FG Orders Civilian Servants To Use .gov.ng Emails

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.