Internet users in Nigeria. Photo credit: TVC

The Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA) has expressed displeasure over the inability of some Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to migrate their websites to dotng (.ng) domain.

In his Facebook page, the President of NIRA, Mr Sunday Folayan, said that the .ng domain name was a national resource and a unique identifier for every Nigerian on the World Wide Web (WWW).

Folayan said that the .gov.ng was exclusively preserved for all government MDAs.

Commenting on a letter circulating on the Internet attributed to the police command in Ogun State over the case of “man who named his dog Buhari,” he took exception to the e-mail address used by the command.

According to him, instead of modeling its e-mail in line with the Police Force Headquarters, the Ogun Command adopted ‘[email protected]’ and ‘[email protected]’.

“The most important thing to me in the letter is the e-mail address of the police force therein. It should be [email protected].

“Any other e-mail address looks fake and should be discouraged. With NIRA working day and night for Nigerians to embrace our country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), this just makes our efforts seem weak.”

He, however, asked “have you been to the police website before? Go ahead. Visit them and give them some hit today. http://www.police.gov.ng. Give their IT folks a reason to celebrate. Be your friend and neighbour’s keeper.”

Since its establishment, NIRA embarked on campaigns on the utilisation of the .gov.ng domain name by all MDAs as critical step in the implementation of e-governance in all levels of government.

Folayan said the Association remained resolute on the implementation of .gov.ng as part of strategies to connect government within itself and with the citizens, on a safe common platform that would increase local traffic and thus reduce the overall cost of governance. (NAN