THE Lagos State government has unfolded plans to leverage on the six submarine fibre cables that have berthed on the shores for improved Internet services.
Indeed, submarine cables that have landed on the shores of the state include those of MainOne; Glo 1; WACS; SAT3 among others.
Addressing journalists in Lagos at the weekend, Lagos State Commissioner for Science and Technology, Adebiyi Mabadeje said cables would not only accelerate Internet services, but also ensure that the state moves with global development.
Mabadeje said the state also plans to provide its own private cloud through partnership with Dimension Data, stressing that when the project is completed, it will help Lagos to optimize its resources, eliminate idle capacity and save cost.
The commissioner informed that the recent Memorandum of Understanding signed between the state government and Microsoft will apart from strengthening e-governance and facilitating serving the citizens better, also ensure that the company would be working with its local partners to give back to the people through capacity building and training of indigenous manpower.
A commitment, he disclosed, was secured under the MOU to train 100 Microsoft certified applications support personnel, who will not only assist the Lagos State government, but other states in Nigeria.
The e-governance platform, he said, will deliver services to Lagosians using smart phones and mobile devices while enabling government functionaries to monitor on-going projects and the performance of ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
The MOU, he went further, is centred around four cardinal programmes which are; implementation of a citizenship management platform, leveraging on the existing call centre infrastructure, provision of IT skill development and affordable mobile services, arising from a partnership under the Microsoft Africa Initiatives centred on entrepreneur support.
Mabadeje also informed that the Lagos State Residents Registration Agency (LASRRA) has a different mandate from other identity registration exercise going on in Nigeria.
According to him, unlike others which discriminate on the basis of age, nationality and other sundry issues, LASRRA registers only residents and ‘not even indigenes’ living outside Lagos’’.
He said that since the state could not attest to the integrity of the process and the past controversies bedeviling the competing identity registration exercises, the LASRRA exercise, which is of ‘’FBI standard’’ became necessary in order to develop a reliable data that would assist in predicting trends and assisting the state government in planning for the populace.
The Commissioner assured that the movement of the Ikeja Computer Village to a new 15-hectare site in Gotankowa, a Lagos surburb, was being addressed by a committee, which will take care of all the concerns of stakeholders who should look forward to a conducive environment for an Internet city.
He dispelled the fears of those who alleged that the Federal and State governments were playing politics with the deployment of about 1,000 Close Circuit Television monitoring devices in Lagos.
He said: “I have personally seen the CCTV cameras working and it is already up and running, adding it is a safety and security matter, it cannot be unveiled for public knowledge.’’
Mabadeje also said that apart from the on-going computerisation in schools now stepped up with the imminent Computer-Based Testing, students in the state have continually been encouraged to adopt science at an early age with programmes like LASTECH and the Science Camp which hosted 300 students for one week in Epe in August 2013 as against 60 hosted for three days last year.
By Adeniyi Idowu Adunola
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