Engineer Lanre Ajayi is the president of the Nigerian Internet Group and the managing director of Pinet Informatics. He started his career with Nitel where he worked  for 11 years before starting Pinet Informatics as part of his contribution to the development of the sector. He spoke to funmi ilesanmi on a wide range of industry issues.  

NIG Increasing Internet Penetration in Nigeria
The Nigerian Internet Group has devised a couple of strategies to ensure that we boost Internet penetration in the country and out of all our activities and strategies, we consider policy advocacy as a prime one.  It is through policy advocacy that we can get input into government policies that will facilitate quick roll out of Internet services in the country. The roll out of Internet services that is not limited to the urban areas but extends to the rural areas, so we tend to participate actively in the process of policy formulation. We attend meetings with government, we submit memoranda, we attend public hearings where we new things are being discussed and we tend to help government fashion out policies that will ensure appropriate and adequate penetration of Internet in the country. We also do a lot of sensitization, creating public awareness through workshops, conferences and we generally highlight the importance of the Internet, how it can benefit individuals and the nation as a whole. We also showcase the potentials of the Internet in the improvement of social and economic well being and of late we have been focusing on the need for Nigerians to adopt the Internet as a tool for job creation and as a tool for wealth creation. It is in view of this that we launched an initiative called the Internet for Jobs (I4J) initiative to sensitize people on the power of the Internet to crate jobs for out teeming unemployed population.
Government’s Response to NIG Advocacy Activities
The government’s response has not been bad. They have been generous in inviting us to some of these for a where policies are being formulated. Specifically we were part of the process that came up with the new Information Technology Policy that will replace the existing policy and we had the opportunity to give our inputs. For giving us this kind of opportunities in presenting our perspective, we want to say that the government has been responding positively and we can see that some of the policies that we have particularly the telecoms policy have been proven to be quite good. The policy espouses deregulation, liberalization and all private sector led economy and we can see today that that has worked to a large extent and has created the right environment for investors to put their money down for the roll out of telecoms services and Internet services. Some of the policies we have can be considered good because government was gracious enough to accept inputs from various sectors including the Nigerian Internet Group in formulating some of these policies. 
Position of Internet for Jobs Initiative 
It is essentially about awareness creation, to let people know that you can make a living by using the Internet positively. Sensitization is an ongoing thing, the more we talk about it, the more we drive into people’s subconscious the opportunities on the Internet in creating jobs. It is an ongoing process, we only need to talk about it using every opportunity we have and I want to believe that people are listening to us. There are a number of moves by people to start their online businesses, which is quite encouraging to us and that is a proof that our I4J campaign is working.
Centralising Campaigns in Urban Areas
Yes, the NIG office might be located in Lagos and our activities might concentrate more in urban areas, our conferences, workshops and seminars but through the use of the media, I believe we can extend that campaign to the rural areas. Newspapers do get to the rural areas, radio and television stations are listened to and watched in the rural areas so by that some of our campaigns also get to these areas. We may not have the resources to move into every rural area in Nigeria but through the use of the media we believe we can reach out to people in rural areas and spread the gospel about the need to use the Internet for job creation.
Why Are Government Activities Still Paper Based?
Yes, I am as disappointed as you are. We expect government to take a lead in adopting the use of the Internet for service delivery. We are quite surprised that a good number of government agencies are not using this platform that makes their life easy and also make the lives of citizens easy. A platform that makes service delivery very efficient and cost effective, so we are surprised that government agencies are not buying into this but that is not to say all of them have shunned the Internet. There are some good examples of people who are adopting the Internet to deliver government services to citizens. The ones that readily come to mind are the JAMB of this world, WAEC and NECO which allow candidates to register online. You will agree with me that that has eased the burden on students and have made these organizations more efficient. Another good example is the passport office which allows you to apply for your passport online. Some of them are actually using the platform for service delivery but a good number of government agencies have not woken up to the opportunities presented by the Internet.
Need for Documentation in the Nigerian Internet Space
I don’t want to say it’s a cultural thing. We’ve not being documenting properly, people don’t write books in this area and we don’t read, so if you cannot learn from experiences, how do you develop your knowledge base? We need to develop a culture of documenting. We did not inherit that from our fore fathers because they lacked the capacity to write, the basic literacy was not there; the culture of documenting was not there so they were not able to pass all the experiences they gathered over the years to the new generation. People have ascribed our level of underdevelopment to that because we are not able to transfer knowledge to the new generation but the Internet has provided a great opportunity for us to capture our experiences, our knowledge and make it easier to transfer these resources to one another with ease. Now experiences can be captured with digital camera, a whole lot of resources that we have in physical form can be easily digitized and captured and transferred on the Internet in seconds. The Internet and the information era that we are offer great opportunities for us to capture our experiences, our knowledge and be able to transfer these to the new generation.
On the Set Back of a Computer per Nigerian Student
You see there is no initiative or project that will not have its draw back, that will not have some loopholes that could be exploited; but we have to weigh the pros and cons. Will you say because a couple of parents will sell the computer given to their children, should we use that as an excuse to deny other parents who will value the opportunity to enhance the knowledge of their children? Yes, we cannot rule out the possibility of few parents who cared little about their kids would dispense the computers that were given to their kids. I think there are millions of other parents that will realize the benefits of those computers to their children and will leave it for their children to develop themselves and will even join their children in utilizing this tool to empower themselves. If you continue to see the little draw back of initiatives then you will not embark on greater initiatives. I believe with all my heart that if we give every Nigerian student a computer today, the social and economic profits that the nation will derive from it far outstrip whatever other avenue we are putting the resources into now; be it fuel subsidy, be it even road construction or any other avenue we are putting money. What we actually lack in the country as basis for underdevelopment today is lack of knowledge. We are not knowledgeable relative to the people in the developed world. If acquiring knowledge is what we make us great, why don’t we put all our resources there? We have identified the Internet as a reservoir of knowledge so why don’t we give every Nigerian student that device that will enable them tap into that resource base so that Nigerians can become very knowledgeable for us to compete globally. I believe we need that investment, we need to put a huge resources, a great percentage of our resources in empowering the Nigerian student and the way to go about it is by giving them the opportunity to tap into the vast resources on the Internet. You cannot tap into the Internet without a terminal device like the computer, a smartphone and anything you can use to accessing the Internet. An ordinary Nigerian cannot afford a computer. An average low end computer will cost about N50,000, how many homes can afford that? It means there must be a government intervention to facilitate that ownership. That knowledge that will be acquired is in the national interest because whatever knowledge is acquired will still be used within this economy to boost our productivity; so it is an investment that needs to come top on priority, we should not look at some of the draw backs. There will be some loopholes and people will take advantage of it but it should never be the basis of us taking decisions on whether or not to go for great initiatives.
Addressing Bottlenecks in Broadband Penetration
There are a couple of bottlenecks and luckily they are not bottlenecks that are insurmountable. Operators do not have access to spectrum and that is the honest truth. Some operators have money to invest in broadband but to do wireless broadband, they need spectum and if the government is not releasing spectrum what do you do? You hold on to your money and who losses? The Nigerian populace will not be able to access the Internet at the right amount and at the right quality because there is no service delivery. We can make spectrum available to investors, to people who would like to roll out services. The other parts are already being addressed and that is the international backbone. International cables are being laid, we know of Glo 1 and MainOne that are possibly going to commence services this year. We believe that when these cables land, they are going to bring abundant international bandwidth and we also know that on the national scale, a number of companies are already rolling out fibre to major cities that will link Nigerian cities together.
The issue of last mile is still a pending issue because spectrums are not made available and incidentally that is the easiest part of the whole scenario. It should not be a difficult thing for anybody to do. The spectrums are there, three spectrums have been ascribed for Wimax globally; the 2.3GHZ, the 2.5GHZ and the 3.5GHZ. We have these spectrums there unoccupied so why are we not releasing it for the roll out of broadband services? I think that is an area the government has to look into.
About Pinet Informatics
Pinet is one of the first ISPs not only in Nigeria but in Africa. We are a traditional ISP, we started during the days of the dial up. We have been involved as technology evolve, we’ve done Vsat, we’ve done wireless, we’ve pioneered a number of products and services in the industry. We were the first to do a prepaid Internet card which we called the Log On card which was the first prepaid card in the country. We developed the Nipost e-mail when e-mail was still emerging. We’ve pioneered a number of initiatives and even now we hope to launch a number of products which are also pioneering services in the country and that is in the area of content and in the area of e-payments. Hopefully soon we will launch the products. We are an engineering company, we are also an innovative and creative company. We have moved from being a pure engineering company to an all encompassing company.                                                   
Competition between ISPs and Telcos
I will say it is an unfair competition. Of all the traditional ISPs we started with, there are about one or two left, the others seem dead. GSM and CDMA operators bundling Internet into their services eliminated traditional ISPs. But we are a little bit lucky that we anticipated it, we saw it coming so we started exploring other opportunities. We saw a big opportunity in the area of content, in the area of e-services and we started conducting intensive research and we are lucky that the number of products that we have been researching on are fully developed now; and we will soon launch the products.