MDAs owe NITA GH¢18m
Over 504 Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) owe the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) which provides Internet service to them over GH¢18 million, according to the Director-General of NITA, Mr Samuel Atta-Boateng.
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That, he said, had had a serious toll on their activities and had compelled them to go on a debt recovery drive to retrieve the monies owed them.
This was made known at a seminar held by NITA to engage Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) on how they could improve on their services and also come out with plans for the payment of the services.
According to him, their operations were cost-effective and needed more capital injection to improve their output to serve their clients well.
Mr Boateng mentioned that his outfit had already sent out letters to the MDAs to pay their indebtedness else they would be disconnected from the service being rendered and most of them had responded positively.
“One surprising thing is the services we provide to these government agencies are far cheaper compared to that of the private ones,” he noted.
NITA, he said, was on the move to introduce a new system where billing would be done monthly or quarterly and it would be prepaid and would come with huge discounts.
Private partnership
Mr Boateng indicated that they were considering a private partnership to serve the needs of other private institutions which were interested in the services of NITA.
He said the move had been necessitated by the excess capacity that had not been utilised and since NITA was created to serve the Internet needs of only government agencies, the private partner would see to the needs of the private institutions.
According to him, this move would help recoup the huge monies that had been invested to pay back the loans and also improve the services rendered to the MDAs. He said advertisement had already taken place and interested persons had gone through the evaluation process and had finally come out with one solid partner.
The Director of Information Technology Application at NITA, Mrs Veronica Boateng, stated that one of the challenges her outfit faced now was the participation of the public on the Internet regime and that they were trying to come out with plans to get the public to benefit from some of NITA’s services.
According to her, there are setups to enhance public service delivery so the public should begin to benefit from these platforms and make them much more productive.
She said they would enhance their publicity and awareness creation to educate the public on the platforms they were providing.
A representative of the Ministry of Communications, who read the speech on behalf of the sector minister, indicated that the government would see to it that it enhanced the activities of NITA to improve their services.
She stated that the government was bent on making Information Technology easily accessible to all government agencies to speed up government businesses.