Prince Osuagwu
15 October 2008
IF every other benefit of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, CTO, hosted by the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC in Abuja last week, is lost on the participants, the impact of the event is surely going to last long among Nigerians as its aftermath is going to provide a platform for chronicling the history of internet growth in Nigeria very soon.
Atleast, this is the promise made by the Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive of the commission, Engr. Ernest Ndukwe, at the weekend, when the organizers of the event paid the commission a courtesy visit, Friday.
The delegation made up of Ministers of communications, Heads and other representatives of communications regulatory agencies of different African states, including Ghana, Cote de Voire, Egypt and others, who came to thank the EVC and his commission for a hospitable reception extended them throughout the period of the event, also used the opportunity to tour round the NCC massive building and facilities that made it one of the top range communications edifices in Africa, if not the world.
Conducting the visitors round, NCC officials took time to explain every bit of telecommunications growth in Nigeria and the role the commission has played within the time it came into existence.
But the visitors, however, took special delight and interest in the NCC Museum, where archival materials and historical records of telecommunications were kept.
The interest and fascination in what they saw at the museum attracted three cardinal questions; why were there no women in the photographs of past NCC EVCs, Chairmen and other major contributors beautifying the walls of the museum? Why was the history of Postal services, broadcasting and the history of internet respectively, not captured and placed in the museum as was the case for communications which is conspicuously displayed on the wall of the museum?
The NCC EVC, Engr. Ndukwe took these questions in turn. For him, it was also a surprise why women were sheering away from telecommunications Engineering profession in Nigeria which according to him could account for why there may not have been an active women participation to match that of such men their portraits were hung on the museum walls.
Ndukwe however recalled that during his days in the university, there were noticeable women Engineers as well as course mates, which is in contrast with the unlikely situation in these days.
On the history of postal services and broadcasting, Ndukwe told the visitors that the postal services has not only being a hundred percent government controlled institution, but has neither had a regulator nor was part of the NCC. He also told the delegation that broadcasting commission used and is a separate entity in Nigeria from that of the communications even though there are serious plans to soon merge the two commissions into one.
But on the question of internet history, Ndukwe said that being part of a strong communications vehicle, there was every reason to capture the historical perspectives of growth of internet in Nigeria.
He promised that the commission was going to look towards that in no distant time. "That is actually the area we have not looked into but there is no reason why we wouldn't do that. Maybe we are going to look into that and provide the history of internet growth in Nigeria, very soon.
The delegates were also taken to the Digital Bridge Institute, an ICT training institute established by the NCC to ensure that Nigeria does not only maintain her pride of place in using ICT to develop the African economy but would also churn out quality ICT engineers for the country and entire Africa.
At DBI the delegates inspected the telecom lab where an array of sophisticated ICT testing and training equipments including mobile Vsat equipment, fibre optic equipment, phase noise measurement, load pull system, noise figure measurement, voice quality analyzer and time domain reflector meter among others.
The institutes Vice President, Okechukwu Ugweje, explained to the delegates that those instruments were used to study behavioral patterns of telecommunications services, like identifying impudence on a particular communication system wire, study inconsistency in Quality of Service among other major services.
At the end of the tour, some of the delegates who spoke to Vanguard confirmed that the commission had given enough to earn the country much respect in terms of Information and Communications Technology growth and promised to adapt most of the landmark achievements of the commission they had so far witnessed, in their respective countries on their arrival to their different destinations.
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