Nigeria’s top software industry group says the local software industry needs urgent support to be a key driver of wealth creation and government’s economic development agenda.
Pius Okigbo Jnr, President of Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) said that the Nigerian government can borrow a leaf from foreign software companies that have developed “through the encouragement of their home governments.”
Okigbo explains that one of the challenges facing the Nigerian software industry is that locally developed solutions are priced cheaper than their foreign variants simply because they are made in Nigeria.
According to the President of the top software group, amid all these, software developed by local companies can serve the diverse needs of over 25,000 ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) across the three tiers of government.
“There is nothing we cannot write in software programs but nobody is ready to trust us and pay us huge amounts of money as to make us bigger players in Nigeria and this is a big tragedy”, Okigbo said.
According to him, “we have developed some good solutions that foreign solutions cannot match. Foreign software became the humongous behemoths they have become because of huge patronage. They all have their humble beginnings.”
The ISPON leader maintained that there is no foreign Human Resources (HR) software system that is better than the locally-developed HR package.
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