ICT, Major Tool For Transparency – Special Adviser

In a bid to instill transparency and good governance in the system, which is the hallmark of the present administration, the Rivers State government on the 5th of this month inaugurated the ICT department. This all important department is charged with the responsibility of training all civil servants nay Rivers State people to be computer literate free of charge. To this effect The Tide Roundtable, a personality interview programme of the Rivers State Newspaper Corporation invited the Special Adviser to Governor Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi on ICT, Engineer Goodliffe Nmekini to throw more light on his activities. The Special Adviser was put to task on many issues ranging from the target audience, benefits of the training, time span to the fear of loss of job and many more.

Here’s the excerpts. Ride on:

How would you want us to know you?

Well my name is Goodliffe Nmekini, I’m a Rivers man who has always been fascinated against the poor state of ours. I attended primary school here at Oromineke that was called CKS Oromenike, after which I attended Federal Government College then left for the United States, as God will have it, I’m back here to serve my state on the capacity of Special Adviser to the Governor on Information and Communications Technology (ICT). So I am here to give you update on what I have been doing.

Lead us a little deeper into your family background to enable us appreciate how your childhood experiences modeled your life, who knows, we might well be creating a new role models?

Well, I am from a beautiful place called Rundele. Most of you may know it as Ndele which is virtually in Emohua Local Government Area.

I am from modest family who actually went to primary school here in Port Harcourt. So I might be called a Port Harcourt boy because basically I grew up here in PH But I have some role models, my uncle had always been my own role model.

He is a business man, we all tried to be like him He always have this penchant for education and he pushed us as hard as you can imagine.

Most of us believed that we actually grew up from house it was always a joke coming from Federal Government College and going back to the house it was like you were from one military school to the other.

I don’t know what Federal College is now but when I was there between 74 and 79, it was quit an institution that promoted and ensured that people were disciplined. After my graduation from secondary school, I was one of the few people who  were very lucky, if you recalled, our state used to have regular scholarship award including some thing also called Governor’s Special Award. And at my time, it was Governor Okilo of blessed memory.

He had given nine people scholarship to study anywhere in the world and I happened to be one of those he gave scholarship to study so I went to the United States, I went to Miami, Florida where I got a bachelors Degree in Industrial and System Engineering and later did Management Information System in the graduate level or Masters Degree level.

I stared working for the state of Florida for eighteen years and then at some point got His Excellency’s nod, he picked me to now come back and join his administration and here I am.

Are you married?

Oh yes, I am married to a very beautiful lady who is also from Rivers State as a matter of fact from my village, whose father was at some point the Auditor General of this state, Chief S.H. Weneka and we have three beautiful kids, two boys and of course the owner of the house my little girl Oroma. So I have two boys and a girl.

I know you are prepared for ICT but we will shake you a little bit before we get to ICT, since you returned from your study abroad have you found time to visit your school in Rundele and Federal Government College Port Harcourt to see how they look like?

I have, unfortunately it was one term I attended in Rundele and I have been there, I have also gone to see my school at CKS Oromineke here in D/Line, so I have actually gone there, but is transformed completely different from what it used to be.

As a matter of fact anybody who is near the school will know that even the modern day College of Education or University of Education cannot be as good as the primary school is today. This was the end of my primary school, there was something called Advanced Teachers Training College, ATTC,  I guessed that’s where College of Education eventually got its study I have gone there and I have also actually been to FGC Port Harcourt. For some of you may not realize that the Federal Government College actually started at Rumuola where you have RIVCAS today. That was our campus, it started in 1972 and we were the 1974 set, and to have gone there and as a matter of fact I actually received an award recently from the College, Secondary School, and I hope that FGC will continue to be what it has always being, of course, I was told that there has been some little issues there in terms of quality of education but I do believe that they haven’t strayed away from what it used to be a very good school and I hope it continues to be that way.

Lets move close to ICT, in government circle you are seen to be Super Special Adviser because you are one of the very few who have the privilege of attending the State Executive Council meeting, why so?

Well with all due respect I don’t know about the super Special Adviser, His Excellency still refers to me as SA to him on ICT, everybody else is an SA so His Excellency if you recalled for those of you who have listened to him you will realize that he has a vision and he puts it inform of a statement.

He wants all of us to serve our people with humility and one of the key things that he always like to talk about is transparency. So he wants to serve the people with humility that would bring transparency into the picture but most importantly, the need for them to be anchoring on integrity and good governance, because of this good governance and transparency he now sees ICT as a tool to achieve those things and being that, he is always wanted ICT as a tool to achieve this, he then thinks that it is very very important for an ICT person to be present when decisions are made because ICT cuts across every discipline whether it is Ministry of Works or whether it is Ministry of Water Resources, you name it, is a tool that cuts across entire discipline and one of the things I usually do when I talk about ICT, I was even telling somebody who says well, I studied English, why should I do all these, why should I go for ICT training and looking at them, I said well, you studied English, how do you communicate. Sometimes you will not use the pen and piece of paper to communicate with people, I said well in these days of our age there is no difference between a pen and paper and a computer so, sometimes instead of writing on a piece of paper, you might write on word processing and be able to send whatever you have written to some one else via E-mail.

Just by doing that you are already using a different tool, but it hasn’t changed you from what you studied, just another tool to enhance your profession and for you to move forward with what is happening in the 21st century.

Part of your mandate is supposed to be like what you have said is to help the governor achieve the purposes of transparency and good governance and all that, what exactly is your mandate and how do you intend to achieve this? How long does the training last?

My mandate very simple, in the department has a mission which is, one, to really maximize the use of technology for the state and then come up with a way to sustain the delivery of government services through the common portal, what is happening means that we have to find out the different government processes.

How does Ministry ‘A’ perform? How does it do its job? How does Ministry ‘B’ do its job? And what are the different processes and once we get those processes, how do we streamline those processes so that they become easier to use, we then apply technology on top of that. So our mission and mandate is to coordinate the processes of government, make the processes easier, infact the work of government should be easier by applying technology.

Technology in this case being ICT and ensuring that information flows very easily. How then do we ensure that information flows very easily we need to treat repository of data by way of daily basis and then outlay application on top of that.

You see when we first took over, there was absolutely nothing on ground so we came up with three fold strategies and those were, building of infrastructure, building capacity and then application development.So what we did then was to ensure that there was connectivity within the hub of government which is secretariat.

As of today, every building in the secretariat is connected to what we call net work cooperating centre for what I might call data centre in the ground floor of Point Block that’s where the hub of our technology or the hub of our computing is. Indeed every building there is connected to that building via a satellite object. And we also have redundancy in Radio links. Having done that, having computed that, we even extended that to the House of Assembly, the Deputy Governor’s Office and of course His Excellency’s Government House. Having done that, we now went into each of the buildings actually using,  cables and connected every building with wireless access point so that people will now be able to connect and get on the internet and get on to other resources, we have done the first part, the second part which is capacity building, we now come up with what we might call State Of  The  Art Training  Centre. Again at Point Block Ground Floor, where we started training of civil servants I can assure you that we have trained over 1200 employees in the use of the basic ICT and word processing on most of the Microsoft products and so on and so forth.

Is a weeklong training from 9am till 4pm Monday to Friday and basically we get request from ministries these are the people we want to be trained and we go ahead and do that.

Now we have ventured into application development. Before we took over almost every government officials that we have seen their cards or whoever had email had a yahoo email account and as we know for government business, we should never send data or receive data in Public Domain Accounts so we now created a State Owned Email Account.

So Like in my case is G Nmekini of Rivers State Gov. ng. so we are beginning to continue to operate this account so that people will be able to have information in this manner, we are also moving now into access control and management as well as credit and few applications so that people will now start sharing data and ensuring that data shared is also protected and secured.

What class of people benefit from the training?

Absolutely is of no choice to the civil servant His Excellency had always wanted everyone who works for the government to be ICT literate. As a matter of fact, he wants the whole state, but we are actually starting from the civil service level and it is free to every civil servant.

Some people have this fear that as soon as the processes of ICT is completed, there will be loss of jobs and that fear is really high among civil servants. How possible is this. What has been your perception of the civil servants throughout this period of training?

Well let me first start by saying that I’m not in a position to say whether one will loose his job or one will not loose his job, certainly I hope everybody will keep the job.

The essence of ICT is to make their lives easier, when we started the payroll automation, that was also the fear, it was something very very strange. It was quite a good experience, I must tell you, a lot of people were afraid that they were going to loose their job. There were even rumour out there that ICT department would now start creating payroll and paying people therefore, all those whose job it is to pay people will loose out. So I had several meetings with them and what I explained to them was this, your job today is to make payroll, how do you do it. Every month you write for some kind of money and did all your tabulations and then you took the piece of paper to Ministry of Finance. But once we automate the system, you will still be the same person that will take care of the same payroll for your department, the only difference is that instead of doing it on a piece of paper and taking it to Ministry of finance, you will now do it on a computer and then shift a key and whatever you’ve done will still be transmitted to the Ministry of Finance.

As a matter of fact there is not a single person in my department, may be exception of my Director of finance that even had any idea on how to pay anybody. That’s not my job, my job is to handle ICT processes. And so with several meetings, they began to realize that all we were actually doing was to make their lives a whole lot easier. That no one was interested in anybody’s elses job. That we will not even take their job even if we wanted to because we were not trained in that profession. So every one understood.

Now going back to the second question which is your perception, one of the things I observed was that I have always said even overseas, they always look at Nigerians as being smart. There are no two ways about it, even anybody could say anything they want to say about other things, but our people are always keen and they are always very smart.

Some of these workers have never been given the opportunity to even touch a keyboard, once they started getting trained, the spate of glee or euphoria will go away at the end of the week, just give me the impression that we are now doing the right thing and as we continue, what we said to them is, this is the beginning, this is just the basic training and all we need from you is commitment, this is just the basic training after which, we will move into the intermediate level and advanced level and before you know it, just take kids today, look at the period as just an executive point.

You know, this is what we want, we want them to understand that computers are nothing but toys, so once they start using this thing on a daily basis to do their work even at home, you will be surprised what the state will transform to.

You recently presented laptops to permanent secretaries how many Permanent Secretaries in Rivers State are computer literate?

The  very first time we opened the training centre by His Excellency the Deputy Governor of the state, the first batch of people we were training were actually Permanent secretaries. So we trained Permanent Secretaries first.

His Excellency was so excited about seeing the Permanent Secretaries being trained that he said ICT, please look for something for the Permanent Secretaries by way of computers so that once they leave here, they can now have the tools that they need, whether they are at home or they are traveling, and email is sent to them, they should have way of responding, we need to start communicating via electronic format and that was the cause of the distribution of laptops to Permanent Secretaries and I can assure you it has put a smile on their faces.

Now no one has an excuse to say, I didn’t receive my email, what we did was we actually installed all the pertinent software products that we believed they need, before handing over the Laptops to them. It was quite a good experience.

How much did it cost government to provide that?

I wish I have my DFA here. I don’t have the exact figure, but I can assure you that, of course, one of the things we do since we bought them in quantity, normally, you will negotiate and ensure that quantity discount is applied and we were able to get something decent. And ofcourse, the benefit frankly speaking in my opinion outweighs the cost but  as a government whose is responsible and also knows that they are custodian of our public or the citizens money, it will ensure that you get the best prices for whatever you are buying.

However we want to talk about the cost  for the people to know that what they are getting is better than the cost, they should also know the cost?

I agree with you but the only thing is that, this is why we now have Due Process. I’m sure most of you are aware that, His Excellency had stressed and stressed very hard in ensuring that everything that you do is done through proper channel because of that, the tax payers should be rest assured that even if we in the pocess make a few misstates, there are other channels down there that will catch those mistakes and ensure that they get the best for what they pay.

He has asked for us to know whether the permanent secretaries are the only people to benefit or are there other categories of staff you intend giving this facilities, who are they?

Actually is interesting that you asked because one of the things I always tell people even my people even my own nephews and nieces they will say, ah: I want Laptop and the question is, why laptop in the caliber of Permanent Secretaries, it does make sense for them to have laptops because they can work from anywhere they are.

We have trained Directors of Administration  and we have also trained the DFAs. We are about to distribute desktops to their offices.

Now this is from the ICT project, with time, what we have encouraged, is for every ministry to have something in their budget for ICT where they would be able to purchase things, I mean purchase computers for their own staff, because the worst thing that can happen to anybody is to get trained and then not having the tools.

The ICT department, is new, we are just tidying up we decided, well let us take areas.

The Permanent Secretaries to commissioners and permanent secretaries, lets see if we can get them desktops because these are key areas, so we are trying to again give them desktops so that they can do their job. As time goes on, whoever gets trained, we will encourage the ministry to provide them with these tools.

Can it work without electricity or other sources of power supplies, knowing the erratic nature of our power supply in the state?

Well I think every one knows that it is a common problem we have here. This is why like the data centre which is the heart of our computing, we have different ways of power supply.

We will not depend on NEPA. If we did, then we won’t be able to run a 24 hour operation. So we have backed up power we have inverters, we also have power source coming directly from a very stable environment. So actually, I don’t want to go technical, but even on different ministries, we have wireless access points in such a way that they don’t even get power directly from the power source.