By Shina Badaru

ACCRA- As the question of who manages the Internet continues to generate increasing global attention, African stakeholders are pushing for a more effective role for the continent’s user community in the governance of global information infrastructures.
This topic was one of the crucial issues that attracted heated debate at the pre-conference workshops of the second African Regional Preparatory Conference for the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) which opened today at the Accra International Conference Centre, Accra, Ghana.
Underscoring the increasing importance of domain name management across Africa, a cross section of ICT sector stakeholders in Nigeria recently recommended that the National Internet Registration Agency (NiRA) should be formed to manage the .ng internet name.
Even though a larger stakeholders’ forum is expected to adopt the resolution of the 22-man working group set up in August. The Stakeholders Forum convened in August to resolve the domain name dispute among feuding ICT sector groups formed the Committee to recommended strategies for the formation of the consensus body. The Forum also resolved to relocate the .ng technical management from the US to Nigeria soon.
Meanwhile, experts at the pre-WSIS workshops agree that contentious issues include those of internet governance, financing initiatives to close digital divide, and definitions.
Olivier Nana Nzepa, a member of the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) and chairperson of the African Civil Society Cabinet, says the issue of internet governance is even more critical for African economies where the growing community of users is more vulnerable to outside forces.
Nzepa, was part of the panel of experts at the Internet Governance workshop that included Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) consultant, professor Clement Dzidonu; programme officer with the Commonwealth Telecommunications Union (CTO) and professor Abdoulah Cisse of the Academia Research Network (ARN) for WSIS and Dean of Law University of University of Saint Louis, Senegal.
According to Nzepa, the concept of internet governance also needs to take into consideration better ways of reflecting African languages and the cultural diversity of all the communities who wish to be represented on the internet.
Hence, WSIS stakeholders need to organise workshops on the issue of cultural diversity so as to generate a consensus of specific views across economies and regions on the continent, he says. Nzepa believes that national governments should integrate internet governance concerns into their ICT policies and programmes.