2014: Why global IT companies in Nigeria may not grow - unless

 

Uwaje

By: Chris Uwaje

The global IT battlefield in 2014 will revolve between triangular dimensions of: IT Policy, e-Government, and e-Security. These triangular parameters will dictate the development and market growth directions of the Information and Communications Technology sector.

And unless massive local skill capacities are urgently developed in the Nigerian IT Ecosystem, the expected market growth by global IT companies will result into a diminishing mirage. The reason is simple: Technology diffusion has overgrown its support (skill) capacities for continued growth in Nigeria and by extension, in most of African upbeat nations. This phenomenon is due to two critical factors: The Telecommunications-centric IT vision of the nation and the gross neglect of addressing indigenous IT capacity building during the early bubble of the initial telecommunications growth era of 2003-2011.

As we migrate into the midstream of the second decade of 21^st century Technology frontier, new conditions will be required to ensure and accelerate national IT development. The most critical of those conditions is ‘indigenous capacity’. Currently, Nigeria ranks 131 of 143 in global ICT e-Readiness development status – mainly due to her inability to build commensurate local skill capacities to support and sustain the development of her IT ecosystem.

This lack of skill capacities has stressed the variables for accelerated growth – earlier built on hardware and will further distress user demand, constructive investment, employment and real development as we engage 2014, unless the nation re-focuses her absolute telecoms –centric direction strategy and move into constructive knowledge and innovative solutions – championed by knowledge ware/software, where massive investment is critically required.

To attain the national Software capacity building, we must first of all consciously do the following:

·         Bring back IT knowhow currently incubating at the Industry Domain to Education.

·         Retool the Education System and by extension, retrain our IT lecturers– ensuring that we abandon the teaching of ICT-User competence and move onto Computer Science Education at all levels.

·         Adopt a national IT Skill-Conversion Strategy to accelerate our capacity building goal.

·         Furthermore, it also means that we must establish special Information Technology Institutions – such as national Software Engineering Development Institutes at Federal, Private Domain and State levels.

·         Connect with our Diaspora Brain Drain and convert them to IT brain gain.