THE National ICT Week was declared open by the Federal Ministry of Education in Abuja last Monday. In light of a declaration by the Minister of State for Education, Barr. Ezenwo Nyesom Wike that the Federal Government is commitment to infuse information and communication technology, ICT, into the educational curriculum of primary and secondary schools in order to empower the next generation for national development, I hereby reproduce part of what I wrote in this column in our edition of wednesday 15 February under the headline: Where are we with NEPAD’s e-schools?

THIS August will make it just eleven years that the Nigerian ICT sector, unarguably the wunderkind of our economy took a quantum leap forward when the first two GSM telcos were licensed for business.

THIS week, attention is on key ICT indicators for Nigeria as released by SCAN ICT Initiative. By the way, SCAN-ICT Initiative Nigeria is an internationally co-ordinated effort to generate suitable sets of comparative methods and statistical indicators for monitoring, measuring and assessing the impact of ICTs on the social and economic growth, gross domestic product (GDP) and Gross National Income (GNI) of the country.

WHEN the Central Bank of Nigeria announced the cash-less policy last year, it ignited hope as it was seen as one that would help kick the nation’s primitive cash economy into the 21st century as the use of credit cards will become widespread.

FOR a very long time, one issue that has helped drain the public treasury is that of “ghost workers” – a situation perfected such that people who do not exist anywhere else exist on payrolls of, especially government institutions. It is one of the particularly ingenious schemes by which public money is siphoned.