The director general of the National Centre for Technology Management (NACETEM), Dr Olusola Odusanya, has said that the federal government can save N5 billion yearly by migrating to digital platforms.
He stated this yesterday in Abuja, at the opening of a three-day programme themed “Application of System Thinking and System Dynamics for Transforming Public Policymaking Processes in Nigeria.”
He said digitalisation was part of the ongoing, overall reform of the federal public services in the Federal Civil Service Reform 2020 – 2025.
“Among them is the need for us to digitalise our operations and digitalise many of the things that services will provide.
“In many countries, you see that many forms you fill in by hand are done digitally, making the system more efficient.
“We save a lot of money by not having files, paper, and all that gets missing. And once you interact with the digital system, it never gets erased.”
Dr Odusanya noted that systems thinking is crucial to digitalisation as it helps solve problems and promotes national development.
According to him, the plan is for fundamental, basic digital literacy, and people need to be digitally literate to migrate into these systems.
“Digitalisation is one of the tenets of the federal public service reforms, and we are actualising it more or less, by first migrating people into systems thinking and by the time we start migrating people into digital systems reforms, it will be the peace of cake because the fundamental knowledge is already there. It’s just migrating to a platform that allows us to provide more services while saving much money.
“If you go to many of our operational centres, where you get driver’s licenses and passports, you see that many digital introductions are coming in. It’s making the system more efficient. You see what is happening in the immigration service. We are having our passports available faster and more easily. We need to integrate all these digital systems, ” Odusanya added.
In his remarks, the president of the African University of Science and Technology, Prof Azikiwe Onwualu, said systems thinking is one of the country’s major problems, as many decisions are made without considering the entire system.
Citing President Bola Tinubu’s removal of the fuel subsidy during his inauguration, he said that using system thinking, there are things that could have been done before the pronouncement.
He said, ” We know that once you remove that subsidy, it will affect quite a number of things. So, we should have done something to prevent what would happen when we removed the subsidy, even though removing the subsidy would have been a good thing.
“Anybody that knows the history of this country knows that the best thing to do is to remove the subsidy. But if you use system thinking, I believe there are things we would have done before removing the subsidy. And it happens everywhere.”
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