States, Local Govts. Get August Deadline on .ng

State governments’ ministries and parastatals as well as local governments in the country have till August this year to host their websites on the country’s top level domain name .ng, in a bid to protect state mechanism from deliberate and unintended abuse, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek has learnt.

.ng is Nigeria's Code Top Level domain name, an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for Nigeria only.

The aim is to set up and operate a unified ICT infrastructure platform that permeates through all tiers of government and its agencies.

The creation of the .ng domain based websites and email addresses followed discovery that some civil servants have inadvertently transmitted sensitive government data and information through their own free email addresses which pose national security challenges.

Mary Uduma, president, Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA) said that according to federal government directive to that effect, all state governments, their ministries and parastatals as well as local government are to host their website and emails on .ng by the end of August this year.

Uduma, said, to meet the deadline, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) is collaborating with NIRA to ensure a smooth migration for the states and local governments.

She noted that for the federal government ministries, departments and agencies compliance to their directive, a steering committee has been set up under the supervision of head of service of the federation with Galaxy Backbone the federal government registrar for the migration to work out modalities for the migration.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek recalled that e 2009, the federal government through Galaxy Backbone Plc, a public enterprise of the government had begun moves to replace so-called free email accounts like Yahoomail, hotmail used by government officials for communication with accounts ending in .ng.

Uduma added that NIRA is expecting to have some 2,000 websites from governments’ ministries, departments and agencies with additional 40,000 emails when the directives are fully complied with.

Aside government ministries and parastatals, she said that .ng registrars with the approval of NIRA are planning promos aimed at creating awareness on .ng.

“Registrars are planning promos such as Centenary promo among others where some websites will be registered free to increase the number of website on .ng. From these promos we are targeting about 150,000 in addition to existing 50,000 registrations and others we could achieve our projection of 250,000 registrations at the end of the year,” she said. 

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations however revealed that most businesses in the country shun .ng but rather prefer to register -ng.com or ng.com as against .ng.

Same is the case with emails where senior government officers are using yahoo, gmail among other email accounts against secured email account of their ministry account.

Ope Odusan, managing director of Africa.com Domain Services, said that the numbers of electronic mail also known as email on yahoo portal which belong to Nigerians are put at 2 million.

He explained that said that yahoo was able to attract this number of Nigerians to its email portal because the company offered the service free. He urged the federal government to replicate similar incentive to encourage Nigerian businesses to register with .ng which is the country’s top level domain name.

According to him, government could offer incentives such as one year tax break for any business that is registered in .ng or enter into public private partnership with information and communications technology companies that are capable of building hybrid data centres using energy efficient power to make the hosting of websites in the country cheaper.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations revealed that there are only 50,000 businesses registered in .ng while .com, .net and .org account for 600,000 of Nigerian businesses.

It was also gathered that other foreign domain names outside the three mentioned has some 50,000 Nigeria businesses on them, bringing the total of 650,000 of Nigerian businesses that are registered with foreign domain names.