The federal government has said it will establish an Information Communication Technology (ICT) University in the first quarter of 2017.
This was disclosed by the minister of communications, Mr Adebayo Shittu on Monday, December 26 in Abuja, when he featured at the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) Forum.
His words: “By the grace of God, in the next three to six months, we should have established in Nigeria an ICT university which will be first of its kind in Africa.
“This is with the sole purpose of providing training environment and training facilities to make the industry have enough skilled manpower in various sub sectors of the ICT sector.
“I am happy to say that we already have what is called the Digital Bridge Institute which is for short term training programmes in six locations across the country and we hope to transform this institute into the ICT University of Nigeria.
“I am already talking to a lot of operators at the international level, Facebook, Motorola, Ericson, all of them. We are encouraging them to come and adopt the university campuses as their own.
“They can bring in money and bring in faculties and a lot of logistics to assist in training Nigerians and we can now export these trained skilled facilitators to African countries to work.’’
The minister said the interests of big ICT operators internationally would also earn Nigeria a lot of foreign exchange.
According to him, his ministry was at the stage of discussing with the ministry of education and the National University Commission (NUC).
“And all of these have already given us support, so we think that within the first quarter of the year, the implementation committee will be set up with a view to putting things in proper place for the eventual take off,’’ he said.
Meanwhile, the federal government has confirmed a part payment of fine slammed on one of Nigeria’s telecommunications company MTN.
The federal government said MTN paid N80 billion out of the N330 billion fine slammed on the company over violation of extant rules guiding telecommunications operations in Nigeria.
