Federal government has announced that henceforth, all planned expenditure on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects across the public sector by Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), must first of all take cognizance of existing infrastructure and systems and convince government of the absolute necessity to make the desired procurements.
Plans are also under way to constitute a Services Oversight Committee (SOC) that will serve as the operational interface between government, Galaxy Backbone and other relevant stakeholders in the industry with a view to providing a pervasive nationwide ICT infrastructure platform that can serve all government MDAs.
All of these were with a view to ineffectively checkmating acts capable of duplicating procurements in the ICT sector as well as realizing the foundation for e-government.
Ambassador Baba Gana Kingibe, secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) who spoke in Abuja on the occasion of the 1st Public Sector ICT Infrastructure Forum, also disclosed that government is currently reviewing the report of the Task Force on the restructuring of government institutions/organizations in the telecommunications and ICT sector of the economy.
This, he said, could result further significant changes that are aimed at streamlining and strengthening the sector to ensure greater contribution to national development.
However, the SGF lamented that one of the early observations made in the life of this administration was the huge expenditures made in respect of ICT projects across the public sector. Another observation, he said, was the significant amount of overlap in functions among the various government organizations involved in the ICT sector.
"I have said it before and will want to say it again that inter-ministerial or inter-agency rivalry that results in duplication of expenditure as it affects ICT, is wastage of public funds and will not tolerated by government".
"This led to the issuance of a circular from my office containing guidelines for the procurement of connectivity and other ICT infrastructure services by government organizations from Galaxy Backbone", Kingige said.
Pursuant to government policy on ICT, Galaxy Backbone Plc, established by government to consolidate and integrate all the desparate existing government-owned networks into a single holistic government-wide network, has been directed to carry out a verification and analysis of actual bandwidth requires for the year 2008 for a MDAs.
This exercise is a pre-condition for the provision of Internet and site-to-site bandwidth for MDAs as provided for in the 2008 federal budget.