General News
Nigeria is Ripe for Institute of Cybercrime Monitoring-Uwaje
Dr. Chris Uwaje, is president of Global Network for Cyber Solutions (Organisers of the Conference) and first vice president of the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON). He is also managing director of Connect technologies Limited. A valuable asset to the ICT industry, Uwaje is a well sought after speaker globally and consults for the federal government on a number of projects. Uwaje spoke to chike Onwuegbuchi
Cybersecurity Summit
First, let me congratulate Nigeria CommunicationsWeek for coming out with a very educative and informative concept in what I would call ‘technology reporting,’ which has been missing over the last decade. What we have around generally is regular reporters and they cannot be blamed because they have not being exposed to technology reporting skills. That is why I want to congratulate you for being different. Now, to your question about what informed the cybersecurity conference or my initiative with respect to involvement in cybersecurity; it dates back to 1999. Consequently, with my project leader initiative as a consultant for the First Bank Nigeria PLC, as a software engineer, I saw a lot of vulnerabilities in the daily operations and when I had the opportunity in year 2000 to pioneer the National Policy Transformation of Technology, I was privileged to have incorporated cyber police units as far back as 7 years ago. The issue of cybersecurity that has now taken centre stage globally – it is not just about the security content but it is about the sovereignty of the community of people.
That is why the issue of cybersecurity is very important. As we speak, I am dealing with a cybersecurity issue here; I have been communicating with some cyber criminals who are posing as a friend of mine. They say he is stranded in a 5 Star hotel somewhere outside Nigeria and has lost his international passport and need some money, I have been trying to make them give me a bank account number where l will make the payment but they have insisted that I send the money through Western Union Money Transfer. This communication started about 2 weeks ago; these miscreants hijacked the email of one of my friends. What they do is send a message saying that your Yahoo! account is being reconstructed and you should renew your identity and password. Once you do that, they hijack that mail box and you cannot have access to it anymore. Now they begin to operate with that mail box and some people fall prey to their schemes. This is about technology and Nigeria has what is called technophobia syndrome. Nigerians are very shy of technology; it is not their faults because Science and Technology has been on the downturn. If it had been upground, the issues we are facing today would not have been strange. So, there is need to involve Science and Technology contents in our everyday lives.
It is very important to ensure that Nigerians understand what technology is. Nigerians have created a fallacy of technology definition; it is not just computing, aeronautics, automobile, electronics; these are the products of technology. Technology is the concept and process that creates the product; so we should concentrate on the core content of technology. But we neglect the process and go for the product only and that is why about 80% of what Nigerians consume is imported, and with such a scenario, it shows that we are not creative entities.
Fighting Cyber Criminals
The issue really is that there are two ways Nigeria can get herself set. One of the ways is the institution of critical infrastructure and of course, massive capacity building for knowledge workers and ‘code warriors.’ For Nigeria to be prepared in terms of dealing with the cyber criminality of the world it needs to produce a reserved pool of nothing less than 1 million code warriors from our tertiary institutions, secondary and primary schools, as well as industry. Because e-Government has to be protected, businesses have to be protected; even our cultures have to be protected. What we are witnessing today is no different than what our ancestors witnessed about 500 years ago. Technology has the centre stage today. Some people believe that Slave Trade is just about the ship, the cargo and the Whiteman. That is not so. What is at the centre of Globalization, which is Slave Trade 500 years ago, is the compass – the face of technology. Ideally, without the compass, those sailors of that time would not have ventured into the seas. So, the centre of globalization has always been technology. Indeed, technology is another word for the internationalization of trade and commerce. So, the cell phone of today has security content for Nigerians; the computer of today has security content for Nigerians; the Internet of today has greater security content for Nigerians; and there is going to be more ferocious attacks on this sub-region. We learnt that during the time of the 9/11 attacks, Al-Qaeda used some of the IP addresses within Nigeria to wreak some havoc. So, we should be prepared. It is important and paramount – above all, professionals should be put in place to engage these cyber criminals that are almost ruining us.
If Nigeria knows IP and cybersecurity issues, they should domicile them at the footstep of the professionals in the CPN, the NCS and Atcon. These are people who have been trained in the area of informatics and information technology development; they should be the experts advising Government. How can we have a nation that does not have an IT adviser to the president? And you want to safeguard your country from digital attack. There must be a special assistant to the office of Mr. President, who would be a senior adviser on information technology. These are the things that need to be put in place in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which is very strategically imperative that we need to do as fast as we can. There is no reason why we should not have an Institute of Cybercrime Monitoring; there is no reason why we cannot have Cyber Engineering in our institutions; there is no reason why we should not inculcate the cybersecurity curriculum from primary school upwards. Just the same way we used to have the civic lessons of the old, cybersecurity and cybercrime can be introduced at the primary and secondary schools levels.
Local Software and Patronage
I have spoken about technophobia. First, let me point out the difference between indigenous software and local software. The former are those that are developed and politically managed and supported by Nigerians, for Nigerians without the transfer of foreign exchange. Whereas foreign software is one hundred percent transfer of our local currency, in other words, this transfer does not have the potential of capacity building. We are creating jobs and labour for other people externally. It is the duty of every nation to protect its indigenous software. I can put it to you that there is no software that is developed for external use; they are developed for resolution of the challenges in the immediate environment. It is technophobia and a fallacy to say that foreign software is better than indigenous one. It is sheer ignorance and a lot of people do not understand software because it is an intangible thing that one cannot see. But they buy computer; now they are saturated with hardware and they then see that the hardware itself has not solved their problems and they are still where they are. There is a difference between computerization and automation. They must automate and that is when the software starts to drive them. When we say foreign software, we are talking about application software and services; not system software because that is still far away. There are lots of services that Nigerians can render as outsourcing entities to fellow Nigerians and other African countries, much better than people from elsewhere. An example is our payroll – our payroll was based on our state and national structure and foreigners from India and the U.K are finding it difficult to sell payroll here because their own structure had informed the development of their software. They were developing for their region. Digital colonies would be built this century and the way they are going to build it is to take control of the software engines that run the lives of the entire people of a community, nation or sub-region. That is why we are passionate when we say that ISPAN needs grants – Government grants, individual grants, if you take say, ten companies today and tell them to give us a software that can run in Nigerian banks in about six years from now, I can assure you that that can be done. That is what other countries do; they create what is called ‘failed projects’ in software development and when these projects are done, people learn from them because they can always experiment. We shy away from research and development in software because nobody is ready to invest. It is high time our Governments understand the imperative of indigenous software and also know that Nigerians are capable of producing world-class software.
In fact, a lot of Nigerians are working in laboratories abroad. If they can do that there, why can they not do same here? ISPAN has been campaigning and of course, it has yielded a little result by ensuring that we created IT departments in the ministries as a pilot. We have gotten a circular from the last regime that indigenous software should be considered before any foreign one for use within government departments. We have an agreement with Government that 50% of the cost of every foreign software imported into this country should be charged as a tariff to check their influx into the country. There is a lot of software – the core banking applications, among others, that have failed in this country. Nobody talks about them and Nigeria is losing money. The cost of these failed software is enough to build software institutes, is enough to provide superlative employment for software code warriors all over the country.
By Tim Akano
Leo Stan Ekeh (LSE) is an extraordinary human being. He is extremely hardworking, hugely brave, and massively intelligent. He is a shrewd businessman but with a cathedral-size heart of butterfly
Leo Stan Ekeh
I’m a product of LSE’s generosity. But not only me, I am close enough to know. We are uncountable.
I was always with him after office hours in his office twenty years ago when he was constructing a church in his place of birth. He was so committed to details and beauty that when the church was roofed and he went for inspection and discovered some misalignment, he instructed the contractor to remove the roof and redo it, without minding the extra cost coming from his pocket.
There was this physically challenged fellow that LSE bought a car for, including a driver to make life easier for her.
During one of his birthday celebrations, he told me, Tim, I am not inviting my friends for any birthday party this year, all the money I would have used in buying expensive wine, I am donating everything to charity
LSE & I
He actually looked for me when I started New Horizons. He read my interview in the Vanguard news paper and asked his staff to look for me.
Prayer:
May each of us receive a telephone call before the end of 2025 that will change our life’s trajectory for good for ever in Jesus name, Amen.
I did.!
Our conversation on that fateful Friday went like this:
LSE: Tim, I read your interview in the newspaper. I would like us to meet.
Tim: You are our LEADER in the Technology ecosystem, Sir.
I can come to your house tomorrow Saturday morning for a breakfast.
LSE: Tim, that’s good, I will be expecting you by 8am tomorrow in my house.
By 8am the following day, I was in his massive, intimidating house.
As I entered the premises I said a simple prayer: The God Almighty who is blessing LSE, please Daddy God be kind to me also in my entrepreneurship journey Amen.
That day the breakfast meeting went well. He wanted to see the man behind the ambitious vision of transforming the ICT education in Nigeria.
He saw tomorrow!
1 LSE First Intervention: Two years after I started my company, New Horizons, I ran out of cash, even to pay salary was a prayer item every 30th of the month. That was May, 2007 it remained just 72 hours for Heaven to fall on my head, metaphorically speaking, that is!
I needed N10M to stop HEAVEN FROM CRASHING ON MY HEAD!
Banks in Nigeria are irrelevant to Start-ups, except and until you START WALKING, Banks will not come to your assistance in Nigeria.
It is O.Y.O (On Your Own) for every Start-up. If you don’t have God 100% on your side, don’t dabble into entrepreneurship in Nigeria!
This is why over 80% of Start-ups failed in Nigeria. In America, it is about 50%.
LSE was in Abuja on this particular Thursday. I called him and requested to see him. He told me to come.
Our conversation went like this:
LSE: Tim, I know you are keeping well.
Tim: My chairman, I am strong in faith, but in reality, heaven is hot on my side o! I need help, Chairman.
LSE: What is the matter, Tim?
Tim: I need N10M soft loan to keep afloat. It is urgent, critical and time- bound.
LSE ok, Tim, see me on Monday (that meeting took place on a Thursday).
Tim: My chairman, I am not exaggerating the criticality of my situation. by Monday it would be too late because Heaven would crash on my head in another 72 hours without the N10M! And it would be all over.
LSE adjusted himself, he breathed in , he looked me straight in the eyes. I wouldn’t know what LSE saw in my eyes that day.
But he stood up, went to the inner room and he came out with his cheque book. He gave me an Access Bank cheque for N10M, which I later refunded 3 months later without interest.
I survived, heaven didn’t fall that day, glory be to God and thanks to LSE.
LSE intervention 2:
This time we had grown, having survived the ABIKU YEARS (The first 5 years of Start-up are the ABIKU YEARS, years of premature, sudden death. If you survive the first 5 years, your chances of living to celebrate your 20 years in business are bright). We did, all gratitude to God.
I got a business that required huge capital to execute- very big money, which was beyond my capacity.
I went to my destiny- helper again. He is never tired of seeing me. He picks my calls on the first ring. But I don’t abuse the access too. No frivolous conversations. No irrelevant calls. Every call is about matter and mission critical
This particular day LSE was looking extremely tired, having over flogged his body.
He told me he had been sleeping in the office for about 3 days, busy putting his papers together to enable him close a massive business deal, which he eventually got, after fighting like a lion whose cub was taken by a lone leopard!
LSE overwhelmed every opposition. He fought like Mohammed Alli, the world’s greatest boxer of all time. LSE won.
And that changed everything for him, too, forever. Fortune favours the Brave
Our conversation that day went like this:
LSE: Tim, congrats you are doing well, I can see. Indeed I instructed all my staff to make sure they read any article you published (“I felt flattered”).
Tim: Chairman, I need your help, KONGA is not ready to give me the products I needed on credit and I don’t have cash to pay and the client will not pay me until after 9 months.
Tough one, indeed.
LSE: Tim, I will be honest with you, there is no way KONGA would give you products worth N500M (10 years ago money!) on credit.
Indeed, we held a meeting on Monday over your matter, the resolution of the Zinox Group is that you must look for cash before you can get the products. Let me tell you, my staff made me to sign-off on our resolution that as the Chairman of Zinox , I, LSE will not go behind to do the opposite of what we all agreed to, and I signed. Tim, I am sorry, my hands are tied!
As of that time, some of the young people LSE helped disappointed him badly. So bad, some souls are ungrateful.
Tim: Chairman, I know some of the people you helped even went to the extent of wrongfully blackmailing you in the media. I know that for a fact.
But Chairman, I am different. I am Tim Akano, I won’t disappoint you.
I will remain eternally grateful if you can still think out- of -the box and help me out.
I added: Chairman, you recall you were the one who looked for me that you would give me a helping hand in life.
I think my last statement touched him.
LSE Tim, I will give you my personal cheque. Here is the cheque for you, take it to KONGA and pay for your goods to meet your deadline.
Tim On getting to KONGA, from my steps and tone, the staff knew something positive had happened.
I confidently presented my cheque to Loretta & Co, the lady managing our account in KONGA then
They were shell shocked that God pulled it through for me another time, using Leo Stan Ekeh.
There were many more positive interventions, which I will reserve for my memoir.
Lessons: The reason behind the rise and rise of Leo Stan Ekeh (LSE) has to do partly because of his massive generosity, most of them are done silently.
Yes, LSE is a shrewd businessman, but he has a heart of a butterfly.
2 LSE is unconquerable and himself and his lineage will remain so because of several lives he has impacted positively
3 We are all products of people’s generosity. No one is a self-made man. In my own corner, through the TIM AKANO FOUNDATION, I am giving back in thousands folds all the kindness I am enjoying from people like LSE & others. I’m not withholding any kindness from people who need it when it’s within my capacity. God saw my heart, too, that when he must have helped me to stand, I will light thousands of candles.
It was William Shakespeare who admonished his followers to tell him all the good things they wanted to tell him while he was still alive because tributes written in beautiful prose means nothing to a dead person.
I congratulate LSE children, they have a great father in and his legendary generosity will always speak for them up to the 4th generation., as the Holy Bible said. LSE children should be proud of their father, he is a Lion, an Eagle and a butterfly, (LEB) all together at the same time.
@LSE: Sir, if you manage to read this short public appreciation, which I was inspired to write in a wedding event (the couple is taking over one hour to come out, instead of joining people who are anxious, I decided to use my idle time to pay you this tribute today), I want you to feel proud of yourself; what you have achieved will take an average person 10 lifetimes to achieve.
Your positive numerous interventions in my entrepreneurship journey have germinated and I am also touching lives- like you- in thousands across Africa, not only in Nigeria, especially with regards to Youth Empowerment.
I am eternally grateful, my chairman, my destiny-helper.
My prayer for you my Chairman, LSE: The Lion, the Eagle, the Butterfly (LEB) is for God to keep you continuously in sound, divine health, peace and happiness- that you will still remain strong at 120 years of age like the Biblical Moses who miraculously escaped physical depreciation in his eyes, strength and mental magnitude.🙏
Gratitude!
Gratitude!!
Gratitude!!!
National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has clinched three prestigious Service Compact with All Nigerians (SERVICOM) awards at the annual Ministry, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) Awards ceremony, earning acclaim for its outstanding citizen-centred service delivery.
NITDA
The honours spotlight NITDA’s leadership in digital transformation and efficient public service, as evaluated by SERVICOM on key benchmarks of timeliness, transparency, and customer satisfaction.
NITDA Director General, Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, received a personal commendation plaque during the event, recognising his unwavering support and commitment to prioritising citizens in agency operations.
The agency also secured a Special Recognition Award from the SERVICOM Office, celebrating its sustained initiatives to bridge government and citizens through high-quality service delivery.
In a further mark of excellence, NITDA was named the 2nd Best Performing Public Service Unit (PSU) Team B within the competitive MDAs category.
SERVICOM Framework Drives Public Service Reforms
SERVICOM, established to enhance service quality across Nigerian public institutions, assesses MDAs based on rigorous standards that ensure responsiveness to public needs.
NITDA’s triple honours reflect its strategic focus on leveraging technology to streamline services, foster accountability, and promote inclusive digital governance.
The awards align with broader federal efforts to reposition public service delivery amid Nigeria’s push for digital economy growth.
NITDA’s Digital Leadership Under Spotlight
Since its establishment, NITDA has spearheaded national ICT policies, infrastructure development, and capacity building, positioning Nigeria as an emerging digital hub.
The agency’s SERVICOM success underscores effective implementation of the National Digital Economy Policy and Strategy (2020-2030), enhancing e-government services and citizen engagement.
Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi’s leadership has been pivotal in initiatives like the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, alongside partnerships driving broadband expansion and cybersecurity.
These recognitions come amid NITDA’s ongoing campaigns for data localisation, digital skills training, and startup ecosystem support.
Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has secured enforceable compliance from Ikeja Electric Plc, leading to the unsealing of the electricity distributor’s headquarters after regulatory intervention over consumer rights violations.
Ikeja Electric
The Commission had sealed the company’s headquarters on December 11, 2025, following its failure to comply with a directive of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) to unbundle a Maximum Demand account into 20 individual accounts for a customer who had remained without electricity for more than two and a half years.
Following the enforcement action, Ikeja Electric entered into a binding undertaking with the FCCPC, committing to resolve all consumer complaints referred to it by the Commission within agreed timelines.
The FCCPC warned that any breach of the undertaking would trigger renewed and escalated enforcement under the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act (FCCPA).
The Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the FCCPC, Mr. Tunji Bello, said the intervention underscores the Commission’s resolve to protect consumers and enforce regulatory decisions.
“Our responsibility is to ensure that consumers are treated fairly and that service providers comply with lawful decisions and directives. Enforcement is not an end in itself. Where compliance is achieved and credible commitments are made, the Commission will respond appropriately,” Bello said.
He added that the resolution reflects a firm but balanced regulatory approach.
“We intervene decisively where consumer harm persists, and we de-escalate where enforceable compliance is secured. What remains constant is our duty to protect consumers and uphold regulatory accountability,” he said.
The FCCPC said the outcome sends a clear signal that consumer rights violations will attract decisive regulatory action, while companies that demonstrate genuine compliance will receive proportionate responses.
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