The Minister of Information and Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, has announced the Federal Government’s plans to migrate all Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to one portal on the .gov.ng domain.
The Minister who was represented by the Director of e-Governance in the Ministry, Mr. Tope Fadeshemi, disclosed this in Abuja on July 7, 2014 at the opening ceremony of the Africa Domain Name System Forum. She disclosed that government has concluded plans to move all its MDAs from their existing domain names to the Country’s Code Top Level Domain Name (ccTLD) .gov.ng for their websites and official emails to allow for seamless sharing of facilities and information among government’s parastatals.
Mrs. Johnson said the new framework was at the final stage adding that it came about as a result of an all-inclusive wide range stakeholders’ meeting across public, private and cross country consultations. She said the ministry hoped to accomplish the dream of achieving true e-government in the country through the initiative adding that it will be using ICT as a means of transparently administering governance and engaging the citizenry.
She disclosed that the Ministry of Communications Technology was already working with Galaxy Backbone Limited, an agency under it, to ensure a connected government where information could be shared.Mrs. Johnson said: “Today we have many different databases scattered around the MDAs across the country and we hope we can have shared databases to be able to share information across different government agencies to have one connected government.
“The ministry is putting in place a message and collaboration system to facilitate a connected government. All MDAs will be live on the .gov.ng. When next year you get an email from a government official, it will be a .gov.ng address.”She said this would be the framework rather than everyone working individually with different e-engine platforms.
She disclosed further that “This is being done through coordinated workshops that include all public and private stakeholders so that we can come up with the best practices on e-government plan, and this will be unveiled in September.”She said the ministry was hopeful of concluding and launching the new e-Government Master Plan for all Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDAs), in September 2014.
