Ondo
State Commissioner for Budget and Economic Planning, Mr. Akin
Adaramola, on Tuesday said the alarming rate of unemployment in the
country would worsen in the nearest future unless government provided
infrastructure that would support Information and Communication
Technology development and electricity generation.
Adaramola stated this at the opening of a
10-day training programme organised by the state government in
partnership with the National Information Technology Development Agency
for engineers and ICT graduates in the state civil service.
The commissioner said ICT was pivotal to
the development of any nation and that any development model without
concrete plan for ICT contribution would fail.
“Many advanced economies of the world,
in the past, developed from an agricultural economy in which land was
the key resource, then to an industrial economy in which natural
resources was, and now, to a knowledge-based economy characterised by
ICT in which knowledge is the key resource,” he said.
The commissioner maintained that most
advanced economies developed very rapidly because of their heavy
investment in ICT, and insisted that any country or state that paid lip
service to the critical sector would remain under-developed for life.
He said, “Most of the world’s economies
are underpinned by ICT even as it also takes the front row in the
development agenda of emerging market economies. The developed countries
built their economic development agenda around ICT.
“It is worthy of note that Nigeria and
India started development at about the same time. Today, India towers
higher above Nigeria in the development index because it deploys
ICT-based technologies to accelerate her development trajectories.”
Adaramola noted with concern that
Nigeria, with its current high computer-illiterate population, would
continue to lag behind in the comity of developed nations if necessary
strategies were not employed by government on enlightenment campaign and
capacity building.
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