The Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, has said that automation of the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) will improve to a large extent the efforts in tackling corruption in the country.
Inuwa made this known during a Courtesy Visit on him by members of staff of the Commission, led by the Chairman, Dr. Musa Adamu Aliyu, SAN. Inuwa also affirmed the Agency’s readiness to collaborate with ICPC in order to aid the digitisation of its services and monitoring corrupt practices in public institutions. According to him, to achieve the goal, there are over two hundred and ninety-three processes to automate but they are being selected one after the other to achieve the goal of the Agency According to the Director-General, “NITDA organises a lot of trainings and has a technical Working Group which started about three years ago, and saddled with the task of training representatives from different MDAs who are later asked to nominate people that will become champions to promote digital transformation in their respective organisations”.
“We train them on e-Government and digital transformation in general, so that they can start the advocacy within their MDAs”. “Moreso, we help some MDAs through the journey, like two years ago, Shippers Council came to us, we helped them with trainings, they documented their processes and have started automation.
Also, we are currently working with the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI)”, the DG said. Inuwa reiterated the fact that although technology is a tool, if the supposed users are not ready to utilise it and open to its endless possibilities, then, the expected results would never be attained.
“If your processes are not optimised and re-engineered, it will be difficult to automate your services”, the Director-General stressed.
“When you look at the mandate of ICPC, the first responsibility is to ensure that it helps in preventing corruption, then investigate issues of corruption, prosecute, where there is a clear case of corruption, established through investigation. So, with a lot of changes observed over the years, particularly, since the creation of the Commission in 2000, we believe that aligning or collaborating with NITDA to digitise our processes will boost our services and speed up deliverables,” Aliyu noted.
The ICPC Chairman further stressed on the importance of technology to the overall performance of the Commission, as he expressed the hope that the digitisation process will make the Organisation more transparent, accountable, and effective, which will invariably spur the Nigerian people to have confidence in the Commission.
