Acting Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Mr Vincent Olatunji, has disclosed that at least 50 per cent of cities in the country would be e-Governance compliant by 2019.
The acting DG, who made this known during an event organised by NITDA in Abuja, said the agency was keen to promoting the development of smart city technology and projects as key national policy through its e-Government Unit.
Mr. Olatunji said that the e-Government Unit of the agency had put in place some key projects owned by states government to ensure that state were working toward compliant.
He said that the agency was working at an extremely conservative rate of one smart solution in each zone annually, exclusive of Abuja and Lagos, which had special status in the programme.
“With this, we are confident of going ‘smart’ in over 50 per cent of our cities by 2019,” he said. “The projects include traffic flow management, smart flood management, secondary school learning hubs, smart solutions for managing Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), smart Internally Generated Revenue Systems and Integrated Public Transportation Systems.”
He lamented that the pressures on urban infrastructure and the environment certainly call for new actions and solutions to fix the increasingly complex challenges.
“We are demonstrating a new service delivery paradigm based on multi-stakeholder engagement to develop, deploy and manage smart solutions for the benefit of the average Nigerian citizen,” he said.
NITDA’s boss explained that with an annual urban migration rate of 3. 7 per cent of national population, the pressures on infrastructure and the environment call for new actions and solutions to fix challenges of pollution, traffic congestion, electricity, water, affordable housing, health and education.
According to him, “We set to promote Internet of Things (IoTs) and e-governance standard platforms and tools in which disparate systems owned by different federal and state service entities communicate and share information.
“The Nigeria smart city development approach must also key into other existing policy provisions such as those of cyber-security, broadband, software and e-government development.”
