FG Orders Civil Servants To Use .gov.ng Emails | Nairalaw

The federal government may have concluded arrangement to move
all official government documents and exchanges on to a more secure
domestic security infrastructure.This is in a renewed security
ethos designed to permeate through all tiers of government and its
agencies and to protect state mechanism from deliberate and
unintended abuse.

With the move, emails sent or received on free email account, no
matter their content, are not public records because they are not
owned or used by a government agency.

In place of free email accounts; Galaxy Backbone Plc; a public
enterprise under the supervision of the office of the secretary to
the government, and National Information Technology Development
Agency (NITDA) have reportedly been mandated to create .gov.ng
domain based email accounts for the public service
organizations.

Each ministry will now have customized email accounts that allow
its civil servants to use the ministry’s name as their e-mail
domain and in turn allow people to immediately recognize incoming
e-mail messages´ origin. For example, wazobia@mod.gov.ng.

But, implementing the directive may face many bottlenecks after
it was discovered that most of ministries, departments and agencies
(MDAs) of the federal government are still without active
websites.

Dr Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, director-general, NITDA, who is
worried about the development, said that ‘’This has prevented IT,
to some extent, from becoming an asset shaping strategic future
opportunities of public institutions and the Government as a whole.
The implication and consequence of all these is high rate of IT
projects failures.”

Critics of government are quick to dismiss the latest
initiative, citing several failed attempts.Previous attempts to ban
the use of so-called free email accounts like Yahoomail, Gmail,
etc; and enforce the use of .ng based emails for government
businesses were hobbled by bureaucracy coupled by the sore-footed
and refractory approach of civil servants.

But a top official at the presidency, said that with
internet-related issues such as identity theft and online privacy
becoming a global concern, the federal government has been forced
to act quickly.The source said that “A permanent secretary, for
instance sending sensitive documents like military proposals and
vouchers through free email accounts, run the risk of exposing
intra and inter-ministerial transactions, which may be a clear
breach of national security”.

According to the source, the new email policy will make it
mandatory for government offices to communicate only on.gov.ng .
rather than commercial email services It is also a measure to
tackle the menace of cyber criminals who set up fraudulent websites
and have reduced Nigeria’s image among the comity of Nations.

Additionally, it is meant to prevent sensitive documents
belonging to the government from becoming the property of a foreign
government or multinational.However, with developed nations and
large corporations facing complex attacks from hackers; the
security architecture of the federal government may need to be
re-evaluated