I am proud to be a Nigerian because it is the only home I know and I am making conscious and deliberate efforts to walk the talk by flaunting the Nigerian brand online.
Last week, I attended the IBM InterConnect 2016 which held in Las Vegas, United States and one of the take homes for me is that quite a number of people are interested in Nigeria; some for the right reasons and others for the wrong.
However, each time I mentioned Nigeria, people took some sort of interest. I remember a top ranking official of IBM explaining how Nigeria and Africa are strategic to their overall plan.
During my interactions and networking, I observed that folks from most parts of the world outside the United States used their own local domain names with pride. For me, that was quite striking because the reverse is the case in Nigeria, maybe because we don’t believe that .ng is good enough or we don’t just understand the importance to our national brand or we probably need some sort of government policy to make it somewhat compulsory?
Let me share an interesting statistics with you, Nigeria has just about 60,000 domains in the .ng registry compared to South Africa that has close to one million domains in the..Co.Za registry. Does this not seem like we are yet to begin especially when you compare both countries population?
The big question is: What has South Africa done to achieve this feat? Like I’d always say, when it comes to technology, there is no need reinventing the wheel; just copy and improve on an existing model as long as it is legal. The telecoms companies as you may have observed have proven that this strategy works.
The Nigerian government should as a matter of urgency find out what ways South Africa has been able to achieve this feat and replicate same because there is no reason why we should not have as much domain names in our own local registry.
Nigeria as a nation is blessed with a unique domain string known as .ng which is her country code top level domain (ccTLD) and we should be proud of this gift of nature.
Apart from the fact that .ng is a beautiful string when compared to that of other countries, there are a number of benefits when you use the local string domain such as local search engine optimisation which means that — Finish Reading on the Punch Website
