President Jonathan Appoints New NITDA DG, Pledges $500 million For IT Industry

In what might appear to be a desperate move in order to garner support for his presidential bid from the Nigerian tech and social media community, President Goodluck Jonathan has appointed ‘Gbenga Sesan as the new Director General of NITDA.

Update: This was an April Fool’s Day post

Mr. Sesan, who was Nigeria’s first IT Youth Ambassador and currently the Executive Director of Paradigm Initiative Nigeria (PIN) now replaces Professor Cleopas Angaye as Director General of the Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency.

President Jonathan announced this today during a private lunch at the Nicon Hilton, Abuja with some of the tech industry’s movers and shakers, including Chris Uwaje (ISPON President), Florence Seriki (CEO, Omatek) and Leo-Stan Ekeh (MD, Zinox).

The strictly-by-invitation lunch also provided the President an opportunity to learn some of the key challenges that are affecting Nigeria’s technology industry and entertain suggestions from the experts on how to transform the industry.

As at time of writing this, details are yet to emerge as to the outcome of their discussions. Also, it is uncertain why the President made the appointment, but sources say that he could be lobbying in a bid to win the votes of the tech community comprising mostly of young IT professionals and software developers.

President Jonathan further pledged the sum of $500 million for Nigeria’s technology industry for software development in the country.

Earlier reports had indicated that the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON) was already shopping for over N500 million investment for software development in Nigeria.

With President Jonathan’s pledge to bail out the IT industry, it is expected that the funds would be spent in technology infrastructure and manpower development.

We’ll update this post as soon as we have more information. Update: This was an April Fool’s Day post

Image via Flickr courtesy of CSTS_SCU

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