Galaxy Backbone Accelerates NICTIB II and Digital Infrastructure Growth in Transformative First Year
A major and immediate success was GBB's critical response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring the continuity of government operations.
Professor Muhammad Bello Abubakar’s first year as the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Galaxy Backbone Limited (GBB), covering the period from January 2 to December 31, 2020, was characterized by significant achievements in strategic repositioning and operational efficiency, despite it being one of the most challenging years in the organization’s history. Appointed to spearhead the Federal Government’s vision of a digital economy, the new administration focused on delivering state-of-the-art digital infrastructure and services for a Digital Nigeria. This change in leadership resulted in an immediate, successful overhaul and a clear articulation of the strategic direction for the company.
A major and immediate success was GBB’s critical response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring the continuity of government operations. Following a directive from the Minister of Communications & Digital Economy, Professor Abubakar led the rapid establishment of virtual interaction platforms and leveraged GBB’s infrastructure to provide connectivity at the residences of key government functionaries. This initiative was vital, ensuring that essential government business, including the weekly virtual meetings of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and other Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs), continued seamlessly despite the restrictions on movement.
Internally, the management focused on strategic repositioning for growth by implementing a number of initiatives to drive value improvement, rationalise costs, and enhance the quality of services. This included addressing anomalies in both technical and financial operations, as well as initiating comprehensive human resources and capacity development tactics. Notably, the innovative review of the procurement process for service capacity resulted in the aggregation and redesign of bandwidth capacity requirements, which achieved significant cost savings, better network traffic management, and delivered a phenomenal boost to GBB’s overall bandwidth. Furthermore, the administration demonstrated transformational leadership by creating new functional units, including a Research, Digital Innovation, and Skills Department, which helped to revitalise relationships with stakeholders and customers.
In terms of mandate actualization and infrastructure development, vital policy support was secured to enable better value delivery. A critical achievement involved overcoming a major challenge for the National Information & Communications Technology Infrastructure Backbone (NICTIB II) project, which had stalled due to pending final statutory approval at the National Assembly. Through concerted engagement by the management, these final approvals were received, leading to the activation of project funding by the China EXIM Bank, which paved the way for the project’s implementation to commence soon after the reporting period. These achievements successfully laid a strong foundation, secured GBB’s value proposition within the government, and strategically positioned the organization for further growth in the coming years.
