Nigeria

After 20 years outside of Nigeria, Gabriel just arrived at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, and would like to take the next bus that will be heading to Sokoto, about 1000 km from Lagos. He has always taught the country is now at par with some western countries that do have transport timetables like you have in a country as small as Slovenia, actually he was disappointed! Gabriel eventually waited and gets settled 3 days before he could get a cousin to put him on a bus to Sokoto. This is how interesting data availability could be in Nigeria, and while so much funds is been put into government budget on infrastructure data, the more we look, the less we see the availability of these datasets, one being government spending data in real-time!

Nevertheless, postal codes of every community in Nigeria has been available since the publication of the commercialized printed copies five years ago, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) isn’t relenting in making statistical data available to Nigerians through its new portal that is already used in complimenting its e-library, five years ago, this wouldn’t have been possible, and this awakening isn’t peculiar to the NBS. Election results are now available immediately it’s being released by the Independent National Electoral Commission; the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency at the beginning of the year, released a real time map data of oil spills in the country; and talking about maps, it’s quite appalling that an online digital map of the most populated black country still remains a holy grail, despite the fact that the Office of the Surveyor General of the Federation and the National Boundary Commission has this locked in their office electronic devices! Following suit, is the company register domiciled in the strong room of the Corporate Affairs Commission, which is only available to registered legal practitioners at a fee, perhaps we will need some intervention by Open Corporates

While the country might move up in its rating in the 2014 Global Open Data Index from 63 in 2013 (6th in Africa after Burkina Faso, Tunisia, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco) due to so much pressure on government agencies to make data available, there are still much challenges of the integrity of the data been published, and how downloadable some of this online data are. Having appreciated the government moving to an Open Data regime, especially with recent open data initiative of the Ministry of Communication Technology, it is important to let government institutions know how to openly license their data, and empower citizens, and strengthen non-state actors on how to make use of this available data, so that when transport data becomes available, Nigerians that might want to transit like Gabriel can quickly leverage on using it for moving from one point to another.