Posted by From Cletus Akwaya in Abuja on
Telephone lines in the country may hit the 20 million mark from the current level of 12.1 million by year end, Vice President Atiku has said.
* Local production of handsets begins December
Telephone lines in the country may hit the 20 million mark from the current level of 12.1 million by year end, Vice President Atiku has said.
And to deal with the problem of acquisition of handsets, the Federal Government is working in collaboration with a Chinese firm, ZTE to begin local production of handsets by end of December.
Atiku who spoke at the one year anniversary of the Digital Bridge Institute (DBI), in Abuja said he was proud of the successes recorded by the Obasanjo administration in the telecom sector.
At the first anniversary celebrations were Chairman of the National Communications Commission (NCC), Alhaji Ahmed Joda, Engr. Ernest Ndukwe, Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive of the NCC, telecom experts, and top executives of telecom companies.
Atiku in a keynote address at the start of the two-day festivities said he has was amazed that in the last five years when the telecom sector was liberalized, the number of phone lines have risen from just over 500,000 to over 12.1 million.
This, he said, had made acquisition of telephone lines easy and affordable and no longer for the rich as was the case.
He noted, however, the increase in the number of telephone lines had created serious demands for professionals of different shades like lawyers, policy analysts, information technology software and hard ware engineers, administrators and researchers among others.
In this direction, he said the establishment of the DBI was to fill the vital gap in the human resource requirements of the telecom sector and urged the private sector to patronise the Institute for their necessary manpower training needs.
The Vice President called on public establishments to take advantage of the facilities offered by DBI to train the personnel for the Federal Government's e-governance initiative.
Director of DBI, Dr. Olasupo Ogunfemi, said the Institute has in the last one year of operation offered short courses for all cadres of personnel and executives in the industry, training-to- placement courses in collaboration with international and local tertiary institutions and customized courses using state-of -the- art facilities like computers. High speed internet access, Wi-Fi hotspot, digital resource library, executive training rooms, seminar break rooms among others.