ICT stakeholders applaud Tinubu on tax reform, jobs, others

“The opportunities actually exist (to achieve that). If you look at what’s happening in other parts of the world today, the biggest job creator is actually the digital economy. That’s where you have fintech, virtual trading, virtual markets, you have the likes of Jumia and Konga and the rest of them. These are virtual markets. We have what today is called the home office. People work from home digitally, banking is going digital. If you look at all of that, what the government has to do is to provide the platform for it to thrive. Not that the government will go directly to create digital employment; that’s not what we expect. But the government should give the platform for digital trade to thrive; encourage young entrepreneurs; encourage digital natives to do what they want to do; give them access where they need to fund, give them access, when they need the enabling environment, give it to them.

“You cannot have a digital economy if you don’t have access to data, especially if you don’t have a resilient network. That means we need to look at the infrastructure, particularly energy, and remember that telecoms, on account of the activities of government agencies, in an attempt to extract revenue has to stop. Such actions must be seen as criminal actions. For any government agency to go and seize a telecom site in the name of collecting tax, that should be seen as criminal. “A lot of things are interwoven but I think to my view, hearing the president speak today, we see some light in his address and we cannot but join well-meaning Nigerians and the international community in wishing our president all the very best.  He has the assurances of our support, we look forward to a new industry; we look forward to a new policy that will foster development. “Our industry has demonstrated that we can move things forward if we have the enabling environment. Our appeal to the government is to help us in removing those things that make telecoms operations difficult because it’s easy for anyone to come and say reduce prices, if you don’t provide incentives that will lead to a reduction in prices if energy prices continue to go high if companies pay higher to service their forex obligation, the security problem is what it is, all these are interwoven and it’s good that the new administration has mentioned them. Even mentioning it in the address is encouraging,” Adebayo said.

Prof Sodiya said: “The one million jobs is doable; our youths are eager, many of them are going to crimes because they do not have jobs, they do not have enough things to satisfy their quest but the job target is doable. There are so many opportunities in IT. It depends on the interest of government, it depends on the people that are working with them, it depends on the people that are coming up with these suggestions. If they truly understand how to create jobs on the digital space, the opportunities are there. Because of the development in IT now, there are so many opportunities that are coming up. If you have to go into building websites for small and medium enterprises, helping them to promote their businesses, using social media because people are now experts in social media, so there are opportunities, it’s just requires some basic soft skills, skills that you don’t need to go to the university; when you don’t want to be doing some researches; just the ability to learn some things by yourself.

The NCS president who said he does not doubt the ability of the president to place round pegs in round holes, said the best thing is to come together in order to be able to identify these jobs that can be “created using soft skills, low hanging fruits, there are so many low hanging fruit jobs that the government can create but they also need expertise. They need people that can make it happen to work with them. If a new government is coming on board, so many people will be running to them but I believe that this current president likes to work with experts, technocrats. Let believe he’s going to go into that direction.

“Even where people are saying IT is going to take their jobs; robot is going to take their jobs, it’s also creating other opportunities and in our drive for digital transformation, we are really not there yet and that’s why we are not benefitting immensely from what’s going on. There are so many organisations that are still being run manually. And because of that, we don’t have ability to use digital for economic development is still challenged.

“We will expect that in anything that has to do with IT, to use core professionals, not people that will pretend because everybody is saying they can do IT now but when the chips are down, when you have to talk about technical things, talk about applying some methodologies, things that before you advise government to do, you must have conducted research to ensure that it’s the best for us, so in even taking decisions, be scientific and strategic. That is what we want. Not when you advise government to take a decision that at the end of day will fail. We don’t want any failed action of this government because it’s going to take us backwards. Analyse situation very well and know it is the best, even have projected outcomes.  These are the type of analysis we want, not somebody coming to say something into your ears and you say that’s the best. IT doesn’t operate like that. It requires critical thinking because by the time that people know that it’s IT you are deploying and you are failing, it’s really a challenge to us in the sector. And because people believe that when you use IT, you’re expecting perfection. You are expecting something that will be better than something you use to do and when you’re using IT and it’s now creating problem. My advice to the government is that they should ensure that they carry along the stakeholders, put people that are core professionals in this different offices or roles of IT so that we can achieve the desired goals.”