NITDA has set March 15 2021 deadline for companies to file Data Audit Reports or face sanctions ranging from financial penalties and/ or blacklist from public projects
Director General of National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Dr Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi announced that the watchdog has set March 15 deadline for companies to file their Data Audit Reports or face sanctions.
Inuwa was speaking today at the NATIONAL PRIVACY WEEK 2021 PRESS CONFERENCE in Abuja via online.
The DG noted that the sanctions is neither about making money nor stifling the business environment. ” This is about creating trust and awareness to ensure stakeholders see the need to comply,” he said.
Dr Inuwa said blacklisting is not good for company’s image because they can lose customers. No one would like to do business with any company whose data is insecure, he added.
The NITDA CEO explained that failure to comply may attract sanctions and this may include financial or blacklist from participating in public projects. This is about data protection and companies need not fail to respond to the directives.
In a passionate address, he said “NITDA had issued a draft Data Protection Guideline since 2013, with the objective of providing a basic law to guide the use of data in the digital space. However, when the EU GDPR was issued in 2016, the then Director General of NITDA, Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, constituted a team to review the draft guideline in the light of global developments and also to provide Nigerians with a practicable law for its implementation.
The team made a couple of brilliant recommendations and got necessary assistance from law firms, GDPR consultants and some multinationals that made inputs through the NITDA Rule Making process.”
Speaking further, he said “after exhausting the consultative process, the Agency issued the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) on 25th January, 2019..
The NDPR, according to Inuwa, is designed to meet the global, especially GDPR principles on data protection, and also provides unique and innovative implementation frameworks that has made it a point of reference in Africa and beyond.
