By Emmanuel Elebeke

The Director General of National Information Development Agency, NITDA, Mallam Inuwa Kashifu Abdullahi says the agency is currently building capacity public servant on digital skills to help government drive its economic diversification agenda.

Abdullahi stated this at the weekend at the graduation of Batch A of the 650 DT-TWGs on Government Digital Transformation which lasted for a week at eGovernemt Training Centre, Kubwa, Abuja.

The DG, who was represented at the occasion by the Director of eGovernment, Dr. Vincent Olatunji stated the determination of NITDA to drive digital penetration in all public institution, saying that the public servant have no alternative to acquire digital skills to fit into government transformation plan.

“One of the major things that this government is doing is economic diversification and the digital economy sector has been identified as a major sector to drive the economic diversification plan of the Federal Government.

“But how can you do this without having a proper policy in place? So, when you have the policy and infrastructure, you need human capital to be able to drive whatever you are putting in place.”

”The training was to ensure that the agencies of government have the required digitally qualified personnel,” he said.

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NITDA under the programme, is building capacity of 650 DT-TWGs members on Government Digital Transformation.

This followed the inauguration of chairmen of the group by the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami on Thursday 27th August, 2020.

The training of Batch A started on Monday 28th Sept and ended Friday at eGovt Training Centre, PSIN, Kubwa.

Reviewing the training, the resource person, Lukeman Lamid said the training was focused on heads of IT and other public servants in business department of various government agencies in order to align IT with business.

According to him, about 160 public servants were trained in the first batch in every aspect of digital transformation and some subsidiary frameworks on digital policy and strategy. In terms of Government interprobability framework, Nigerian enterprise Architecture, Nigerian data protection regulation, and so many others.

”Digital economy will not be sympathetic to any CEO who will not want to be digital compliant. We encourage them to join the bandwagon. ”Once, the trainees go back to their organizations, they should be champions of digital transformation with level of training they received. innovatively use what they have learnt,” Lamid said.

One of the trainees, the Director of IT at NYSC, Mrs. Grace Ubah, who lauded NITDA for initiating the programme, said ICT needs to move very fast to achieve the desired objective in the diversification plan of government.

”It is a wake up call to go back to implement all that we learnt. we will hit the ground running in terms of playing our roles. This is the kind of training public servants need and we must make good use of it because such opportunity does not come by so easily,” she said.