All communities in Abia State are to be connected to Internet Service within the next 9 months.

The state governor, Dr. Alex Otti, announced this yesterday at the Nnamdi Azikiwe State Secretariat premises at Umuahia, the state capital, while flagging off the first phase of the Umuahia Dedicated Internet Access/Wide Area Network And Managed Network Services Project (Project), saying that it promises to re-engineer efficiency and flexibility in operations and interactions within and amongst institutions, enhance policy execution, and engender a culture of outcome-oriented competition amongst civil servants.

The Project is being handled by IPNX, which has Mr. Ejovi Aror as the Group Managing Director, who said that the Project/Initiative would facilitate efficient service delivery, assuring of his Company?s commitment to providing seamless productivity, which he disclosed is essential to unlocking the full potential of any economy, with his vow to work closely with the government to ensure its success.

He said, ?This partnership signals the beginning of a new chapter in the journey towards building a digitally connected, technologically advanced, and economically empowered Abia State.?

Governor Otti, in his speech marked ?The Digital Transformation Journey Begins,? said that this project phase is a carefully coordinated programme of digital support infrastructure layout and integration, that will involve the acquisition and distribution of thousands of high-performance digital tools and devices across ministries, departments, and agencies of government, laying of fibre-optic cables within the precincts of State-owned public institutions, and the installation of other critical hardware infrastructure to support digital governance through high-speed data transmission and round-the-clock multi-network exchanges.

Also, that the project goal is to improve governance deliverables by empowering civil servants to do their jobs in a result-oriented manner, just as the event marked the fulfilment of his promise to rebuild the civil service architecture through measurable improvements in the competences of the workforce at the lower and upper rungs of the ladder, with the target being ?to build a new civil service community that responds to dynamic realities of the New Abia.?

According to Governor Otti, with the Umuahia Dedicated Internet Access/Wide Area Network Project becoming operational, there shall be greater speed in communication amongst personnel working within and across MDAs through emails, instant messaging, and Voice over Internet Protocol, which will thus effectively lead into the age of seamless collaboration, birthing a new service-wide culture of learning, sharing, and growth.

He added that the long-term dividends of the new system will manifest in the areas of reduced outlays on paper and printer consumables and related overhead costs that have practically become a drain on government revenue, with the direct and medium-term gains to include the streamlining of the bureaucratic structure of the civil service, faster turnaround time, effective document archiving and tracking, objective, data-driven performance management processes, and the gradual elimination of the structures that impede personnel and institutional productivity.

He also said that the phased migration of the civil service workstations and platforms to the digital space to make for round-the-clock borderless operations will further open up the State to the global community, enable timely responses to inquiries, and create multi-channel interfaces to answer to the service needs of our development partners at the earliest possible time, with the determination to lean on the strength of new and emerging technology platforms to set higher standards of service delivery.

Tasking the state civil servants to embrace technology, stressing that it is now the way forward, he announced that certain levels of efficiency with the use of relevant technology shall now be required as a necessary condition for exposing civil servants to new opportunities and promotion in the service.

He said that while the government will avail its employees with all the right support to scale their IT-systems knowledge, it is incumbent on them to appreciate that the old era of operational inefficiency is gone for good; hence, they should either up-skill and grow, or become uncompetitive and stagnant.

?Our broad envision in the New Abia is to connect the larger Abia economy to the digital space to drive enterprise growth, create jobs, and new opportunities for entrepreneurs to enable them interact and consummate businesses on virtual platforms, such that traders, farmers, artists, and fabricators, including artisans and those with varieties of skills, can be hired by anyone from anywhere to sell their services and make money without necessarily leaving their homes.?

To effect this, he said there is already an existing agreement with an ICT industry leader to drive the laying of fibre-optic cables across the State, starting with the urban, business-populated destinations, indicating that in nine months? time, Internet Service shall be in place in all state communities and thus ?reduce the development gap between the urban and rural communities through consistent investments in infrastructure and partnership with stakeholders in the development space.?

Describing the day as a special memorable one, the State Head of Service, Mr. Benson Ojeikere, thanked the Governor for giving the civil service a priority and recognising it in his transformational agenda.

He added, ?Civil servants would reciprocate by moving the service to the next level beyond what it has never been experienced in this country; hence, our commitment to our work with the sense of diligence, urgency, integrity, and the kind of hunger to deliver on our expectations that would start showing, would be one way we would show that we are not taking this special initiatives for granted.?

The State Chief Information Officer, Mr. Gerald Ilukwe, said that the Project Phase One focuses on the multi-tenant building complexes that have many Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) in them in the first instance, adding that even as this phase one is being actualized, the next one/phase will commence.

?By the end of this service year, the entire government ecosystem in Abia will be linked up to one interconnected network,? Ilukwe stated. (The Guardian)

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