Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, a technology expert and the Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), worked at Galaxy Backbone and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), where he dedicated his time to developing the technology architecture repository. The architecture gives a 360 degree view of the bank’s IT Infrastructure and facilitates ease of decision making on new IT investments. He was part of the team that executed software license rationalization that has increased cost savings for the bank in license annual subscriptions.
The young, brilliant, dynamic and humble CEO has managed the execution of increased ICT contribution to Nigerian GDP by over 13% in Q2 2018. He also coordinated local content initiatives that increased ICT local production by over 200% in 2017. Speaking in an exclusive interview with Bashir Ibrahim Hassan, GM, Northern Operations, BusinessDay, Kashifu revealed his plans to make Nigeria’s digital innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem the most vibrant sector of the economy.
This interview is about you telling the public, as a public officer accountable to the public, the world what is and has been your duty since your assumption of duty as the Director General of this important institution.
What is your policy direction for this institution and what have you been able to achieve in terms of success in tune with the policy direction as a leader?
Thank you very much Bashir, for this opportunity to share with you my vision, policy directions and achievements so far. My vision started 7 years ago, when I was with Galaxy Backbone Limited. I remember the day I was assigned to help an important costumer. The customer said to me: “Young man, we invested so much on this application, but we are not getting value from it.” He was furious, but I calmed him down and asked him to give me time to investigate what went wrong.
READ ALSO: Amnesty International: Credible evidence protesters shot dead in Nigeria
After my preliminary investigation, I asked him: ‘Sir, can I have your business requirements so as to enable me have a clear understanding why you invested in this application?’ He said to me: ‘Young man, what is the business requirement? The company that sold this application to us told me this is the best and latest technology; so what business requirements are you talking about?’ I went further to ask him what he really wanted to achieve with the application. We sat down for about an hour during which he provided me with inclusive details of what he wanted to achieve.
At the end of our interaction. I realized that he didn’t need to do that big investment to achieve what he wanted since he could use Microsoft office (to achieve the purpose). I advised him to use Excel to do it, after which we could customize the application to meet his expectations. We used Excel and he got what he wanted.
My experience with that customer got me thinking why some investors in IT spend so much without adequate knowledge of the concept cost-benefit analysis. This scenario changed my whole perception about investing in Information Technology. As we all know, marketers of technology always try to convince their customers to buy the latest technology, whether or not it is required for their business or can proffer immediate solution to any problem. I also realized that there is a huge gap between business and technology, as most people buy technology and then start thinking of what to do with it, when reverse should be the case.
For instance, if I own a business, the first thing is to design a business architecture where the mission and objective are clearly stated before identifying the required capacity in terms of technology and human capital to be deployed. However, experience has shown that most business owners buy the latest technology and start engaging it for their businesses, whether or not it is required to provide any solution their business was set up for.
This got me thinking on the best way to assist people and help them actualize the mission of their businesses effectively and efficiently. In order to achieve this, I realized that I need to launch out something different. Rather than being the regular cool techy person, I chose to focus on the enterprise architecture, which is field within IT that helps organizations or governments to design their businesses before investing. As an analogy, someone who wants to build a house would first acquire a land after which he engages an architect to design the house according to specification. In the same way, organizations and governments have their mission, vision, and strategies clearly spelt out before designing their operational architecture. Every business therefore should have their business architecture before thinking on what best technology is required to meet the objective of that business.
The architecture has four layers — the business architecture, information system architecture, technology architecture, and security architecture. If you are going to do a business, or operate any business, you should have that architecture. So, I started by researching on these after switching my career from being a coordinator to a solution architect. As a solution architect, my responsibility was to sit down with a customer, understand his business objectives and requirement, identify the gaps associated with the business, before setting out to develop the required solutions using technology.
I started that unit at Galaxy Backbone Limited. I was the head of Insuring Architecture unit. After sometime, the Central Bank of Nigeria opened a new division called enterprise architecture. CBN was the first in this country to develop that architecture practice as an organization. They were looking for people to work in that division. I didn’t apply for the job rather I got contacted. So, they employed me as a technology architect and I was the first technology architect with the Bank because it was a new division. The bank employed three people including myself outside the bank and two people within the bank, making it a five-man team.
I was the technology architect and my responsibility was to develop a technology repository for the bank so that the bank would have a 360-degree view of its IT investment and also help the bank to identify areas that needed reinvestment and capacity increase.
Part of the work I did for the bank was application rationalization because the bank had invested a lot of money on applications. During this period, a lot of IIT applications were sold to the Bank, which were not required, but unfortunately, the Bank was paying huge annual subscriptions. However, as the technology architect, I was able to save the Bank lots of money with application rationalization.
How much did you help the bank save?
Initially it was around 5 million, but before we finished, we were able to save over 7 million USD. That really broadened my mind about the vision.
When I started, it was a new profession and, for the multinationals, as you know, the Chief Technical Officer, Chief Information Officer, etc., are mostly the ones responsible for enterprise application in the organization. Their responsibility is to bridge the gap between business and technology, requiring understanding of the mission and vision of the company to translate them into how to use technology to achieve that. As at that time, my career goal was to become CIO of a promising organization, be it government or private, because I liked the title.
I was with the bank when the Honorable Minister of Communications and Digital Economy was appointed as the DG/CEO of NITDA. He has been my mentor for almost 22 years. I met him within my first 5 weeks in the University and we have been together in close contact since then. He was my lecturer. When he was appointed as the Director General of NITDA, he called me and asked me to work with him as his technical assistant, because he was coming from the academia outside the country, and he wanted someone that understands the language here.
When I joined the team, the first thing we did was to review NITDA’s mandate and look at what NITDA was doing and what it should have been doing. When we reviewed the mandate, it was in the mandate that we discovered that the DG is also the Chief Information Technology Officer of the country. I was so impressed and motivated by the revelation. If you would recall, I said my vision was to be a CIO of an organization, and now, presently, I am the CIO of the country (laughs).
NITDA was established in 2001 to implement the National IT policy. So, we looked at the mandate of the agency, we baselined it with the Nation’s current reality and came up with a strategic roadmap.
The then DG was appointed in 2016, I joined the agency in 2017 as his Technical Assistant and led a team that designed and implemented the strategic roadmap. My experience at Galaxy Backbone and CBN was very helpful and instrumental during this period. The strategic roadmap has 7 pillars and it was a 4-year strategy. NITDA’s critical mandate is IT regulation and development. The agency has two main program responsibilities.
The first pillar on the strategic roadmap is developmental regulation because we see regulation as an enabler, something that can unlock opportunity and trigger business opportunities rather than something that stifle innovation. We want to unlock innovation and opportunities which is why we called it developmental regulation.
The second pillar is capacity building. When you talk about ICT, you can only use it when you have the knowledge to. We tied it to the Economic Growth and Recovery Plan (ERGP). Remember that, in 2015, the country ran into recession and the President set up a committee that came up with a plan.
The plan had 3 objectives: firstly, to restore growth; secondly, to build a globally competitive economy; and, thirdly, to accelerate inclusive growth by investing in our own people. It identified ICT as a major key headed plan. When we say investing in our own people, it means building their capacity, giving them the right knowledge, they need.
The third pillar seeks to promote indigenous content. If you have the enabling environment, you have the knowledge you need, the next thing you need is to turn your knowledge into skills or products and services. So we need to encourage people and government to buy from you. To strengthen this pillar, the government issued Executive Orders 003 and 005 (the first of its kind) on local content and on Ease of Doing Business that says if you have expertise in the country you are not allowed to import experts. Rather, you must employ or engage the indigenous experts.
The third pillar stresses on job creation. You have the enabling environment, the right skills and knowledge, government is encouraging and willing to buy from you. When government starts buying from you, it means we are creating jobs for you in terms of digital jobs.
The fifth pillar is about Digital inclusion. A part of Government’s commitment towards encouraging people participation in the use of technology, we came up with interventions where we helped the unserved and underserved communities with Digital infrastructure.
The sixth pillar is promotion of government digital services where we encourage government to buy and invest in IT.
And the last pillar is cybersecurity. We are putting everything in the cyber space. As a result, we need to have robust infrastructure that would secure it.
So to answer your first question about my vision, that’s how the vision started. It’s not something I started when I was appointed. Rather, it’s something that has been in me for long, just that my appointment reinforced my efforts to achieve my vision in helping people to get value for money invested on IT.
And for your second question on my Policy direction, if you observe very critically, you will note that our policy direction is in line with the Agency’s 7 Pillars which I talked about earlier and have been the Agency’s roadmap for the past 3 years, Though it’s going to expire end of this year, we are coming up with another one. Policy as you know is beyond the Agency as it is usually at the Ministerial level. Departments and Agencies are only created to design effective strategies to implement policies initiated by the Government.
On the 23rd of October 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari extended the mandate of our ministry to cover Digital Economy, and on the 28th November, he launched the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy for a digital Nigeria. If you look at that policy, it has 8 strategic pillars. 7 Out of that 8 can be easily aligned with NITDA’s strategic pillars.
For the new Digital Economy Policy, the first pillar is on developmental regulation. The second one is Digital literacy and skills, which are clearly in line with the Agency’s Developmental Regulation and Capacity Building. In the same vein, the Digital Economy Policy’s third pillar, which is on Solid Infrastructure, can be likened to the Agency’s Digital Inclusion. The fourth one is the Soft Infrastructure, which is embedded within the Agency’s cybersecurity and Capacity Building pillars.
The 5th one is service infrastructure — that is where we have the government digital services. Then we have the emerging technologies, which you can link with the Capacity Building pillar as well. The rest are more relevant to NCC and other agencies. In 6 out of the 8, NITDA is playing critical roles.
So in all, you will observe that the Agency is just to create strategies towards implementing Government’s policy directions.
Where do you think this country should be and where is it now, in terms of information technology?
Generally, I would say as a country we are not doing badly in terms of IT.
From the global perspective, when you look at Nigeria, where is our place? Is this where we should be? If not, then when are we getting there, we have people like you with brilliant plans?
As indicated earlier, at the moment we are not doing badly. We are leading in Africa in the innovation ecosystem. Last year, the African tech ecosystem raised 1.34 billion US dollars, according to Techmate Report. Out of it, Nigeria attracted about 50.5% of that amount, which is over 600 million USD. Also, globally, Nigeria has been on the map of tech innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. And you will recall that in the past two years, global IT players like Mark Zuckerberg visited Nigeria.
Also, Nigeria was the first country to have Unicorn in Africa. Jumia was the first Unicorn Company in Africa with modern US dollar valuation. We are not doing badly, but we can do better. We need to carve out our niche so that we can build on that. We need to know our strengths and weaknesses.
To achieve that, NITDA, under the leadership of the Honourable Minster Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami who is championing the cause, is partnering with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a programme called MIT REAP (Regional, Entrepreneurship Acceleration Programme), which involves helping to identify innovation and entrepreneurship capacity in Nigeria and helping to develop a strategy to strengthen that ecosystem and get the optimal value of that niche they have globally.
We started with Abuja and our target is to reflect it in all the states capital in the country. The idea is to create the ecosystem which has since commenced. We have identified key 5 categories of stakeholders, namely:
• Universities, which produce the human capital;
• Cooperate organizations, which absorb the human capital and buy the product;
• Entrepreneurs (can be anyone, students, lecturers etc);
• Risk capital, which is needed to help these innovators with seed funds to start because government cannot provide for everyone; and
• Government itself: the government is to provide enabling environment, policies and other intervention in the infrastructure but government has no business in business
We have started working on some policies with on the first being the Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurship Policy. The idea is to identify our strengths. One of the areas we have identified is business process outsourcing. This is a huge market, which India and Bangladesh are currently dominating.
If you look at Nigeria, we have more competitive edge to take over that market. We have a better time zone in terms of providing services to American and European companies, and we have a huge English-speaking population. India is running out of English-speaking people. We can leverage on this and leverage on that market segment When you look at FinTech, Nigeria today is one of the leading countries in the world. Four years ago, when we started the ATM, with the chip, Americans were still using the magnetic type. Already, we are there in FinTech. We want to come up with policies of digital innovation that can help boost that market. I have seen opportunities in that area, but you know it’s beyond NITDA. As a country, we need to agree and carve out our niche and build on it, so that we would be building globally in that aspect.
What is the impact of Corona virus on IT? Has Covid-19 provided an opportunity for speedy growth of information technology or otherwise?
On the contrary, I would say it has accelerated it. I remember vividly, before the lockdown, we had plans and were working on how to achieve it within the year, based on the National Digital Economy Policy. But, unexpectedly, the Covid-19 pandemic surfaced. I reached out to my Honourable Minister. After speaking with him, I got some sense of stability. When I asked him how we could meet the targets he gave, considering the lockdown, he said he had done his own part by giving us targets and that we should figure it out (laughs).
So I went back and started thinking of what to do. Just a week before, I remembered Microsoft installed Microsoft teams for us to get it free of charge. I called one of my Directors and told him I had a management meeting today using Microsoft teams. He said they just finished installing the facility and wondered how they were going use it. I asked him to go get it ready because we had to use it. There was so much panic. So we set up a committee of experts and invited them for a virtual meeting.
We held the first virtual meeting on what to do. We discussed on what to do concerning the economic impact. We gave them a target, but they said they didn’t trust the government. So we asked what they wanted us to do to get their trust. They complained that some technology-enabled service providers locked their warehouses and they couldn’t perform their essential services. I related that to the Honourable Minister, who called the IG and he gave them permits to carry out their essential services. The other start-ups came with their own requests too, and we were able to meet their request within 24 hours. We, however, earned their trust.
How did the Covid-19 pandemic affect your growth?
It was emerging before the pandemic. We had Digital Economy policies, but we were not using them. The tools were there but most organizations were not using them. We started by using the virtual meetings, which scaled down to meetings with committees. It scaled down to meeting with the Honourable Minister. It challenged innovators to come up with innovations that could help contain the virus. At the end of the challenge, we had 3 start-ups emerging as winners. The first one developed a ventilator. As you can remember, every country was in need of ventilators. We wanted something local.
The second one has a decontamination chamber; the third one was MyClinic.ng; because people were afraid of visiting the hospital to avoid contamination. He developed an idea of an app where you can consult a doctor and get prescriptions without physical meeting. We funded the development of the prototype of these projects. As we speak now, the ventilator made is being tested on animals at Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital. The one that made the decontamination chamber deployed one here, but he needs to tweak it because it discharges water that gets people wet, and we told him we want a gas form to avoid people getting wet. The third one MyClinic.ng is currently being used in Edo state to consult doctors free of charge.
You may also recall that the Honourable Minister of Communications and Digital Economy championed the commencement of Virtual Federal Executive Council meetings, thereby ensuring continuation of government business.
Now we have virtual commissioning of projects across the country. Considering this emerging trend, if you ask me, the silver lining in this pandemic is virtual technology, because the Nigeria ICT contribution before Covid-19 was a little above 13%, but today is 17.38 % as we speak.
What challenges are you facing in discharging your duties to the country?
My major challenge and part of the things I did was to rebrand the agency — from its logo, the mission, vision and the core value. This is because most of the staff doesn’t know the mission and vision and they don’t live the core value. That’s why we changed the core value and made it 3: the first one is people. We need to be customer-centric. We are a government agency, but we provide services to our colleagues in the agencies and the public. So we need to be professional in what we do. If we can be professional as an organization, then we can increase the velocity of doing things in the agency. For me, what I achieved in a week during the lockdown was more than what I achieved in 3 months before it, because it helped me identify people I can go to, to get things done easily than following the bureaucratic structures.
Where do we see NITDA under your leadership in the next 3 to 4 years, in terms of effective regulation and also the development?
Our vision is to make Digital Economy the highest contributor to Nigeria’s GDP. We are working with different strategies to achieve this. You may recall that in response to an earlier question, I discussed our efforts in business process outsourcing. We have developed the Regulatory Framework and Guideline and on Ecosystem with the Ministry to come up with a policy that can help us create an industry.
Secondly, we are focusing on the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. As indicated earlier, we are working on this with the Ministry to come up with a policy. We have involved the stakeholders in it and our vision is to identify the strength of every state and build innovation on it. Lagos, for example, has been identified for FinTech. Our vision is to transform Lagos into the world FinTech capital and with the involvement and active support of stakeholders, this vision is realizable.
We are also working on identifying Abuja’s strength and building upon it, so that when it comes to that area, it would have a global recognition. We want to put more energy in harnessing the youthful population we have, using their talents and coming up with innovative products and services.
We are building IT hubs and innovation and incubation parks across the country. We want to identify at least one in each state whereby we will be sending our startups for training. After training, we put them on internship programmes and provide a startup ventures for them.
Those that cannot afford to rent a work office space, we will give them the venture and they would have a working place, meeting room and address to start a business. We don’t just want to train people and leave them. Rather, we want to take them to the market. We will help them, mentor them and accelerate them to develop products and services. And we will help them to market these services to government so that government can buy it from them. That is why we have series of activities innovation challenge programmes. We want to identify, every year, at least 3 areas where we need a groundbreaking solution initiative that can solve a problem in this country.
We will work with these startups; help them come up with products and services that can be taken to the market, just like what we did with other innovations — ventilators, decontamination chamber and the MyClinic.ng app. – we took them to the market.
Our own is to create jobs, make Nigeria a startup nation, because we already have this entrepreneurial capability. Nigeria is known globally when it comes to entrepreneurship. An average Nigerian will tell you he has a business idea or wants to start his own business.
We want to harness this capacity using innovation and technology to make Nigeria a startup nation and grow our digital economy contribution more than any other sector. Today agriculture is leading, followed by finance and insurance services, which are highly powered by technology. We are branching into Agriculture as well.
What is your motivation coming to work every day?
Three things — firstly my family core values. When I was growing up, my father always told me to be honest, dedicated and committed to whatever I do. I never asked him why, but it’s been in me. Anything worth doing is worth doing well, and I have always had a flexible mindset to getting things done.
Secondly, I look up to Mr. President and the enormous challenges of leadership. He appointed us to support him in ensuring that Nigerians enjoy the dividends of democracy. You know that there is no better way to facilitate the attainment of this than through IT.
Thirdly, I am representing a constituency; that is the youth. The youth are agitating for opportunities to participate in governance. You may recall how the ‘Not Too Young To Run’ campaign started and ended. The campaign resulted into the Bill being passed at the National Assembly and on the 31st May, 2018, Mr. President signed the Bill into Law. I see my appointment as an opportunity for us to show our people that we can perform. If I fail, people would not say Kashifu has failed, they would say the youths have failed.
Whatever has a beginning has an end. After the job here, what legacy would you want to leave behind in NITDA and the National Economy at large?
For NITDA, the first day I met with my staff as DG, what I promised them was to make NITDA a smart organization. I came from the Central Bank of Nigeria, the way we dress, look, the environment was totally different from how NITDA was as at that time. So we have started, and within a year, we were able to put up this structure. This structure was not here at about this time last year. We put up the structure and renovated the old one.
We are changing mindsets. I want to make NITDA a fore thinking organization. I want to leave an organization where everybody will be happy to come and work, a conducive environment, an organization using technology. We are getting there at the agency. We started with the mindset of the people. We are changing the culture and we are starting our new building, hopefully this year.
For the country, we want to make the digital innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem the most vibrant sector in the country’s economy. The Ministry has started by having the ‘digital economy’ added to its name. Before, we saw ICT and technology as just a tool, when the ICT was just a means to an end, the end is the economic value. We use technology as a productivity tool to do our work, but technology is not what we need — it is the end value; how efficiently we deliver the work and that can be translated to the bottom line which is the economy we are talking about.
I want to see at the end of my tenure that we have a vibrant ecosystem. That is why we are working around the clock with the ecosystem to help government come up with the right policies. And I have the 100% support of my Honourable Minister. We are always on the same page and with his help I am hoping we will achieve a lot within 3 years.
