Recently, the management of Leadership Watch, a non governmental organization which specialized in promoting good leadership in Nigeria organized its 10th annual lecture in Lagos on the theme: Imagine a Nigeria Without Oil”.The Nigeria Internet Group President, Engr. Lanre Ajayi, was there and this reporter cornered him to explain further some of the issues that arose from the lecture.
Excerpts
Going by the topic of today’s event “Post Oil Era For Nigeria”, do you see the possibility of IT taking over the place of oil?
Looking at the Asian tigers, you will notice that all the vibrant economies in Asia, there is one common factor that is driving those economies and usually that factor is the Information Technology.
In China the manufacturing capacities are being generated by information technology and many other economies. The vibrancy of many economies is dependent on IT. So, if we must talk of post oil era for Nigeria, then we must be talking about emergence of IT as the driving force of the economy.
That means that IT is capable of enthroning good leadership in Nigeria?
Ofcourse. Interestingly, IT is already playing a leadership role to other sectors of the economy. It is the key and most viable sector in Nigeria today. It majors as the most transparent sector too. There is no economy that do not rely on IT tools to deliver its services and production processes. It has emerged as a necessary tool and by extension the leading sector of many economies.
How would you relate internet penetration to the achievement of Vision 20 2020?
With the way we are moving, I do not think we can make the desired progress on internet access. But I always say that the difference between the developed economies and the developing economies is knowledge. What the people in developed economies have that we do not have is knowledge.
They are more knowledgeable than us. We need the intelligence and I have no doubt that Nigerians are intelligent. For instance, if you do not read you cannot acquire knowledge. We have not paid enough attention to knowledge acquisition. But there is a good news, the internet provides us the opportunity for everybody to access knowledge. There is a repertoire of knowledge on the internet. I mean knowledge that have been acquired over years are now residence in the e-library on the internet. A whole lot of e-books are now available on the internet including tutorials.
So, when we make internet accessible to every Nigerian, every home, school on every mobile phone, we now have opportunity to access knowledge. So if we are able to acquire that knowledge, then we will be able to achieve our goals on Vision 20 2020. Knowledge is key and the great tool to acquire it, is the internet.
Now that you are complaining that penetration speed is not satisfactory?
To be frank with you, I’m not satisfied with the current level of internet penetration in the country today. But I must confess that there has been some improvements now, compared to what we used to have when we started in 1995 after the formation of the NIG.
Then, there were just a couple of people having internet then and we were so proud about it, especially when other countries are making efforts about it, including African countries who are making huge efforts, getting connected to the internet and Nigeria was pretty back.
But today, a lot of people now have access. Almost everyone in the urban cities have access.
The question to ask then is what about the people in the rural areas, are they not Nigerians? And how you will know that we are doing pretty well in the area of internet connection is when you compare the number of people who have access to internet to the number of people who have access to telephone services.
There is over 60 million telephone access and 20 million access for internet in Nigeria today. That is a wide gap. We now ask, how come that these people making calls on phones cannot have access to the internet. We should not forget that the internet enables us to do more things than the telephone. The telephone is just one little access in what is possible on the internet. Do not forget that you can make phone calls on the internet, Voice Over IP.
How can broadband accessibility be fast tracked in this circumstance?
There are three segments to internet delivery: The international link, national backbone and the last mile.
On the international link, we seem to be making some progress with the landing of Main One and the Glo 1. We now have three cables including the Sat 3 cables. Some others are still coming even as people have started foreseeing the possibility of gloat. The next one is the national backbone.
That is the fibre cable that will link all the major cities together. Some progress has been made but they are not good enough. Only six cities are now connected with fibre in Nigeria and I think that is where a whole lots of job is required to be done now.
Then the last mile. That is the connection between the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) institutions. That one is the easiest part but we are having some challenges in that area. That area is better done by wireless spectrum. In doing this wireless technology, we require spectrum and our spectrum management.
It will be well done when the GSM licences ware auctioned in a very transparent manner but suddenly, we are not giving out spectrums again and people require spectrum to do the business and what this means is that investors can no longer roll out services. That is the major thing holding us down on the internet access. It is a very major factor.
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