CEO, Galaxy Backbone Limited, Professor Muhammad Abubakar with Mr Austin Sichinga, a Director at Zambia Information and Communication Technology Authority, ZICTA .in Abuja. Photo: VON
Nigeria’s ICT infrastructure Company, Galaxy Backbone Limited (GBB) says it is pushing for a single Africa Digital Market.
This would help in ensuring synchronized economic development on the continent.
The GBB Managing Director, Professor Muhammad Bello Abubakar disclosed this in Abuja, when he played Host to a delegation from Zambia.
The delegation was led by Austin Sichinga, a Director at Zambia Information and Communication Technology Authority (ZICTA).
He described Nigeria as the leading economy in Africa, as well as a leading African nation in terms of digitisation.
“…Out of seven unicorns that we have in Africa, five of them have their roots in Nigeria,” he said.
According to Professor Abubakar, this sufficiently explains the direction that Nigeria is going, stressing that the country has “the talent and what needs to be done” to keep Africa together while leading it to “the Promise Land and into the 4th Industrial Revolution”.
Smart Africa Alliance
The GBB Boss said as one of several steps taken to boost the policy, Nigeria has keyed into the Smart Africa Alliance.
The Smart Africa Alliance is a body that is headquartered in Rwanda and chaired by its President, Paul Kagame.
The Smart Africa Alliance is an alliance of 30 African heads of state and Government that aims to take advantage of affordable access to broadband and the use of information and communication technologies in Africa to establish a knowledge-based economy.
He called Nigeria a role model that could facilitate the integration of all the flagship projects from other member-states to form a unique digital market for Africa.
“The whole essence is to see that we are not left behind in Africa and be able to key into the 4th Industrial revolution that is knowledge-based,” he said.
“So we have keyed into that, we are a member-country to that.
“One of the things we are doing now in consonance with what Smart Africa Alliance wants to achieve is to have a single digital market for the whole of Africa, and that is going to be our flagship in Nigeria.”
He recalled that former ex-President Muhammadu Buhari had approved Nigeria’s participation in the smart Africa alliance in September, 2022, and also approved Galaxy BackBone Limited as the coordinator for Nigeria.
Most of the policies developed in Nigeria were being adopted by other African countries, he added.
Nigerian Model
Leader of the Zambian delegation, Austin Sichinga, said his delegation found Nigeria’s model as the most adoptable and adaptable, having studied other models across the continent.
“Our country has prioritized the efforts towards digitising the economy and increasing utilization of ICTs as it were. In our journey, we’ve looked at some aspects of securing our transactions and we have looked at various countries that we could learn from,” he said..
“We came to an agreement that Nigeria is probably one of the best destinations we can look at because of the various similarities but also on how we look at how they’ve managed a big population but still managing to make some strides on implementing secure digital transactions.”
Writing by Abdullahi Lamino; Editing by Tony Okerafor