Leadership
(Abuja)
Clem Khena-Ogbena
4 October 2008
Abuja — The underdevelopment of Africa has been blamed, among others things, on the inability of the continent's forerunners to transfer their experience and knowledge to posterity to improve upon for meaningful development and growth.
The president, Nigeria Internet Group,Mr. Lanre Ajayi, who made this observation in Abuja, recently, also said that the forerunners concentrated on talking too much but documenting too little for posterity.
According to him, "A major cause of underdevelopment of Africa has been attributed to the inability of the forerunners to pass their experience and knowledge to the next generation to build on.
"Rather than documenting their experience to pass to the next generation, our forefathers were busy talking -folklores, oral traditions etc."
While pointing out that the GSM is the only tool helping the modern day Africans to sustain the talking culture of their forebearers, Ajayi, however, stated, "Even, today we have very little documentation of the expertise and knowledge gained. We are still busy talking rather than documenting and sharing experiences, thanks to the GSM."
Explaining the role of the broadband in documentation, the Nigeria Internet Group president said that the broadband offers the greatest opportunity to Africans to start documenting their experiences and sharing knowledge, adding that information media, including movies, books, music, training materials and journals are digitised and made to appear in storage friendly format before transmission on a broadband network.
On the strategy for achieving the objectives of e-government, he mentioned that establishing internet connectivity and access for all government employees at all levels as well as establishing websites for improving government image information centres for the people, would lead to simplifying delivery of services to the citizens, eliminating layers of government management, simplifying agencies' business processes and reducing costs via integrating as well as eliminating redundant systems.
He added, among others, that streamlining government operations to guarantee rapid response to citizens' needs and aiding government employees to find information and get service easily from the government, can be achieved through making information technology(IT) skill acquisition mandatory for all government employees and developing a national portal as well as making all government websites attractive.
Copyright © 2008 Leadership. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
Read comments. Write your own.
