The Federal Executive Council (FEC) has approved the National Policy on the Government, Second Level Domain aimed at safeguarding official communications using government top-level domains.
The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, 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.
He stated that government officials must now migrate from using generic domains in their websites and their emails to the “second level under the government top-level domain”.
According to him, the use of private emails like, 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.
“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 (by) 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.’’