By Our Correspondent
Stressing the need for acquisition of digital literacy and skills among the people of Nigeria, the Director General of National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Abdullahi, said that human capital was the most valuable resource in building a non-dependent digital economy. He explained that Nigeria needed to be a digital sovereign state and needed to build its own indigenous digital content.
Abdullahi made this observation during a courtesy visit to Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)/Digital Transformation Centre (DTC) Nigeria office in Lagos. He stated that the agency was taking steps to implement its strategic roadmap and action plan through developmental regulation, which involved creating an enabling environment for startups and micro, small and medium-scale enterprises (MSME).
“Regulation is not meant to stifle innovation but to positively influence business, market and societal behaviour. Any regulation we implement has to create a market, enable innovation to protect consumers as well as improve service delivery,” he said. According to him, digital transformation is a knowledge-based economy just as one’s company or country is as good as its next product. “We need to train our people and harness our talents to build our digital offerings in-country because technology hardly lasts for more than a year. If you develop a system, you have to update it within a year, therefore no country can survive believing in another country to provide its digital services,” he said.
