Buhari urged to appoint chief information officer

President Mohammadu Buhari has been urged to establish the Office of the Chief Information Officer for the Federation. The federation’s CIO would oversee the spending of the Federal Government as well as the strategic planning of all federal Information Technology investments.

The Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Precise Financial Systems, Yele Okeremi, made this call at the maiden edition of the Information and Communications Technology retreat held in Ibadan, Oyo State.

He said that the CIO’s office should be charged with establishing a government-wide enterprise architecture that would ensure system interoperability, information sharing and maintain effective information security and privacy controls across the Federal Government.

He asked the Ministry of Communications, as presently constituted, to focus on development, implementation and evaluation of the relevant IT policies for the country.

Okeremi, who served for two consecutive years as the Chairman of the Local Organising Committee of DEMO Africa, which Nigeria hosted in 2014 and 2015, advised the Ministry of Communications to strengthen the Office of ICT Innovations and Entrepreneurship.

According to him, this would enable the OIIE to access the required resources and power to support incubation centres and hubs while facilitating collaboration between the incubation centres and hubs with industry practitioners, particularly the software houses.