Dr. Hamadoun Toure, Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), commended Africa’s foremost ICT magazine, IT & Telecom Digest, as it celebrates its tenth year of unmatched and sustained reportage of activities, operations and policy issues in the continent.
Dr. Toure said he was pleased by the pioneering and informative role that IT & Telecom Digest has been playing by keeping events in the telecom sector in Africa and Nigeria in particular, on the front burner for global attention.
“I like to commend you for this quality magazine that you have been producing with such high standard, informative and incisive reports and articles, which consistently tell the world about potentials, opportunities and operations in the ICT sector in Nigeria in particular and Africa in general,” Dr. Toure said when he received the Editor-in-Chief of IT & Telecom Digest, Mr. Mkpe Abang, in audience at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Spain.
It was double honour for the publication as Dr. Toure also launched Mobile Africa newspaper, the new publication recently introduced by the magazine.
“I am proud of your work and I am especially excited that you have even now introduced this newspaper specifically for mobile in Africa; it shows that you are moving with the times, and sometimes even ahead of the events. I do wish you well,” Dr. Toure further stated.
Mobile Africa newspaper, according to Abang, will focus “just on mobile; from mobile telephony to mobile internet, value added services on mobile telephony, and so on. It will also focus on what mobile operators are doing, what is in vogue, the fashion in mobile telephony, the youth and mobile phones, among other areas,” he added, saying the newspaper will also devote special attention to impact of mobile telephone on youths in tertiary institutions, because “these are the leaders of tomorrow.”
According to Abang, Mobile Africa starts out as a bi-weekly; it will however quickly stabilise as a weekly because, as he put it “mobile deserves special attention because of what it has done in our lives as a nation and as a continent.”
If the economic, socio-political and private lives as well as the business landscape of Nigeria and Africa have changed in the last one decade, Abang added, “the credit goes to mobile telephony, its operators and the regulators who have ensured that Africans are not denied the special freedom and the limitless life changing opportunities that mobile telephony brings to a people; and which it has brought to Nigeria and Africa.”
