The Secretary to the Government of the Federation has a dedicated website and in 2017 that website cost the Nation 65 million Naira to run, PremiumTimes has revealed. This is despite the fact that in June 2006, the Federal Government incorporated an ICT company it calls Galaxy Backbone PLC which among other things was supposed to host Government websites.
ETN24 can now say with certainty that the controversial website which cost Nigeria 65 million in just one year was indeed listed as being hosted by Galaxy Backbone – a government company so obscure its website’s actual homepage does not load despite providing hosting services to others.
A 2006 Galaxy Backbone document talks about its creation for the purpose of economics of scale. Economics of scale means that the government would save more money as it does more ICT. This aim emphasizes the question as to what government websites would have cost the government if there was no “economics of scale” if it cost 65 million naira a year for one website with a full-blown public company providing economics of scale.
GalaxyBB’s description reads
Galaxy Backbone Plc is a public enterprise of the Federal Government incorporated in 2006 with the primary mandate of setting up and operating a unified Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure platform that addresses the connectivity, transversal and other technology imperatives for Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) of the Federal Government.
Its address is listed as 61 Adetokunbo Ademola Crescent, Wuse2, Abuja, Nigeria. Its listed telephone number constantly failed to go through.
As at 2006, its financial plan was to invest 200 million dollars in short term.
Minimal Functions, Massive Cash
Analysis of the SGF’s website shows that at the very least if there are expensive functionalities, they are not enabled.
The site does not have an SSL certificate, was built with Joomla which is a free Content Management system, host its videos on Youtube, outsources images, and its “latest News” was a News item from March 2017; almost a year ago. Its latest video was an Oak TV Youtube video from 2015. None of its social links goes through as its facebook icon lands on facebook.com, its Twitter account has been suspended and its project area is empty.
There are no provisions for interaction and the last Press Release on the site is from 2015.
Clear Corruption or Curious?
If the hosting for http://osgf.gov.ng/ was not done by the “economic of scale” proponents, the highest quote in the market would be about 2,900 dollars per year which will run into 1.1 million. However, such services are limited by space, bandwidth and its likes. A government may want to purchase with the future in mind, in which case resources may be bought but not implemented. The possibility of having reserved resource, which is a ready excuse for any corrupt act, is the exact reason the ICT requirement of a government should be provided by the government.
To put this in perspective, the Government will spend 1.1 million yearly if the site will only have 30bg of storage. It would be expected that had the official website of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation been fully utilized, the government would surely need more than 100 times this capacity of storage yearly, which would have justified such amount.
What does not help is government’s ownership of Galaxy Backbone, the fact that it hosted the site and the fact that the site is almost not operational.
