Prof Muhammad Bello: Modeling Galaxy Backbone to become Africa’s leading digital infrastructure services provider

Over the past 10 years, significant progress has been made in Nigeria’s digitisation drive across both public and private sector.

An organisation that has relentlessly worked behind the scenes to contribute to this progress especially in the public sector to facilitate e-government is Galaxy Backbone.

Prior to the creation of Galaxy Backbone (GBB), technology had little or no impact on the operations ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) but with the innovations and infrastructure of GBB,  cost has been optimised and greater efficiency has been recorded. So far, 60 per cent of MDAs have gotten on board the GBB infrastructure, over 40,000 email boxes and thousands of IP and video telephony devices distrubuted to MDAs across the country.

However, beyond the public sector, GBB has extended its coverage to include private sector establishments in its network of services.

Under the leadership of its Managing Director/Chief Executive, Professor Muhammad Bello Abubakar, the organisation has a renewed focus to the regional operations of the organisation like never before to spread its reach.

Today in Galaxy Backbone, Professor Abubakar has appointed a General Manager who is the Group Head Regional operations to lead a team of experienced professionals to manage the infrastructural deployment and business operations that would ensure that organisations across the country enjoy, at the same level, the full benefits of the Galaxy Backbone digital services infrastructure.

In the last 9 months, the organisation has opened two new regional offices in Kano and in Gombe to facilitate marketing efforts and provide an opportunity for private sector establishments to take advantage of its huge infrastructure across the nation.

Professor Muhammad is driven by his belief that Galaxy Backbone’s success is not restricted to a particular location, but across the 36 states of the country in the short to medium term and for him, Galaxy Backbone would provide similar operations to other countries within Sub-Saharan Africa.

With the nearly completed National Information Communication Technology Infrastructure Backbone (NICTIB) 2 project and state of the art data centres across the nation, the organisation is positioned to achieve its audacious goals to connect Nigerians, Sub-Saharan African digitally and optimise productivity.