Mr. Femi Williams is the Group Managing Director of Chams Plc. In this interview with Abiola Odutola, he outlines how biometric identity cards can change the perception of governance in states. Excerpts:
Chams recently partnered the Osun State Government to launch a biometric identity card system in the state. What do you hope to achieve with this innovation?
The card is about knowing the people that are in the state. You know, without knowing the people and having their statistics, there is no way the government can plan and manage the state’s resources, effectively. It’s an attempt to know the people that it’s managing, to enable it to plan and provide for them and measure the effectiveness of the services it is delivering. Once you have such in place, it is then that the government can begin to make strategic decision on what the people want. Before now, it was all a guess game. If they wanted to plant a new school, they would just look for an influential politician and site such school in his village, no statistics.
Is the ID card thing applicable to infrastructure as well?
The same applies to roads and other infrastructure. But, this kind of data base would allow what we call data-driven intelligent solutions, not solutions of governance or government project and services that are just based on sentiments.
How does it work?
Once I connect to government one time, I already have a unique number and there is no need for government registering me again and again, because I have a unique number which can be used. This is the kind of a thing that this would allow government to do. We did it with students and the impact was measured. We discovered that the cost of managing, sponsoring and promoting things around educational sector was optimised. Before then, it was going up and down because there were no statistics regarding the number of students in every school and class. So this is there now. From a touch of the button, government can know where every child is, what is their score this year? What is the percentage? If you get this kind of statistics, you will see that managing the citizens will be better and there can be measurable results over time.
Is there no way we can have a centralised system that will make life a little bit better for the average Nigerian?
I don’t want to go into the history of all that has happened. But one thing that stands out is the fact that, we all need to find a way to harmonise this data base together. It’s going to be challenging, but it is doable, if we all have a common purpose; because there is a huge repository of data in INEC, in FRSC, etc., even in states. So, whether we like it or not, harmonisation must be the way. And it is not difficult technology-wise, and there are solutions and technology that can harmonise this effectively.
Now the other part of your question, which is political, can be answered this way: there is what is called ‘wisdom of government’. Until the wisdom of government goes the direction of enforcing harmonisation and breaking all the barriers to harmonisation, we will still be going in circles. A lot of thoughts are going around harmonisation, but we are not very serious about it. For us, as a company, we’ve given some proposals regarding how it could be done, but as I said, government has its own wisdom. And until the wisdom of government is serious towards harmonisation, we will be where we
are.
One of the biggest plans of the company is to diversify into agriculture. How far is it to realising this dream?
Our core focus is actually delivering intelligent business solutions. Though I wouldn’t know whether it is the right time to say it, but there are two major industries that we are going to dominate in the next two months: the agric. and health sectors. In fact, there is something happening in the health sector too that would constitute some tremendous disruptions very
soon.
In spite of the rich pedigree of IT companies in Nigeria, the ICT gap is still very obvious. What are you doing to bridge some of these gaps?
You know ICT is a jungle. For you to be successful, you have to be focused on something. You cannot do everything, or else you would just be Jack of all trades and master of none. So we’ve focused for five years on identity management. Now we are focusing on intelligent business solutions that are built
on identity management. And that is what will propel us for a while. We don’t have to do e-commerce, we know how to do it, we can do it, but we chose not to. That is not our area of focus for now. We try and focus on an area we know, and dominate it for
some time.
