Ghana’s National Information Technology Agency (NITA) responsible for the provision of ICT services to the Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) is making frantic efforts to recover a whopping amount of GHC18 million debt.
The accumulated debt which spans from 2014 to date is being owed by the MDAs, the Director General of NITA, George Atta-Boateng has disclosed.
According to him, out of the 700 agencies across the country which are on the NITA’s network, about 500 of them are owing the agency which is also responsible for regulating the provision of ICT, promotion of standards of efficiency and ensuring high quality of service.
“The debt is affecting our operations. We have to pay so much for fibre cuts, international transit bandwidth, among others. We also undertake periodic maintenance to keep the network going”, Mr Atta-Boateng told participants at the NITA, and MDAs Business Forum in Accra over the weekend.
However, he disclosed that their efforts at retrieving the money owed the agency were yielding positive results because some of the agencies were putting measures in place to enable them pay back.
While the agency is also reviewing the pricing and billing system of the agency to avoid the accumulation of debt in the future, Mr Mr Atta-Boateng added.
He debunked the notion that NITA services were expensive as compared to private ones, stressing that “the NITA does not charge commercial rate for its services because it does not operate for profit”.
He noted that the state agency- NITA had supervised the construction of a nationwide fourth generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) network that spans across 125 districts, metropolitan high speed networks in Accra, Tamale and Ho.
The Eastern Corridor fibre optic project spanning across 120 districts and communities from Ho in the Volta Region to Bawku in the Upper East Region and a link from Yendi in the Northern Region to Tamale has also been completed and operationalised.
This access network, Mr Atta-Boateng explained enables NITA to provide high speed access for data and internet services to the MDAs.
Furthermore, the National Data Centre in Accra and the Secondary Data in Kumasi have also been completed to support the provision of secured infrastructure for storing sensitive data.
In a speech read by a Director at the Ministry of Communications, Patricia Dovi-Sampson for the sector Minister, Dr Edward Omane Boamah noted: “The capacity of the Data Centre can support the private sector as well in their operations”.
“With this infrastructure, NITA has the opportunity to serve MDAs with emails, web hosting and data centre cloud services as a platform (iaap), for shared services amongst others”.
The government through the leadership of President John Dramani Mahama, a clear decision has been made for NITA to acquire bulk internet services for all MDAs to ensure that the citizenry and for that government benefits from the economies of scale.
Dr Boamah stated: “As we may be aware, running the infrastructure comes with a cost. These costs include international transit bandwidth, national backbone transit capacity lease from other service providers and support services.
Since government is not just one big enterprise with same needs cutting across; ICT services have been provided on a need basis to MDAs for which they are required to pay from their budget allocations”.
Previously, all MDAs made provisions to pay for such internet services and it is government expectation that moving onto the NITA’s platform or network, such allocations would be paid to maintain and sustain the service being managed by NITA.
Dr Boamah therefore urged NITA to develop cost model and categories for the MDAs to select the exact service bandwidth and its associated cost as well as payment terms to enable all of the MDAs make inform decisions when the budget arrives.
In a presentation, the Director of Operations of NITA, Eric Akumiah said the objectives of NITA includes to promote the sustainable growth of ICT via research & development planning and technology acquisition strategies ; ensure the smooth integration of new technologies into social and economic development ; and ensure significant cost reduction on desktop ICT and service provisioning .
He was confident that within few years of the agency’s existence, the board and management were poised to ensure that all the above-mentioned objectives were attained.
Touching on the activities of NITA, Mr Akumiah said the agency’s top priority is enhancing communication between government and the public through the development of e-Services notably e-Forms, providing electronic points of contact for various MDAs; improving the efficiency of internal government communications through:-the development of a shared infrastructure for government electronic document management and delivery.
Instructively, Ghana developed an ICT Accelerated Development Policy (ICT4AD), to facilitate the implementation of ICT initiatives in all sectors of the economy. NITA was then given birth to through the enactment of NITA Act 2008 (Act 771) to coordinate and guide the rollout of national ICT infrastructure.
Through the World Bank funded e-Ghana project, the e-Government component of the project was assigned to NITA to implement.
The e-Government infrastructure platform has been constructed under the guidance of NITA and completed. This network is to ensure seamless operation of government business through the use of ICT services and effective communication delivery among MDAs.
By Masahudu Ankiilu Kunateh, African Eye Report
