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<h1 class="entry-title">Govt agencies to migrate to .ng domain</h1>
<div style="float:left"><div class="metabar"><em><span class="sword">On</span> <span class="date time published" title="2012-01-18T01:00:32+0100">January 18, 2012</span> · <span class="sword">In</span> <span class="categories"><a href="http://www.vanguardngr.com/category/technology/" title="View all posts in Technology" rel="category tag">Technology</a></span> </em></div>
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<p>By Emma Elebeke</p><p><a href="http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/01/govt-agencies-to-migrate-to-ng-domain/">http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/01/govt-agencies-to-migrate-to-ng-domain/</a><br></p>
<p>As part of measures by the government to bring all IT-based
activities of its agencies and parastatals to a single platform, the
federal government said it is set to ensure full migration by all its
ministries, departments and agencies from their existing domain names to
Nigeria’s Code Top Level domain name, .ng, both for their websites and
official emails.</p>
<p>The Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, who
made this known in a recent event in Lagos said the decision was part of
the current measures by the government to bring all 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.</p>
<p>According to the minister, the ministry would use the medium to
acomplisg the dream of achieving true e-government in the country.</p>
<p>“Another thing we are looking at is Information and Communications
Technology 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.</p>
<p>Johnson sfurther revealed that her ministry was already working with
Galaxy Backbone Limited, an agency under the ministry to ensure a
connected government, where information can be shared.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>According to the 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.</p>
<p>For her, 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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 have about 33 million internet users, some are
occasional users.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>