Chris Uwaje, former president of the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON), has decried the dominance of foreign products in Nigeria's tech sector, particularly the preference for international software by local government and multinationals. He also outlined challenges that continue to impact on what is considered to be the West African country's most crucial sector.

Uwaje warned that the status quo results in capital flight and that telecommunications is dominated by foreign content - despite local content playing a significant role in ensuring sector efficiency.

"Talking about ICT in general, services constitute about two-thirds of the market size. It is labour-intensive and there are policies for sustainability that should be adopted as models."

Uwaje recommended that a telco operator with 500,000 subscribers should be in a position to build a call centre of about 180 attendants. "If you have a magnitude of 20 to 40 million subscriber base, you need to create call centres in support zones. That is why outsourcing centres are growing."

He directed industry regulators to provide frameworks that would favour local sector participation in tech, particularly telecoms.

"Before issuing licenses, the regulators should have laid down the ground rules. They should have anticipated the need for mobile phone assembly plants, knowing that at any time, 50 million mobile phones will be used in the country. So, operators, considering the factors of the licenses, will now seek local partners to help them fulfil the regulatory body's requirements. So, these things ought to be aggregated in such manner that within the assembly plants sphere millions of people would have been engaged."

Uwaje also called for the development of an architecture to ensure the sustainability of Nigeria's ICT ecosystem.

"Every player should be made to adhere strictly to such guidelines/ standards. For instance, what does benefit a country to create a computer science department that the graduates will not have any job? There are a lot of foreign software that have come here and failed. This is in public domain: they failed in banks, government, aviation, the Police force and several other sectors. So, we must make sure that local developers are given the opportunity in a way of laboratories where they can work after graduation."