Most local government areas in the country are yet to comply with the directive to register their presence on .gov.ng, country’s top level domain name, some eight months after the expiration of deadline handed them to do so, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek has learnt.
Mrs. Mary Uduma, immediate president, Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) said that the body has achieved less than 30% compliance as at end of April this year.
NiRA and National Information Development Agency (NITDA) have mounted various campaigns to get the 774 local governments in the country to register in .gov.ng, in line with e-government policy of the federal government.
Uduma attributed the reluctance on lack of awareness of the benefits of presence on the internet to them.
“This system has been standardized among federal government ministries, department and Agencies and we are trying to do so at the local government level. To this end, we are planning to launch ‘switch to .gov.ng’ campaign in the six geo-political zones of the country targeting local governments in each of the zones. The sensitization programme will also correct wrong impression that some of the local governments are holding against launching their presence on the web,” she said.
Federal government had directed all local governments in the country to register their domain name on .gov.ng before the end of August last year and to do this in collaboration with NITDA.
She noted that though NiRA has made remarkable progress in marketing of .ng, and that they are not relenting which inform NiRA’s renewed strategy by giving registrars targets to meet which will be rewarded if met.
“We having been setting target for ourselves which eventually are not met, we have now decided to approach it through the registrars who are the ones driving the registration of .ng,” she added.
It would be recalled that NiRA had targeted 250, 000 registration at the end of last year which was not met even with several promos at creating awareness on .ng.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations revealed that most businesses in the country shun .ng but rather prefer to register -ng.com or ng.com as against .ng.
Same is the case with emails where senior government officers are using yahoo, gmail among other email accounts against secured email account of their ministry account.
Opeoluwa Odusan, managing director, Africa.com and immediate past chief operating officer, NiRA, attributed this to hidden costs such as cost of changing company’s letterhead paper, complementary cards, branded documents among others is responsible for corporates organisations such as banks from switching to .ng.