Emma Okonji
As the political space gets heated up with the declaration of several political aspirants to run for the 2023 presidential election, the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS) has said it will assess the level of technology skills of all political aspirants to ascertain their readiness to adopt and apply technology in governance.
President of NCS, Prof. Adesina Sodiya who said this in Lagos during an interview with THISDAY, said as an umbrella body of all Information Technology (IT) professionals, NCC will no longer allow a situation where leaders who are technology savvy to lead the country.
According to him, NCS would carry out an independent assessment of all political aspirants with certain parameters such as operational use of technology for governance; Critical Information Gathering; Social Skills, Creative Skills; Programming/Coding; Computational Thinking; Technology Adoption, among others.
He said the findings would be made public through different channels of publication, to enable Nigerians make their choice of digital leaders before casting their votes for only technology savvy aspirants.
“NCS is interested in the leadership of Nigeria. We are not political group but an advocacy group that is driving technology innovation in the country. We are advocating for leaders who are technology savvy to rule our country in today’s digital era. NCS wants to promote leaders that are technology savvy and have the interest of developing Nigeria in line with emerging technologies. We need leaders that will continue to support the growth of IT development in the country, leaders that will support IT adoption and usage in Nigeria, and leaders that will support NCS’s IT programmes,” Sodiya said.
He added: “The issue with leaders that are not technology savvy is that they do not understand the speed of technology growth and as such they will always be left behind in a technology world. So we want leaders that will be able to move with technology growth and the speed of technology growth. So going forward, NCS will be assessing the level of technology skills of political leaders and public office holders in Nigeria. We are going to assess the technology level of political aspirants and make it public so that Nigerians will know the right candidate to vote for.”
Sodiya also stressed the need for government the create IT Department in all government Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs). He said the creation of IT Department would help government drive IT development much faster in today’s digital era, where knowledge-based skills in IT is driving development.
“Towards the end of 2019, the federal government, through the Head of Service, issued a policy that all MDAs should begin the process of digitising their operations and processes.
“It is of interest to NCS to see that all government processes are automated and the first process of automation is digitalisation. Physical file and processes cannot be automated without digitising the files and processes. As an advocacy group, NCS will continue to seek partnership with government on digital skills and digitisation of government services and processes,” Sodiya said.
He however said to achieve automation in government circles, government must create the Department of Information Technology in all MDAs to drive digitisation of government services and processes. “Today not all MDAs of government have IT Department. Most federal ministries do not have separate department for IT and this is miss-normal, because governments cannot talk of automating services of MDAs to drive digital transformation in government, when it has not created IT Departments to drive the initiative. If we do not have a separate Department of IT, it will be difficult for government to achieve its mandate on digital transformation in civil service,” Sodiya added.
