Ministries, agencies to migrate to .ng domain

Ben Uzor Jr

The federal government has disclosed that it is set to ensure complete migration by all its ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) from their existing domain names to Nigeria's Code Top Level domain name, .ng, both for their websites and official emails. This is in an attempt to improve efficiency in governance by bringing all activities of its agencies and parastatals to a single platform. Omobola Johnson, minister of communications technology made disclosure in Lagos recently.

She said the decision was part of the current measures by the government to bring all Information Technology (IT)-based activities of the MDAs to a single platform thereby engendering a connected government that allows for sharing of facilities and information among government's parastatals. According to the minister, the ministry would use the medium to accomplish the dream of achieving true e-government in the country. “Another thing we are looking at is ICT in government.

“I can't stand here and preach to you about the importance of IT development in the industry without telling you about what we are doing in government about using ICT as a means of transparently administering governance and engaging the citizenry,” she said. Johnson further revealed that the ministry was already working assiduously with Galaxy Backbone Limited, an agency under the ministry to ensure a connected government, where information can be shared efficiently and effectively.

“As I speak today, we are putting in place a message and collaboration system to facilitate a connected government. All MDAs will be on .gov.ng. From next year when you get an email from a government official, it will be a .com.ng address. I have already started using mine," she said. According to the ICT minister, e-government is a major area that the ministry was currently focusing on in its effort to make sure that government engages the people in meaningful ventures.

She said Nigeria has a very ambitious e-government programme but hoped that the ministry would launch one of the biggest call centres in Nigeria before the end of 2012, which would basically be used as a basis of engaging government and its citizens. “We had a stakeholders' forum in September, 2011 and we will have another shortly after the new ICT policy that we just posted on our website. We have set ambitious targets for ourselves. Those targets are tangible. We have talked about increasing ICT contribution to Gross Domestic Product. “Today, we have ICT contributing 3.5 per cent although in the last publication of National Bureau of Statistics, it had gone up to 4 per cent.

“What we want to do is achieve at least 2 per cent increase in ICT contribution to GDP by 2015," she added. The target according to her is to boost mobile penetration, covering the whole of this country with voice penetration, even with 90 million subscriber base. Also, the minister said government expected to move from about 58 per cent penetration to 80 per cent mobile penetration. She said although Nigeria currently has about 33 million internet users, some are occasional users.

“By making our broadband infrastructure more ubiquitous and more robust, we believe we can increase the number of internet users to 70 million. It will create an opportunity to provide jobs for our young people very quickly. It will create an opportunity to provide services to both the local industries and offshore industries as well.” She noted that Nigeria was ripe and well positioned to create a domestic call center industry, noting that call centre was one of the initiatives the ministry's was looking at as a means of job creation.

First published on Business Day, Tuesday 24 January, 2012

Cashless Economy - UBA to deploy 25, 000 PoS terminals in Lagos

• Conducts 1 million ATM transaction during strike action
Ben Uzor Jr

As Nigeria gradually moves from cash-based to electronic based transactions by virtue of Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) cash-lite policy, United Bank of Africa (UBA) Plc which currently has 700 branches across the country has disclosed plans to deploy 25, 000 of Point of Sale (PoS) terminals in Lagos by December 2012. Luqman Balogun, group director, E-banking, UBA who made this revelation at a media parley in Lagos recently, said the bank was fully equipped to support CBN’s financial inclusion strategy.

According to Balogun, the recent nationwide strike by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) to protest the removal of fuel subsidy was a lucid indication of the banks preparedness to implement CBN’s cashless drive. “We had a massive surge in the number of people who used our electronic channels during the nationwide strike action. Our ATMs, PoS terminals were up and running during the strike. We had a lot of customers who for the first time used our internet banking platform to conduct financial transactions.

“We recorded 1 million transactions on our ATMs during the strike. UBA currently does 5 million transactions on the ATMs monthly. We were able to keep out ATMs up and running. We even had an alert system in place to notify us when cash runs out at any ATM location. Our ATMs were also supporting cardless withdrawals where money can be sent to anyone. A recipient can walk up to a UBA ATM, access the cardless transaction, supply the access code and the ATM dispenses the cash.

“It was a test for us to see how effective our e-channels were and we came out tops.” Balogun, who allayed fears of increased internet fraud entertained by Nigerians as they migrate to the cashless mode, said that risk and security measures have been greatly improved on to address fraud. He expressed confidence in CBN’s cashless policy, adding it provides ample opportunity for banks to improve the performance of their service delivery infrastructure. More basically, according to him, e-channels would indeed deepen the customer base of banks by essentially taking financial services to the grassroots.

The UBA director noted that the CBN’s cash-lite would drive the usage of payment cards will significantly grow. He believes that cards will largely drive the attainment of the goals of cash-lite given their popularity and wide spread acceptance. “UBA issues 2.2 million Visa Cards out of the total 8.5 million cards in the country. We control 20 percent of the market. We are also planning to commence issuance of MasterCard’s to give our customers more options. All UBA cards are EMV cards with chip and PIN.”

He also pointed out that UBA was playing a dominant role in the internet banking space with U-Direct; a solution providing all account holders to their accounts. According to him, UBA has close to 600,000 subscribers with the adoption rate growing on a daily basis. “U-Direct is a secure web-based solution and gives users the freedom to access their account from anywhere. With U-Direct, customers are able to conduct most transactions available within UBA branches but without having to visit the branch.

“For UBA, we see opportunities because we want to provide solutions. What motivate us from an e-banking perspective are convenience, safety and security. Those are the watch word for us”. The above, the bank intends to achieve as customers and corporates embrace its self-service electronic banking channels namely: UMobile, PayManager, Consolidated Internet Payment Gateway (CIPG), U-Pay Connect, BankCollect. PayManager is UBA’s web-based electronic payment solution.

It is a web-based payment solution that enables e-payment to any third party (suppliers/vendors, customers, government, etc) locally and globally. With PayManager, customers can make payment from their account into accounts with any bank in the world. It also supports foreign currency payments and international transfer. On the other hand, BankCollect is a multi-channel is a web-based solution which enables collection or payment on behalf of government or corporate customers.

Payments such as Airline ticket payments, insurance premiums, subscription payments, utility bills, according to Balogun can all be managed on the solution. CIPG is UBA’s Internet Payment Gateway developed strategically to enable online payments on merchants’ websites. The web solution provides the simplest and quickest method of integrating e-commerce websites to a secure payment gateway for the purpose of receiving payments for goods and services. CIPG presents a combination of local and international payment options to merchant customers on a unified web interface.

First published on Business Day, Tuesday 24 January, 2012

FG lobbies ITU for additional telecoms spectrum

Ben Uzor Jr

The federal government is said to be engaging in intense lobbying for additional spectrum from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to enable telecommunication operators in the country provide innovative and reasonably priced broadband services to Nigerians. Bashir Gwandu, executive commissioner, technical services, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), made this revelation in an interview at the Radiocommunication Assembly conference 2012 held in Geneva.

Telecoms operators had earlier expressed concern that majority of the Nigeria’s population especially those who dwell in the rural communities will be denied access to telecoms services due to spectrum unavailability. Available statistics reveal that 40 million Nigerians living in about 850 villages across the country do not have access to basic telecoms services. An analyst told Business Day yesterday that Nigeria’s digital divide is still wide even with Nigeria’s 90 million active subscribers.

According to him, Nigeria needs additional spectrum which could be used by mobile operators to deploy high capacity mobile voice and data services, noting that there was not sufficient spectrum available for the regulator which explains why Nigeria was going to ITU to push for more frequency spectrum resource. “In other parts of the world, there is huge ground infrastructure. In Africa, we rely on wireless. We also have affordability issues which entails capacity to pay for deployment of wireline services.

“The alternative we have is to deploy wireless services. For wireless services, one of the fundamental challenges we have is the amount of spectrum needed to provide the service. Frequency spectrum is very limited resources and we have shortage of it. We have to look for cheaper alternative which involves allocating additional spectrum. Unfortunately, we do not have spectrum that is why we have come to the ITU to ask for more allocation of spectrum that would help us bridge the digital divide.

“So, we have put in a paper calling for more studies. We have put in a draft proposal for additional allocation of spectrum; all of these are skewed towards achieving the objective of getting additional spectrum. On the much anticipated global switch over from analogue to digital broadcasting, Gwandu said much is yet to be done in Nigeria.“Some states have already digitized their transmission, others have not. Digitisation should have been done prior to 2010 but every country has its own challenges.

“Some of the challenges we have are issues revolving around getting the right policy in place to ensure that digitisation takes place. It is very important for us to digitise as soon as possible. Presently, it is difficult to get spectrum licenses for telecoms services. Meanwhile, we have spectrum that is currently not efficiently utilised by analogue TV systems. It has become paramount for us to quickly move towards digital services so that we can free up spectrum for IMT and equally more efficient broadcast services.”

Only recently, the NCC commissioner had reiterated the need for the federal government to request for more spectrum allocation on the 700MHz, which is a befitting spectrum being used for analogue TV. “We said let's digitise our television so that we can have the spectra for telephony services and we are pushing for spectra 690-790 MHz. “At the last conference of ITU (World Radio Conference), we said Africans haven't got Digital Dividend because we have already licensed CDMAs, what is left for us is just 790-806MHz which is 16MHz, which is not going to take us anywhere.

“We said let's extend it to 698MHz that would last for three major operators or an existing operator can buy part of the spectrum and expand their network and still accommodate more people and have better quality service and indeed accommodate the data growth that will come overtime. “This is what we are pushing for at ITU, we are leading Africa in this fight for the next WRC next year and we are going to tell ITU that we want it now, we can't wait any more, the whole of Africa wants it as soon as possible.”

First published on Business Day, Tuesday 24 January, 2012.