E-Governance and Capacity Building – Case Study of the Local Government Area as in Ile-Ife, Osun State of Nigeria

Presented at the GLOBELICS 2006 conference in India during 4-7 October 2006.Session II-3 Innovations in New Technologies: IT and BTNigeria is one of the nations in the world who operates the three tiers of government whose central governance is at the Federal level. Thus the Local Government (LG) is regarded as the lower level or the third in tiers of government activities hence, the issues of information dissemination to the citizenry is expected a great deal to be at the grass root or the LG level which is believed to be nearer to the people. With the level of proliferation and awareness of information technologies communications (ICT), it is of high expectation that the information retrieval, and or passage between the government and the governed would have been improved with the technologies in place at the LG areas. Information Communications Technologies has been described as the tools for changing the world values and making our society a knowledge base environment where everything is done electronically. The Information Society is creating unprecedented conditions for bridging the digital divide through supporting government operations to strengthen the establishment of efficient, effective and transparent governance systems. Electronic tools can significantly improve the services and information flows from administrations to their constituencies. Communication among administrations and citizens and businesses can be enhanced as ICTs offer unique opportunities for the re-use and exploitation of public sector information within the emerging digital economy which in turn create vast economic opportunities for the country at large. The exploratory study carried out in the five Local government areas of Ile-Ife namely: Ife-East, Ife- North, Ife Central, Ife South and Ife East Area Office, Modakeke, was to evaluate the proliferation and capability investment into the infrastructural and human development of the public workers in the local government areas. The study is expected to be further carried out in some of the LGAs across the nation at least in five LGs in each of the six geo-political zones of Nigeria to be able to assess the impact of ICTs in enhancing e-governance in Nigeria fully. Meanwhile, the study reveals that there is still a dirge of accessibility as well as made clear the level of illiteracy in ICT that exists among public civil servants in the LGs surveyed which shows that the issues of e-governance in Nigeria is not yet well articulated despite the Federal Government’s numerous agitation to bridge the digital divide in the developing nations like Nigeria. The questionnaire technique was used for data gathering and then analysis using the SPSS tools was adopted as a descriptive measure for the results obtained. At the end of the survey, the analysis shows that amidst the two hundred and fifty questions administered, about two hundred and twenty-four retrievals were made which is about 89.6% and this shows that the issues addressed seems very pressing that the respondents took the opportunity to express their views and agitation to be educated and improve their operational skills. This paper address the issues of governance in terms of global e-governance practices and addresses how the level of proliferation in terms of ICT infrastructures and literacy in ICTs especially the use of Computers and internet access has affected the productivity of public workers and hence retards the e-governance activities that should enhance the rural peoples participation in politics, democracy and all of what government would expect to pass across to the entire citizenry of Nigeria. In the end, policy recommendations as to how the IT policy enacted by the Federal Government of Nigeria which is to be implemented by NITDA, (an agency of the Federal Government) would be reviewed or given better implementation strategy (ies) to enhance performance in terms of human capacity developments and infrastructural provision to develop manpower and encourage e-governance activities in Nigeria