Inuwa made this known during a Courtesy Visit on him by members of staff of the Commission, led by Dr. Musa Adamu Aliyu, the Chairman of ICPC.

While confirming the Agency’s readiness to collaborate with ICPC in order to aid the digitisation of its services and monitoring corrupt practices in public institutions, Inuwa said automation is a journey and not a one off process.

“We have over two hundred and ninety-three processes to automate but we are selecting them one after the other to achieve the goal of the Agency”.

“We do this for other Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) also, we have other initiatives in place to help them achieve digital transformation”, the DG noted.

According to the Director-General,

“NITDA organises a lot of trainings and has a technical Working Group which started about three years ago, and saddled with the task of training representatives from different MDAs who are later asked  to nominate people that will become champions to promote digital transformation in their respective organisations”.

“We train them on e-Government and digital transformation in general, so that they can start the advocacy within their MDAs”.

“Moreso, we help some MDAs through the journey, like two years ago, Shippers Council came to us, we helped them with trainings, they documented their processes and have started automation. Also, we are currently working with the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI)”, the DG said.

Inuwa reiterated the fact that although technology is a tool, if the supposed users are not ready to utilise it and open to its endless possibilities, then, the expected results would never be attained.

“If your processes are not optimised and re-engineered, it will be difficult to automate your services”, the Director-General stressed.

The NITDA Boss who took time to share with his visitors, NITDA’s digitisation trajectory, with the aid of slide shows, explained the different approaches and workings of automation as adopted in the Agency, which he said is called “NITDA Digital Transformation Playbook”.

After narrating how tedious it was during the early days of his first appointment as NITDA DG, where he practically had to deal with treating tons of memos and mails manually and at the same time had to receive guests, Inuwa recounted how the process then, affected the productivity of the Agency, which necessitated the need to build a high velocity organisation that will engender high performance and turn over the desirable results.

“To achieve that, we had to reimagine ourselves, take a closer look at our mandate to draw up salients points, then, we came up with a new vision of where we want to be as well as core values that will be binding on all in the Agency”.

“We had to develop a 2P2CT Framework (i.e People, Process, Content, Culture and Technology) and deliberately disrupt the way we do things, so that we can come up with a new way of doing them.

Inuwa, while maintaining that corruption happens when there is a human contact, added that technology can help eliminate that.

“I believe if we can digitise  government’s services, it will really address the corruption challenges we have in the country”, Inuwa averred.

The Director-General therefore affirmed that the Agency is open to supporting the Commission in its digitisation quest as well as collaborating on any other critical areas.

“Digital Transformation is a journey, it is not a one off initiative or project that you will execute and you are done, no, it is a journey which needs continuous improvement and we are willing to go on this journey with you,” Inuwa concluded.

Earlier, Dr. Musa Adamu Aliyu, the ICPC Chairman, who summarily briefed the DG of NITDA and his team on the purpose of the visit said that the possibility of fighting corrupt practices and other related offences without utilising technology is minus.

“When you look at the mandate of ICPC, the first responsibility is to ensure that it helps in preventing corruption, then investigate issues of corruption, prosecute, where there is a clear case of corruption, established through investigation. So, with a lot of changes observed over the years, particularly, since the creation of the Commission in 2000, we believe that aligning or collaborating with  NITDA to digitise our processes will boost our services and speed up deliverables,” Aliyu noted.

The ICPC Chairman further stressed on the importance of technology to the overall performance of the Commission, as  he expressed the hope that the digitisation process will make the Organisation more transparent, accountable, and effective, which will invariably spur the Nigerian people to have confidence in the Commission.

It can take many forms, including embezzlement, bribery, and kickbacks. These practices have the potential to raise the costs of government projects and contracts, as well as divert public funds to personal accounts.

The Human Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA) Resource Centre reported over the weekend that Nigeria lost N1,623,584,000,000 and $825,679,500,000 to corrupt officials between 1999 and 2022.

The shocking revelation was made during a press conference following the public presentation of a publication titled “Impunity Galore: A chronicle of some unresolved high-profile corruption cases in Nigeria.”

Its Chairman told reporters that the title was coined after extensive research on recent events revealed that impunity has continued unabated.

He said: “In many of the cases, it is either investigation was not completed, committee report not made public, white-paper not released or there is clear sabotage within and or outside government.

“It is also noteworthy that the cases listed in this chronicle are not exhaustive and the selection has not been discriminated in any manner.
We have only done our best to report on such high-profile cases as much as we can find stories about. So, even if we overlooked some, we should be able to update them in the near future.

However, we have done our best to cover the majority of the ground.”

According to Suraju, the document is a compilation of corruption cases being investigated by the Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC), and relevant National Assembly committees.

“The collection is centered on cases between 1999 and 2022,” he clarified.

The Executive Secretary, Sulaimon Arigbabu, observed that the petitions and legal action being executed by the organization were to help to keep these humongous cases of graft evergreen in the memories of Nigerians.

“So, we try to keep a public view on the issues of corruption that had either suffered in the legal process or with this latest work, we are doing those issues that didn’t make it through the court process and some that didn’t go there,” he explained.

According to a statement released on Thursday afternoon and endorsed by Reuben Muoka, Director, Public Affairs at NCC, Bawa presented the badge to Danbatta on Wednesday in Abuja when the latter paid a courtesy visit to his office to deepen the synergy between the two agencies.

The NCC, under the leadership of Prof. Danbatta has been in the vanguard of promoting transparency and openness with the strengthening of its Anti-Corruption and Transparency Unit in line with the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) Act.

The ICPC in 2020 ranked the NCC above other departments and agencies of the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy (MoCDE).

The NCC topped the list among three other agencies under the ministry, which featured in the intra-ministerial agencies’ ranking in ethics compliance and institutional integrity with 81.15 per cent.

Similarly, the Commission led 24 other regulatory agencies to emerge as the most ethically-compliant parastatal among 25 different regulatory agencies assessed in the anti-graft agency’s Ethics Compliance and Integrity Scorecards (ECIS), 2020.

In 2017, the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR) awarded the NCC the topmost Platinum recognition for its institutional work processes, courtesy of its robust business organizational structure, policies, and practices that facilitated effective and efficient service delivery.

In arriving at this conclusion, the BPSR also listed accountabilities and responsibilities for setting Standardized Operating Procedure (SOP) manuals of the Commission’s 19 departments as some of the high points.

In the same vein, the NCC’S Computer Security Incident Response Team (NCC-CSIRT) has been at the forefront of rolling out series of preventive measures in the country, helping in the process to curbing cyber-related crimes.

This is in line to deploy technology in the fight against corruption.

According to a statement co-signed by the Head of NITDA’s Corporate Affairs and External Relations, Hadiza Umar, and the ICPC spokesperson, Azuka Ogugua, on Monday, the hackathon will give young Nigerians the chance to use their creativity and entrepreneurship to use emerging technologies to fight corruption and other unethical practices that harm the socio-economic fortunes of the country.

It urged interested individuals or groups to visit this link and apply before the closing date on August 26, 2022.

According to the statement, the Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) Hackathon is aimed at developing indigenous solutions to curb illicit financial flows (IFFs) in Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs), checking illegal transfer/movement of funds within Nigeria and across international borders and ensuring effective monitoring of procurement processes.

It said, “talented Nigerians will be tasked with coming up with clearly-defined ideas and prototype solutions to checkmate IFFS, with emphasis on leveraging emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud, Big Data, blockchain, Quantum computing, Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR), among many others.”

“The two-day event scheduled to take place on September 1st and 2nd 2022 will open with a bootcamp at the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR), Abuja, while a Demo Day will take place at ICPC Auditorium, Abuja on the second day and final day.

“Therefore, ONDI is calling for applications from eligible individuals or groups with innovative ideas and prototypes that would leverage emerging technologies to help address the menace of IFFs within the nation’s expanding digital economy.

“ONDI is a subsidiary of NITDA, created to ensure the promotion, growth, and protection of the Nigerian digital innovation ecosystem for the growth of Nigeria’s digital economy.”

“The Office has a responsibility to facilitate the growth of the Nigerian digital economy through the creation of innovation-driven enterprises that will promote job creation and the proliferation of market-creating innovations to create more prosperity for Nigeria,” it added.