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The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) on Wednesday said Information Technology (IT) regulation was all about regulating for development.
The Director-General of NITDA, Dr Isa Pantami, made this known at the 27th National Conference of the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS) in Ibadan.
The conference theme is: “Digital Inclusion: Opportunities, Challenges and Strategies”.
According to him, the regulation of IT is not to stifle IT development but to make things easy for stakeholders in the industry.
“NITDA has taken steps to ensure that digital inclusion is adopted in the IT industry and for this to happen, there is need for an enabling environment.
“Regulating the sector and proper enforcement will ensure that all things and persons involved will be digitally included.
“There is need for digital literacy among the people so that people will be able to use skills acquired for their own good,” he said.
On capacity building, Pantami said NITDA had introduced laws to ensure that skills were guided toward building people with disabilities, women, unemployed youths among others.
He said that digital inclusion, if not properly guided, would also give rise to cyber crime and called for proper implementation of laws.
“The issue of cybercrime is real and now the statistics on ground are very worrisome.
“Cybercrime is at the speed of light while cyber security is at the speed of law and this shows that the ways laws are enacted is not good.
“We need to move from traditional governance to e-governance and this can be achieved when cybercrime laws are done at the speed of light,” he said.
Pantami called for awareness creation for the public to be aware of issues associated with cybercrime in order to take preliminary actions against it.
He urged government on the adoption of e-governance, saying there was need to tackle obstacles limiting ministries and parastatals from doing their jobs online.