The National Information Technology Development Agency says the process of clearing an Information Technology project in a government agency has led to a saving of N3bn.
In a statement issued by the firm’s Head, Corporate Affairs and External Relations, Mrs. Hadiza Umar, in Abuja on Monday, NITDA said its clearing process had offered a glimmer of hope that the Federal Government would be reducing wasteful and duplication of the IT procurement and services in the Ministries, Department and Agencies.
A further investigation by our correspondent showed that the clearance process had indicated that the software and hardware which an agency sought to import into the country was overpriced by N3bn.
Umar said, “As an unbiased watchdog of government, the director-general has ensured that there is transparency, accountability, efficiency and effectiveness in the process of obtaining clearance from NITDA targeted at extracting maximum value from the MDAs’ investments in the IT projects.”
President Muhammadu Buhari had at the recent e-Nigeria conference called for strict compliance with the IT project’s clearance directive by all government establishments to ensure that government’s ICT procurements were transparent, aligning with the government’s IT shared vision and policy.
Meanwhile, NITDA has warned the Ministries, Departments and Agencies of the Federal Government against hosting their websites on generic domain names rather on the government top level domain name – gov.ng.
In a statement issued in Abuja, the Director-General of NITDA, Dr. Isa Ibrahim, said that the agency would begin to blacklist agencies that continued to use the generic domain names such as the dot com.
