FG halts use of personal emails for public officials
By Ibiyemi Mathew
The Federal Executive council has halted the use of personal and generic emails by government officials.
This directive follows the approval of the National Policy on the Nigerian Government Second-Level Domains during its meeting on the 16th of February, 2022. In a memo by the Honourable Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Professor Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, the minister disclosed that the policy was developed to strengthen public confidence in the use of digital technologies and participation in the digital economy.
The Policy is also in line with the implementation of the Nigerian e-Government Master Plan, approved by the Federal Executive Council in August 2018.
“The Master Plan has a vision to create a world class open and digitalised government that connects with people to drive efficiency in public administration, responsiveness of civil services and transparency in governance leading to improvement of the quality of life of Nigerians,” a statement issued by Dr. Femi Adeluyi,Technical Assistant (Research & Development) to the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy.
The statement read further that, “The use of generic domains and private emails for Government businesses and correspondences impedes the identity, security and global recognition of the Nigerian Government on the Internet.
“Furthermore, the use of private emails for Government business is a major limitation to the capabilities to archive and back-up sensitive Government data thereby making it difficult to preserve historical correspondences and documents hosted on non-Government servers.
“Similarly, Government documents that should be deleted or destroyed after a period of retention are permanently hosted on unsecure servers.
“It seeks to promote transparency in governance; protecting the Nigerian cyberspace; and promotion of the Digital Nigeria agenda. It also seeks to accelerate the adoption of the second level domain (.gov.ng, .edu.ng, .mil.ng) under the country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD.ng) with the main objective to eliminate the use of top-level domains for Government business and the use of private emails for official correspondences by the end of year 2022.”
The Policy will be implemented by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), under the supervision of the Federal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy.
As part of the implementation of this Policy, Federal Public Institutions are to obtain a Nigerian Government Second-level Domain from NITDA and migrate to that platform with immediate effect.
