When Governor Charles Soludo reappointed Chukwuemeka Fred Agbata to lead the Anambra State ICT Agency for a second term, the first question Agbata says he asked himself was simple: what should look different this time around? The answer, laid out during a virtual media parley with Lagos-based technology journalists on Thursday, is a state government betting that artificial intelligence, rather than just broadband and free Wi-Fi hotspots, will define the next phase of its digital transformation story.
Agbata used the session to unveil what he is internally calling the Agency’s “2.0” era — a shift from building digital infrastructure to actually putting that infrastructure to work across government, business and everyday citizen life.
An AI system built at home, not from scratch
The centrepiece of the announcement is Anambra’s move to deploy a locally trained AI system across its own operations. True to the state’s cost-conscious approach to emerging tech, the Agency didn’t attempt to train a frontier large language model in-house — an undertaking Agbata acknowledged would demand computing power and funding far beyond what a Nigerian sub-national government can currently marshal. Instead, the team adapted an existing open-source model, fine-tuning it for Anambra’s specific needs.
That system has already been put to work automating the Agency’s internal processes end-to-end, a rollout Agbata described as an early, practical proof that AI can meaningfully improve how government functions — not a flashy pilot for its own sake. With that use case live, the Agency is now looking at how the same approach could be extended to tackle revenue leakages and lift productivity across other government departments, positioning AI as a genuine accelerator for the state’s wider development goals rather than a…
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