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.
General News
EFCC Says Corrupt Politicians are Using Crypto Wallets to Launder Money

Ola Olukoyede, chairman, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), has raised the alarm that some corrupt Nigerian politicians are now hiding their illicit wealth in cryptocurrencies to evade scrutiny and detection by anti-graft agencies.

Ola Olukoyede, chairman, EFCC
The EFCC boss said the agency had uncovered a growing trend where fraudulent public officials now used cryptocurrency wallets to stash stolen public funds and conduct illicit transactions.
Olukoyede made the revelation at an event commemorating Africa Anti-Corruption Day.
The event was held simultaneously in Abuja, Lagos and Ibadan, Oyo State.
Other speakers at the event lamented that Nigerians usually fell victim to crypto fraud, including the recent CBEX scam, where Nigerians lost over N1.3tn.
Olukoyede said, “Virtual asset fraud is on the rise. Our findings show that fraudulent politicians are already perfecting schemes and hiding their loot in cryptocurrencies to beat the investigative blackness of anti-corruption agencies.
“Stolen funds and unexplained wealth are being warehoused in wallets and payment for services are being done through this window,” he said.
Olukoyede warned that while the rise of virtual assets had transformed financial transactions globally, it had also created new avenues for money laundering and financial crimes.
He said, “Technology is moving at a supersonic speed around the world.
“The advent of virtual assets is a response to one of the qualities of money as a store of value like it is known in our elementary economies.”
“However, as with every progressive innovation, fraud starts to usually evolve, evolve ways of perverting their genuine purposes,” he said.
He added that the EFCC was not helpless in the face of the sophisticated schemes, noting that proactive training and intelligence sharing had enabled the commission to identify and investigate such cases.
General News
Airtel Nigeria Drives BFSI and Utility Sector Innovation with Industry-wide Workshop

Airtel Nigeria, telecommunications and digital solutions provider, has reemphasised its commitment to national development with a two-day workshop for companies in Nigeria’s Banking, Financial Services & Insurance (BFSI) and utility sectors.
Held from July 8 to 9, 2025 at the Lagos Continental, the exclusive event brought together C-suite executives and industry thought leaders to co-create transformative and tech-driven solutions for these critical industries.
Themed “Banking on Innovation: Powering Financial Services with Connectivity” on 1 and “Accelerating Nigeria’s Digital Leap: Smarter Networks, Smarter Business” on Day 2, the sessions were designed to identify critical pain points, unlock business potential, and drive smarter, more connected operations across two of the nation’s most essential sectors.
Delivering the keynote address, Dinesh Balsingh, Managing Director/CEO of Airtel Nigeria, reaffirmed Airtel’s dedication to enabling and driving Nigeria’s digital transformation across the finance and energy sectors.
Speaking on the timeliness of the workshop, Airtel Nigeria’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Dinesh Balsingh said, “From power and water to finance, transportation, and logistics, this is a defining moment for every sector. The real question isn’t whether to adopt digital solutions, but how quickly and intelligently we can do so. At Airtel Nigeria, we’re moving beyond basic connectivity and becoming a true digital partner to the industries we serve.”
He highlighted Airtel’s categories of enterprise solutions that has been created to improve quality of life. These groupings include Internet of Things (IoT) for such services as smart metering, leak detection, energy optimisation, and real-time asset tracking; Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), which enables secure, multi-channel customer engagement via SMS, WhatsApp, Voice, and USSD; as well asl Network as a Service (NaaS), which delivers flexible, secure connectivity with cloud-ready agility.
Mr. Balsingh added that, “Nigeria’s power and energy industries are under growing pressure to modernise. Legacy infrastructure, fragmented systems, and lack of real-time visibility are major obstacles. Airtel is stepping in with the right tools, not just to connect, but to transform. With IoT, CPaaS, and NaaS, we’re laying the groundwork for smarter operations, improved service delivery, and better outcomes for businesses and consumers alike.”
Abhishek Biswal, Chief Business Officer, Digital Services at Airtel India, brought substantial insight to the discourse with a demonstration of Airtel’s IoT Hub and its transformative impact on energy distribution.
Biswal said, “The future of finance and energy is digital, and that future must be secure, scalable, and seamless. When financial players and utility providers partner with telcos like Airtel, we’re not just connecting systems; we’re building a smarter digital ecosystem for everyone.”
Reinforcing the CEO’s position, Ogo Ofomata, Director, Airtel Business, called for collaboration among the participating sector and their stakeholders.
“We don’t take lightly the trust you have put in us. Airtel operates in what we call the enabler industry. Sometimes we don’t even know there’s a problem until we come together like this. This workshop is about understanding your needs and working side by side to design solutions that truly fit,” she said.
In his remarks, Luc Serviant, Group Enterprise Business Director at Airtel Africa, highlighted the company’s role in driving digital transformation through sustained investments in 5G and LEO satellite connectivity, aimed at boosting remote operations and expanding access in underserved regions across the finance and energy sectors.
He said, “At Airtel, we understand that the future of is going digital, and reliable connectivity is the backbone of that future. From 5G to LEO satellite integration, we are investing in intelligent infrastructure that empowers service providers to operate more efficiently, respond in real-time, and deliver uninterrupted services to millions of Nigerians. This isn’t just about innovation; it’s about building the digital foundation that will power the nation’s next chapter.”
This workshop, which continues the series of sectoral engagements within Nigeria’s growing economy, concluded with feedback from stakeholders who called for the inclusion of regulatory bodies such as the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in future editions.
General News
AfCFTA Credit Fund Makes First Investment With $10m Loan

The Credit Fund of the AfCFTA Adjustment Fund has successfully closed its first investment, committing $10 million to Telecel Global Services Ltd, through a senior secured amortising loan.
The transaction marks a significant milestone in the operationalisation of the Fund. The Credit Fund is one of three Funds under the AfCFTA Adjustment Fund, established by the AfCFTA Secretariat and African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) to provide targeted transitional support to AfCFTA State Parties and private sector entities as they adjust to the requirements and opportunities presented by the AfCFTA Agreement.
Telecel Global Services, a subsidiary of the Mauritius based Telecel Group, provides wholesale voice and SMS services and enterprise connectivity solutions to more than 250 telecoms operators across Africa and globally.
With digital connectivity being at the heart of the trade and economic integration and success of the AfCFTA, this facility will support Telecel’s expansion in Ghana and Liberia, strengthen its infrastructure, and contribute to bridging Africa’s digital divide through enhanced connectivity and digital inclusion.
By investing in digital infrastructure in underserved markets, the Fund is helping reduce trade barriers, foster cross-boarder productivity and accelerate inclusive industrialization. Mr. Jean-Louis Ekra, Chairman of the Board of the AfCFTA Adjustment Fund Corporation, stated: “
The closing of our first deal marks a historic milestone for the Credit Fund and the broader vision of the AfCFTA.
This US$10 million investment in Telecel Global Services is a clear demonstration of how targeted capital can drive meaningful impact—accelerating digital connectivity, enabling intraAfrican trade, and supporting private sector-led development in priority sectors.
It is our commitment to ensure that such investments continue to bridge critical gaps, stimulate economic resilience, and unlock Africa’s vast potential.”
H.E. Wamkele Mene, Secretary-General of the AfCFTA Secretariat, noted: “This transaction demonstrates how the AfCFTA Adjustment Fund is beginning to serve its intended purpose – supporting State Parties and the private sector as we work to make this Agreement commercially meaningful.
By investing in digital infrastructure, we are addressing some of the most critical enablers of trade facilitation, industrialisation, and regional value chain development.”
Prof. Benedict Oramah, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Afreximbank, added: “Today, we make another bold statement of our unwavering intent to ensure that Africans reap the benefits of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement.
We are proud to have commenced the operationalisation of the Credit Fund. With this Fund, we will provide vital support to African corporates, helping them retool and expand their operations necessary to capitalise on the AfCFTA opportunities.
The investment strengthens a critical enabler, the digital economy and regional connectivity, while reinforcing our long-term commitment to transforming the structure of the African economy.”
Marlene Ngoyi, CEO, FEDA, the Fund Manager of the AfCFTA Adjustment Fund, said: “This investment exemplifies the strategic intent of the Credit Fund – to catalyse growth and resilience in sectors that are vital for Africa’s structural transformation.
We are proud to partner with Telecel, whose operations directly advance intra-African connectivity and digital trade.”
The Credit Fund will continue to prioritise commercially viable investments that enable trade, support diversification, and promote inclusive growth in line with the broader AfCFTA implementation agenda.
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