The Chief Executive Officer of SystemSpecs, John Obaro, at the weekend, attributed the criticisms that greeted the collection of fees by Remita, the software driving the Federal Government’s Treasury Single Account (TSA) scheme, to ignorance.
Obaro spoke after his induction into the BoICT Hall of Fame and upon receiving the Indigenous Software Provider of the Decade awards at this year’s Beacon of Information and Communication Technology Awards in Lagos. He said Remita in itself is 14 years old.
He said: “We are in a business where we will always have one issue or the other and we take it as it comes; we resolve one problem and another problem comes up. The issue about our fees came because of ignorance but today, many more people are aware of the use of IT; that they can use their mobile phones to make payments; make transfers. When we started all these four years ago, that was when the use of electronic transfer was just coming up. So, many people didn’t understand what it was. Once there was a little spark, it easily became a wild fire, but with time, when people started understanding it, the confusion calm down and cleared. The issue of fees is being negotiated with government and it will be sorted out.
“Not many people know that the product was there. We were operating at the corporate level; it was TSA that brought us to limelight and many people assumed Remita is TSA. Remita has always been there, but the government showing interest was a good opportunity and in the past two years, a number of state governments have shown interest; so you find a diffusion of the use of technology across board, now from national to the states and there are not many businesses today that would have think of starting up without using computers. That was not how it used to be. There was a time you needed to sell the use of computers by allaying the fears of people you needed to educate people.”
Source: The Nation
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