Dan-Azumi Mohammed, Director General of the National Office for the Acquisition and Promotion of Technologies (NOTAP), has disclosed that the Nigerian government spends $400 million annually on foreign software.
He made this disclosure while speaking at a roundtable in Lagos on the use of Nigerian software in the financial sector.
He joined other Nigerian stakeholders in the fintech sector to admonish government to adopt an appropriate policy that would put an end to the huge spending on foreign software at the expense of local software with the same functions.
He noted that the repeated expenditure over the years has an impact on the local software industry, which is struggling to develop because the state does not grant him any orders.
Also speaking at the session, Udukheli Izebuno, a director at Computer Warehouse Group (CWG Plc), explained that Nigeria has a strong institution of knowledge, but the technologies derived from it are struggling to develop the software industry, because the state prefers to trust foreign products that are sometimes a source of security risk.