Mr Yele Okeremi is Chief Executive Officer, Precise Financial Systems (PFS) Ltd; base d in Yaba, Lagos. He spoke with TONY NWAKAEGHO in this interview about the daunting issues with respect to local content and other ancillary IT business challenges in Nigeria. Excerpts:
What really are local content and its outlook in 2017?
Basically local content thus said that for any environmental organization in this case in the country says that we want to ensure that the content that will be consumed, a reasonable percentage of it is owned and consumed locally. So we looking for Nigeria’s created content consumed in Nigeria. That is the nutshell of the matrix called local content. So you look at it from the services stand point, information stand point, and product stand point.
Can we say we don’t have enough local content here?
The same thing the women went to do in Beijing when they said they were being marginalized, the same thing when Nigeria seems not to have sufficient attention to Nigerian product, Nigerian solutions and Nigerian content.
What is your take as regards local content technology wise in Nigeria?
Technology wise is not the problem, and that is just talking about the capability to innovate. Nigerians are innovative people. But the challenges we have are more in the society and more in the environment because you see it is one thing to be creative and another thing to scale. When you are discussing these issues you need reasonable scale in order to become imparted. There are many possibilities of getting smart people who can get thing done, but do we have the structure, an environment, the people, policies and the trust to be able to get these innovators to scale to become able to compete globally? These are the issues.
In the financial sector where you have carved a niche for yourself, what has Precise Financial Systems (PFS) done in the technology space?
Yes PFS is clearly at the vanguard of local content in not just in the sense of just creating awareness but in the sense of doing things. One of the challenges like I said we have is how many success stories we have and we are very proud to say that PFS is really one of those success stories who have created applications that are run pervasively pretty much in every bank in Nigeria and PFS having clients today in about 37 countries coming out of Nigeria. That is one of those things that actually get me out of my bed every day to be able to change the narrative of the black man to let him declare that we are black but not stupid, we can compete.
Is it possible for us to get a harmonized data bank in Nigeria, since we see organisations, government, others gather their own data when the need arises?
First of all these are the issues when you talk about local content. Some countries are talking data sovereignty; although the cloud is pervasive everybody is talking about cloud today and what is the cloud and where is the data sitting? So you have many people talking about data in Nigerian soil particularly government data.
Look at what happened in the US the allegation that their elections which the United State holds sacred were hacked by Russian. How could that have happened? It means that clearly the data was not sitting within their jurisdiction. These are some of the challenges. We cannot ignore the cloud, but we can decide how much of the cloud that we want localized then talking about local content. So Microsoft is building data centres all over the world how many of such is coming to Nigeria?
Now if Microsoft is not able to justify the business scale because of the volume of traffic why don’t we use Rack Centre, MainOne to be able to host our own data? As far as I am concerned there is absolutely no reason to try to have one central data base. The important thing for us to be able to have the data, which may be distributed in several data bases but we just tend to have a standard that allows data to be exchanged from one platform to the other. For example today we are NIMC and they are asking for BVN they are probably not on the same data base but they have to be able to check what your BVN is and that is just sufficient as far as I am concern.
Is this enough for us to now have national converged data infrastructure for the country?
Infrastructure is at the basic level. First of all we need infrastructure that can support this data exchange ability. If you ask me already we do have infrastructure because what are we talking about, the Rack Centre, MainOne, IPNX having data centres. We have few data centres already and these are the basic things. Then the next thing we need to be able to achieve this is Internet Connectivity.
You and I know that it is noticeable in the metropolitan part of Nigeria, so we need to cover some more. With that in place already the next thing we need to do is to create the applications and create the business cases that make these data exchanges seamless.
Do you defer to the fact the legislation could up the local content issue in Nigeria?
Legislation is good, but some things are even better than legislation.
Trust is better than legislation. Legislation means if you do this, this is the punishment, but do you realize that there are times people will actually weigh the incentive of doing what they want to do and weigh it against the punishment and still go ahead and do what is wrong.
Trust and having a proper system is better than what you call legislation at the end of the day. I think the real issues are what we are doing as a people.
I have no reservation to say this that people in leadership in this country this why we are where we are, we get our own worst to lead us, people who do not think, tell us policies.
And I am going to say this again, how can somebody tell me at this day and age that Agriculture is going to take Nigeria out of where we are? Which country does that? You still want me to be doing subsistent farming?
I agree that food sufficiency is necessary, but today smart nations that are doing the right thing know that knowledge is the right thing to do.
If you look at the richest countries in the world it is not because of the infrastructure they have alone, the most important is that all of them believe in the values of the country.
That is something that is completely missing in Nigeria. And it is missing because the people continuously lead Nigerians, deceive Nigerians and make us look like fools. So nobody in Nigeria is going to trust someone that is going to tell you to wait until next year that he is going to deliver you. And until such a time that people can invest and expect a future reward we are not going anywhere.
What is the way forward since Nigeria is said to be a peculiar nation?
There is nothing peculiar about Nigeria. There are human beings in Nigeria and everything that is happening in Nigeria there are organizational theories that can explain everything. The bottom line is that if you are going to make any change the change must come from the head.
Nigerian Software is touted to be superb by those who manage to buy from us from outside, but our banks still go to India to buy Software. So, is it the issue of trust or legislation here?
I told you earlier, you legislate, what legislation are you going to say? You say if you buy from outside we will fine you 30 million. The man will pay the 30million because he has other interest. That is why I said trust is very key, but there is a way the system can make it unattractive for you to go and do those kinds of things.
First of all we need to have proven success stories. The challenges we have is what stories do we hear? We only hear stories of failures and until we begin to hear stories of successes and celebrate those successes then more people would want to be like those successes.
If Nigerians come together and there is a critical mass of innovation that is proven successful it will become unattractive for people to do the kind of things that they are doing.
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