
The elections in Nigeria are over and for the first time in her 47 year history the country has seen the successful handover from one civilian administration to the other. It means President Obasanjo has managed to make Nigerian history yet again by handing over to President Yar'Adua. He earlier made history by being the first military dictator to hand over to a civilian President Shehu Shagari in 1979. During the 8 years of his second coming, the Obasanjo administration amongst many things took a good look at eGovernment with the Nasiru El Rufai's Federal Capital Territory (FCT) leading the way with different initiatives such as the FCT portal (http://www.fct.gov.ng) which was used as the information hub for the sale of government housing reducing their dependency on newspaper advertising and saving a fortune. This was possible because it had been underpinned by a strategy that took into consideration local peculiarities such as low ICT penetration and the need for regular updates without depending on 3rd parties. A schematic of it is shown below for those interested. I am sharing this because developing the strategy cost me six months of my life and we surveyed over 2000 FCT staff and ALL Directors and Secretaries (i.e. Senior Executives) and analysed the data before coming up with a unique way forward. That was why we could easily fit programs such as GAPP (see earlier posting) into what was being done by the FCTA.