By 
By Suleiman Isah, Pioneer Commissioner, Communications Technology & Digital Economy, Niger State
For years I’ve watched well-intentioned government projects crash and burn. I thought they wouldn’t have failed if I were in charge lol. And here is the hard truth I’ve learned on the ground while in office. Digital transformation doesn’t die because of bad code. It dies because we forget we are dealing with people, not just processors.
RELATED: NITDA advances pans for a one-stop government services portal to accelerate Nigeria’s digital transformation
A major lesson and example for me was when we set out to introduce a unified health card across 23 secondary hospitals. I thought the biggest hurdle would be technical. On paper, the logic was simple standardize patient identity and let the data flow between facilities. But reality was far messier. I walked into hospitals that had evolved in complete isolation for decades. No two facilities had the same operational manual. One hospital’s “registration” was another’s “archiving.”
We weren’t just installing software; we were asking 23 different cultures to speak the same language overnight. The resistance was immediate. It wasn’t a fear of technology alone, it was a fear of transparency also. When you digitise a system, you expose the inefficiencies and “deals”. You shine a light on processes that, frankly, some people prefer to keep in the dark.
That experience taught me that government transformation is less about IT upgrades and more about institutional psychology. You can’t just write a cheque for a new server and expect governance to change. You have to navigate the silent killers of progress. Procurement rigidity that locks you into bad vendors, data silos built by years of departmental mistrust and the ticking clock of political cycles (four years is very short for a tenure).
One of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that a budget allocation equals implementation. I have seen funds allocated, only for momentum to stall because somewhere down the chain, a public servant viewed the new system as a threat to their job or to an opaque process that benefited them. And let’s be honest, in politics, if a project doesn’t visibly win votes, it becomes very hard to prioritise.
So, we had to pivot. We stopped waiting for the big bang.
We started treating the budget as a constraint, not a blank slate. Instead of trying to conquer the entire state at once, we broke the transformation into what I call “sachet-sized” deliverables, small, visible wins.
We prioritised basic infrastructure first. Before we could layer on complex applications, we needed to get the internet working in government offices. We introduced simple things, like online payslips. It sounds mundane, but suddenly, civil servants didn’t have to travel just to collect a piece of paper. The value was immediate. They saw the computer not as a threat, but as a tool that made their lives easier. That shifted the entire culture.
We also leaned heavily on partnerships. We knew we couldn’t and shouldn’t do this alone. By partnering with UNDP, Zenith Bank, and local tech hubs, we ensured what we built was sustainable rather than just another government project destined for the archives.
My message to colleagues in more developed ecosystems looking to enter Nigeria’s huge market is this: don’t underestimate the power of mobile-first architecture and incremental delivery. If you try to lift and drop a massive, monolithic system from Europe into a place like Nigeria, it will collapse under its own weight. You have to build for the reality on the ground.
Digital transformation is not about the sophistication of the technology. It is about execution discipline, fiscal realism and understanding the human heart. The countries that master this won’t just digitise services. They will redesign governance itself. And that is a future worth fighting for.
