Ọpọn Imọ, IPPIS, e-government, etcetera

Mrs. Omobola Johnson, at the 11th International Conference of the Nigerian Computer Society (NCS). The conference took place on 24-26 July 2013 at the Royal Park Hotel in Iloko-Ijesa, Osun State, Nigeria. The Honourable Minister delivered her speech on 25 July 2013. The theme of this year’s NCS conference (NCS 2013) is “e-Government and National […]

Mrs. Omobola Johnson, at the 11th International Conference of the Nigerian Computer Society (NCS). The conference took place on 24-26 July 2013 at the Royal Park Hotel in Iloko-Ijesa, Osun State, Nigeria. The Honourable Minister delivered her speech on 25 July 2013. The theme of this year’s NCS conference (NCS 2013) is “e-Government and National Security.”
Mrs. Johnson is the ultimate technocrat: she was a Chief Executive Officer at Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting), which is arguably one of the leading IT-based consulting firms in the world. It surely gives me some pleasure to see the Nigerian government engage resources such as Mrs. Johnson.
Mrs. Johnson articulated her ministry’s roadmap to ICT advancement in Nigeria, starting with a discussion of Nigeria’s below-average global rankings in key ICT metrics, followed by her summary of the four components of her agenda (Direct Nigeria, Connect Nigeria, Local Content, and ICT in Governance). However, the topics that seemed to have captured the attention of the audience during the minister’s session at NCS 2013 are the ones listed in the title of this article: “Ọpọn Imọ,” IPPIS, and the minster’s general overview of Nigeria’s e-government efforts. In the rest of this article, I will write more about Ọpọn Imọ and IPPIS.
Ọpọn Imọ
Ọpọn Imọ is a Yoruba phrase: “Ọpọn” is tablet, or slate, like the one primary school pupils write on with a chalk. “Imọ” is knowledge. So, Ọpọn Imọ literally translates to “tablet of knowledge.” Functionally speaking, it is an electronic tablet device inside which has been pre-loaded learning materials for secondary school (SS) students in Osun State, Nigeria. A micro-presentation of Ọpọn Imọ was presented at NCS 2013 by the Osun State government.
Ọpọn Imọ is a learning environment designed specifically for SS1 through SS3. There are three basic components: e-Library, Virtual Learning, and Integrated Test Zone (ITZ). The e-Library environment contains the textbooks for all the 17 subjects in Arts, Science, and Social Science. Virtual Learning contains the teachers’ tutorials and lesson notes. The ITZ contains past questions in MOCK and the West African Examination Council (WAEC) exams, and allows students to take practice tests. (WAEC refers to an exam that is jointly administered by West African countries for the purpose of providing a common platform for evaluating all secondary school graduates in West Africa. MOCK is a pseudo WAEC exam conducted locally in a school, as a warming-up exercise to the real WAEC exams.) In the practice problems in ITZ, students answer multiple-choice questions and are graded after each question. In MOCK practice exams, students are graded after they have answered all the questions in a test. Note that the ITZ environment allows performance monitoring for each student, based on her scores in the practice problems. The Ọpọn Imọ program is a vital component of the overall Osun State initiative, which has been dubbed “Otels,” for Osun State Technology-Enhanced Learning Systems. The Ọpọn Imọ device is free to all students!
IPPIS
IPPIS stands for “Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System.” It was conceived by the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) “to improve the effectiveness and efficiency in the storage of personnel records and administration of monthly payroll in such a way as to enhance confidence in staff emolument costs and budgeting.” The precise objectives of IPPIS include facilitation of manpower planning and assistance in providing information for decision making. The system also helps to monitor monthly payment of staff emoluments; it aids budgeting by providing accurate recurrent expenditure data, and it eliminates payroll fraud. The tool has two main components: a) personnel records, including biographical data, with photograph and finger print, and b) payroll processing.
The IPPIS project has been divided into phases, with Phase I commissioned in 2006 using just six pilot ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs). The central database was located at the Bureau for Public Service Reform. As one of the FGN’s reform programs conceptualized as a central payment process for all civil servants on payroll, IPPIS received a nod from the World Bank, who actually financed the pilot project. Today, IPPIS supports 219 MDAs, with 321 to go.
In addition to the static bio-data of civil servants, the personnel module of IPPIS supports the basic tracking tasks, such as specialty, promotion, deployment, transfers (or postings), and in-service trainings. The payroll module supports such basic tasks as “variation capture”, payroll audit, and the generation of pay slip at the MDAs. Each monthly payroll project involves the MDAs, who process the payrolls and update payroll records, the Budget Office and the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation (OAGF), who prepare payroll warrants and mandates, and generate the transaction files. The OAGF is the custodian of IPPIS.
Although payroll processing and bio-data storage and retrieval as supported in IPPIS represent a small component of a full-fledged e-government software platform, the Nigerian government has already reported some benefits from IPPIS, including the elimination of up to 46,000 “ghost workers” and a savings of over three-quarters of a billion United States dollars.
The main idea of this article is that, although Nigeria presently ranks very low globally in several ICT metrics, a few palpable efforts have been undertaken to address some of the deficiencies. I have presented only two of these efforts: Ọpọn Imọ, or “Tablet of Knowledge” and IPPIS. Although IPPIS represents a small part of an e-government platform, for example, when compared to United States standards, it is a welcome initiative as far as the processing of federal civil service personnel and payroll is concerned.