The essence of technology use since the dotcom bubble burst back in 2000 is to enable people and organisation’s ability and capability of solving complex challenges. Technology also has a specific mandate of assisting individuals and organisations in being more innovative, efficient and productive in whatever they are doing. No doubt, technical and infrastructure factors are preventing some individuals and organisations from deriving maximum benefits from various technologies.
From Internet-enabled technologies to physically structured technologies, people and organisations are equally finding it difficult to create and deliver value due to behavioural attitude towards the use of these technologies. This position is better understood among some public servants in Nigeria, who are techno-phobias and at the same time evident among the servants who care less about responding to the citizens and businesses’ enquiries and requested services within stipulated time frame.
Before technology becomes part of the key resources in the Nigerian public service, citizens and businesses, including foreign stakeholders, largely witnessed movement of files and documents from one point to another before a public service could be delivered. Despite the state and federal governments’ sustained interest in e-governance since 2000, it has appeared that attitude of some workers to the use and response to the public needs suggest technology as a curse rather than a blessing to the public service system.
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In 2017, the National Information Technology Development Agency berated Federal Ministries and agencies over inactive websites and poor online service delivery. According to the agency, “some ministries either have no active websites or are not registered on.GOV.NG domain. Most of the websites were not in conformity with published standards and guidelines for government websites. “Most of the websites do not have feedback and information necessary to facilitate ease of doing business.”
Apart from the facts stated by the agency, our checks of a number of the government’s Ministries, Departments and Agencies indicate poor design, with the possibility of leading to poor user experience. It was discovered that majority of the handlers of the enquiries sections of the websites rarely reply to the complaints of the public. It also emerged that when they responded the replies are either complete or incomplete. The agency described this as “poor online service delivery” to the public.
The implications of the poor online service delivery, according to business owners who interacted with our analyst, have been delayed in getting appropriate documents in an agency or ministry to another agency or ministry, and private establishments. They have been denied opportunity to win contracts because of the failure to provide necessary documents from the government establishments to concerned stakeholders.
While Nigeria has witnessed and still experiencing job creation, GDP growth, improved banking, work or business transformation, improved communication and healthcare as a result of effective and efficient use of technology in the private sector, it has been a mixed results from the public sector perspective in the last 20 years. The mixed outcomes have always had impacts on ease of doing business in the country, especially counter and alternative celebrations have been evolving on the country’s ranking stride since the emergence of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration.
As long as attitude continues impacting the ways Nigerian public servants use technologies, the idea of having technocracy instead of democracy suggested by David Adamo Jr, a Computer Science PhD student at the University of North Texas, USA, would remain a dream not a reality. This is premised on the fact that most public servants are yet to understand how some principles of bureaucracy associated with poor service creation and delivery should be diffused for technologies to be tools for attaining greater efficiency and productivity.