The Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) last Thursday called for a  law that would aid patronage of local software products in the country.
The President of ISPON, Mr James Emadoye made the call in an interview with newsmen in Lagos.
According to him, the law will serve as a panacea to the problem of unemployment and aid accelerated economic development in the country.
He said that with the law, inconsistencies in government policies would be addressed, adding that ICT Development Index (IDI) was a good indicator for determining the relationship of ICT to economic development.
“Korea Republic is on the top of IDI and has maintained that lead for over five years.
“This is because the leadership of that country declared the 21st century as the IT era and concentrates its resources on indigenous development of software for its economy and Nigeria is rated number 137 on the IDI.
“The government directives through the Executive Order No. 003 that software consumed in the country should be locally made will go a long way in making the needed impact for the industry and for the economy.
“ISPON is into software production and we need a conducive environment for the industry to move forward and this can come through a proper declaration by government making software and other components of IT a major strategy for economic development.
“Out of 20 richest and most generous billionaires in the world, seven are in Information Technology, particularly software.
“Software is a prerequisite for modern life and a means to leapfrog development process with no need for big capital investment,” he said.
Emadoye said that patronage was also key to the industries achieving their goals as most players of the sector including government were still enslaved to foreign products.
“Government use billions of dollars to import software that we have available locally and have the capacity of developing in cases where they are not already available.
“Being a member of the global village does not preclude you from having special attraction to your home grown products.
“My office is in Ilupeju, where we have a large population of Indians. A look at their homes shows that most of them use generators and other home products from Indians,” he said.
He therefore urged Nigerians and the government to emulate the Indians by patronising locally manufactured software.
Emadoye called on the government to invest in human capital development, adding that to achieve that the school’s curriculum should be modified and improved to meet with current reality of modern day technology.
He said that professional bodies should be involved in the curriculum drafting and review as they were the real operators in the industry “and are more in tuned with human capital needs of the industry’’.
The ISPON president added that the current school fees payment in public universities which was abysmally low was not making enough funding available for the institutions to develop programmes in ICT.
He said that in view of this, the institutions were forced to wait for budgetary allocation from the Federal Government before they could equip their laboratories and upgrade their learning equipment.
“To improve software development, we need to improve the educational system and since public universities are major schools that churn out programmers, there is need to pay more attention to them,” he said.
The ISPON president said that the Federal Government would have to restrategise to be able reposition the universities to affect the lives of the students more positively.