..

Going deep into the technicality of the exercise, he averred that Nigeria do not even need that direct capture machine because it doesn’t have a second value as it can only be used for that purpose while deploying computers will give the multiple purpose opportunity. NigComSat’s solution according to Rufai is tested .

“we applied it on staff attendance system which is based on smart card, we have been using it for over two years and this system we develop for ourselves , in fact it is from this system we graduated because everything we place there represent entire register system of workers, giving them smartcard and authentication of their present when they come to work and when they close from work so it is a system that we have used over and over and it is very resilient. So we are saying that it is high time we look inward, because there are multiple advantages in INEC taking these decisions”.

As if the special solution was not enough, Rufai also revealed that his company also created an electronic ballot system which cannot be snatched and cannot allow illegal stuffing of ballot paper into it because the entry is mechanized and there is magnetic reader that recognize whether the ballot paper being put on it was programmed to be in that particular box . The box disallows unauthorized voters, because it is controlled by biometric.