The Director General, the National Information Technology Development Agency, (NITDA) Dr Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami has posited that the proliferation of many illegal online news, radio and television stations across the country is as a result of non utilization of the Nigerian Internet Service Point.
Pantami made the position known in a press statement signed by Mrs. Hadiza Umar, Head, Corporate Affairs & External Relations at NITDA, after a visit to the Galaxy Backbone’s Headquarters in Abuja, calling for the proper regulation of the internet service in the country.
The statement quoted Pantami as saying that: “It is our collective responsibility to respect the Nigeria Internet Service point in order to coordinate the activities of internet usage in the country. Many illegal online radio and television that have sprung up today is due to non utilization of this point. Most of these online radio and television stations are being abused, use to canvass for agitations and causing disunity in the country.”
The NITDA boss called for service improvement on the part of the service providers, especially Galaxy backbone and urged the company to prevail on other service providers to adopt various policies of NITDA in discharging of their services.
While advocating for the local hosting of data, Dr Pantami said recent event that made Microsoft to establish a data centre in South Africa is regrettable, adding that NITDA is working assiduously to forestall the future occurrence of such action.
“We are seriously putting in place a strong data protection policy that would put a stop to such action. It will also aim at motivating service providers to host data locally. The issue of Data sovereignty is also critical; we are talking with some Ministries Departments Agencies (MDAs) to bring back their data to Nigeria. Some of them have come to our office and we gave them a time frame to achieve this because it is secure, reliable and available for us to host our data locally,” he said.
