[ 2016-07-01 ]

Samuel Atta-Boateng, Director General of NITA

MDAs owe NITA GHC18m
Over 504 Ministries Departments and Agencies
(MDAs) owe the National Information Technology
Agency (NITA) which provides Internet service to
them over GHC18 million, according to the
Director-General of NITA, Mr. Samuel
Atta-Boateng.

That, he said, had had a serious toll on their
activities and had compelled them to go on a debt
recovery drive to retrieve the monies owed them.

This was made known at a seminar held by NITA to
engage Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs)
on how they could improve on their services and
also come out with plans for the payment of the
services.

According to him, their operations were
cost-effective and needed more capital injection
to improve their output to serve their clients
well.

Mr Boateng mentioned that his outfit had already
sent out letters to the MDAs to pay their
indebtedness else they would be disconnected from
the service being rendered and most of them had
responded positively.

“One surprising thing is the services we
provide to these government agencies are far
cheaper compared to that of the private ones,”
he noted.

NITA, he said, was on the move to introduce a new
system where billing would be done monthly or
quarterly and it would be prepaid and would come
with huge discounts.

Private partnership

Mr Boateng indicated that they were considering a
private partnership to serve the needs of other
private institutions which were interested in the
services of NITA.

He said the move had been necessitated by the
excess capacity that had not been utilised and
since NITA was created to serve the Internet needs
of only government agencies, the private partner
would see to the needs of the private
institutions.

According to him, this move would help recoup the
huge monies that had been invested to pay back the
loans and also improve the services rendered to
the MDAs. He said advertisement had already taken
place and interested persons had gone through the
evaluation process and had finally come out with
one solid partner.

The Director of Information Technology
Application at NITA, Mrs Veronica Boateng, stated
that one of the challenges her outfit faced now
was the participation of the public on the
Internet regime and that they were trying to come
out with plans to get the public to benefit from
some of NITA’s services.

According to her, there are setups to enhance
public service delivery so the public should begin
to benefit from these platforms and make them much
more productive.

She said they would enhance their publicity and
awareness creation to educate the public on the
platforms they were providing.

A representative of the Ministry of
Communications, who read the speech on behalf of
the sector minister, indicated that the government
would see to it that it enhanced the activities of
NITA to improve their services.

She stated that the government was bent on making
Information Technology easily accessible to all
government agencies to speed up government
businesses.

Source - Daily Graphic

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