Isa Ali Pantami, Nigeria’s minister of communication and digital economy, has said that the government has completed over 2,000 projects under the digital economy sector.
Speaking during his inspection of the Galaxy Backbone headquarters in Abuja, Pantami said since his resumption as the minister in 2019, the ministry has continued to deliver on its mandate of fostering knowledge based economy and information society in Nigeria.
“Within the digital economy sector, we completed over 2000 projects and programmes in 3 years from start to finish.
“When I became a minister in 2019, a week after I was given a mandate to deliver, some of the items given to us are now more than 95 percent done, others are 100 percent and even over 200 percent when it comes to delivery.
“This project is a vision of the Federal Government, so the whole administration is about infrastructure among others, and I do hope that very soon we will re-converge here to officially commission this building and other facilities.
According to him, Galaxy Backbone, which is a project of the Federal Government, would not only ensure the safety of government’s data, but also private institutions.
Nigeria’s Galaxy Backbone is the network communications and data hosting infrastructure platform for public and private sector organisations.
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“I am here to inspect this project which is a national project and I do hope the federal government will commission very soon, it is part of our mandate as supervisors of government parastatal to go out and inspect ongoing projects, and render advice.
“So I am very comfortable with what I have seen, and particularly the quality of the infrastructure, as you know President Muhammadu Buhari is more about infrastructure, that is where we excel.
According to him, the facility is also expected to serve as an IT training centre for Nigerians in order to close the digital divide, while positioning the youths for emerging job opportunities.
In his remark, the managing director, Galaxy Backbone, Muhammad Abubakar said the project was serving as a repository for both the government and private sector data.
According to him, “This is the data centre of the Federal Government, as you know a data centre is where you have all the information and for us, information is our black gold. The peculiarity of the centre is that it ensures protection of government data.
“Before now, each ministry had their files but now we have data in the cloud, so the repository for that data is this data centre. All the information we have as a country is now going to the data centre,” he said.
