The Federal Executive Council has approved the National Policy on the Government Second Level Domain aimed at safeguarding official communications using government top-level domain of “dot government dot ng”.
The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isa Pantami, disclosed this when he addressed State House correspondents on the outcome of the Council meeting, presided over by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, on Wednesday in Abuja.
The policy mandates all MDAs to migrate from generic domains in web/emails to government sub-domains under the Country Top Level Domain (.ng)
What the Minister of Communication is saying
The Minister revealed that policy approval means all government officials must now migrate from using generic domain in their websites and their emails to the second level domain under the government top-level domain.
He added that the use of private emails like including yahoo.com; hotmail.com or gmail.com for official communications by government officials would no longer be tolerated.
The memo I presented is our national policy, which has been approved by the Federal Executive Council. The policy has been entitled as National Policy on the Government, Second Level Domain.
“This policy has been approved, and it focuses more on mandating federal public institutions, ministries, departments, agencies, and all institutions as long as they are for government to migrate from using generic domain in their websites and their emails to our second level domain under government top-level domain” he said
“For example, you will discover today, some government institutions will engage in official communications using private email yahoo.com; hotmail.com, gmail.com, and it is an official communication.
“And someone may retire or will complete his tenure or the tenure can be terminated, and he will go with the same email. And in that email, there are many official documents.
“So, this will not be tolerated by government anymore. Any official communications must be using official email. And that email should not be a generic one. It must be dot government dot ng.
“What is most important is, dot ng, that is our national identity. There are many categories of the second level domain, some are for military, you will see like mil.ng. mil is a short form of Military. Dot ng for Nigeria.
“You can see .gov.ng. Gov for government and ng for Nigeria. So there are categories of the second level domain, while our country top level domain.ng must be there in our websites, so that whoever gets access will know that this website is from Nigeria. While for email, it must reflect the official name.’’
On benefits of the system, he added that firstly, it’s for Nigeria’s national security, citing that websites are being created in other countries without domain names and some claim to be from Nigeria.
“And it will go a long way in promoting and improving our global ranking when it comes to human development, when it comes to fighting poverty and many more,” he stated.
What you should know
Recall Nairametrics reported earlier that Nigeria internet Regulatory Association (NiRA) has revealed that in December 2021 a total of 177,453 websites were hosted on the .ng domain name.
NiRA is the registry for .ng Internet Domain Names and they maintain the database of names registered in the .ng country code Top Level Domain.
