NITDA urges National Assembly on data protection bill passage

The National Assembly has been called upon to fast-track the passage of the Data Protection Bill into law.

Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, director general, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), made the call while addressing journalists during a webinar session ahead of the National Privacy Week 2021.

Abdullahi, assured that NITDA would strategize to create a workable, credible implementation process that would assist the National Assembly in its quest to pass a Data Protection Bill.

“We are proud to say the NDPR implementation has the most robust consultative process in our recent history as a nation. This autochthonous approach has deepened the NDPR more than we could have imagined.

‘‘While we await the passage of the Data Protection Bill, NITDA will continue to lay necessary structures to deepen data protection implementation in Nigeria,’’ the DG NITDA said.

He explained that in line with the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) which was designed to meet the global principles on data protection and issued on 25th January, 2019, the agency has recorded a lot of remarkable feats through sustained public awareness, implementation structure, legal and political structure for sustainability among other NDPR implementation strategies.

NITDA boss enthused that its strategy of licensing Data Protection Compliance Organisations (DPCO) is yielding fruits for the country, stressing that currently, Nigeria has more data protection experts per capita than any other African country.

In terms of implementation, he said a unique implementation structure for the NDPR was also created.

According to him, unlike the GDPR and other laws, the NDPR creates a set of licensees who have proven expertise in data protection implementation.

‘‘These DPCOs are licensed to provide data protection compliance, audit, training and related services to all Data Controllers and Processors. So far, we have licensed seventy DPCOs and have received many more applications which are currently being treated.

‘‘This strategy has recorded compliance from many organizations than could be imagined. For instance, our audit reports for the period 2019-2020 shows the percentage of compliance among the number of filing entities.

He disclosed that the NDPR implementation recorded compliance from many organizations than could be imagined with the financial sector leading by 35%, fast moving consumer goods 14%, energy 10% and consultancy 9%.

Others are ICT 8%, transport and logistics 5% while other sectors accounted for 19% of the total record.