THE internet has become part of everyday human existence. It has not only promoted commerce and broken artificial fetters erected by distance, it has also impacted positively on education, health, agriculture, entertainment, governance and many others. But with these have come cybercrimes. The Director-General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, says tackling cybercrimes will be one of the cardinal focus of the agency under his watch. He spoke on the sideline of an event in Lagos, reports LUCAS AJANAKU.
Promoting tech development
NITDA through the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (OIIE), which is a semi-subsidiary of NITDA, organises events which allow innovators to showcase what they have. The reason behind creating the office is to reduce the burden on NITDA, it is just like an arm of the agency, that is designed to handle the issue of ICT, innovation and entrepreneurship. So any role played by it is a role that is being played by NITDA because the office is representing the agency itself. So it is just like a machine, it is just like the arm or subsidiary of the agency. The national coordinator of OIIE is a member of NITDA management team. So this is an indication that it is just a semi-subsidiary, the office of the OIIE reports to the Chief Executive Officer of NITDA about their proposed events and seeks approval. So what I am trying to say here is that the office is part and parcel of the agency. So it has been established under the tech body of the main agency to allow the office operate semi-independently.
The wisdom behind pitching is to identify our young innovators, the young talented Nigerian who has ideas to see how we can support them to at least deliver or rather achieve their dream. That is the wisdom behind doing that. It is just like a competition where you invite them to come and pitch so that you can at least see those that have some potential which you can support. So that is the wisdom behind the idea, supporting them could be in different forms. For example in October, we could be travelling to Dubai to Gitex, when going to Gitex, we used to sponsor them at the event. Some could be supported by multinational companies that participated in Gitex. For example, if we recall, last year among the Nigerians that we sponsored, one emerged among the finalists and some multinational companies indicated their interest to support the idea and we have kept in touch with them. So the role NITDA plays (whenever somebody pitches there and at least some companies indicate some interest to incubate the idea), is that we always try to make sure that it is a win-win situation. What I mean by a win-win situation is, that it would be a winning situation for the country and the young innovator himself. On the other hand, we ensure that it is a winning situation for the company that intends to incubate the idea. If you allow them to go to the company by themselves, they may be marginalised, and the idea could be taken away without verification or without any reason. But as long as a government agency like NITDA is in-between it, that would be impossible to happen. We must ensure that before anything is done, there must be written agreement; there must be a memorandum of understanding on what to do and how to do. This is very critical.
Spread of programme
Location is just a geographical place. Sometimes an idea could be incubated outside but it is for Nigeria. For instance, in the case of Apple, you can hardly see a company only residing in one place. Some companies are officially and geographically in the United States but what they manufacture is in Asia, so this is just immaterial, as long as the idea is for the country, and we champion it, it doesn’t matter where that idea is developed because it is just a mere geographical location. It is just like you have many companies in Nigeria assembling their products and you can’t see Nigeria written on anyone of them and we don’t feel they are for Nigeria. So we would still import them because the name of the other company is still written on their products. There are many companies here, ICT companies. So we are no longer interested in the geography of the company. Rather, we are more interested in the interest of the country, in the interest of our young innovators so that whatever is done with their own ideas, they are well acknowledged and at the same time, it should be for their own benefit and for the benefit of the country. Any other thing would come second but that would be our priority. So there is a less emphasis on geographical location because it doesn’t make any serious difference. There are many companies, for example Microsoft is in the United States, it’s in Redmond but you can hardly see them doing anything there, but they are all over the world. So sometimes, it is a credit for you to be a bit multinational, we are not aiming at producing what we need and consuming it locally. We are more interested in producing what we need, we consume and then we also export. So exporting doesn’t mean you produce locally in Nigeria and export but as long as the idea is demanded somewhere and the idea is from Nigeria, and the interest of Nigeria is protected as a country, then there is no problem, rather it is an achievement indeed.
Basically what we do is advertise. So we put it on social media, we advertise in the traditional media, through newspapers, we also come up with jingles. So we created a form and a portal where every Nigerian has the opportunity to send in their pitches into that portal. So once we get the needed information, we select our panelists, then they spend a week or more depending on the numbers of information that has been submitted. Then we have different stages, we have stage one, two and three to be able to reduce them. Some of them do not have a technical glimpse of it, so we quickly remove them. About then we look at the innovation inside that technical work, we reduced them to 30, because some of them were just doing repetitive things without really adding value to the country in general. So we reduced them to 30, and got more consultants. For each of these stages, different judges are used.
We started the processes since last year in our ICT innovation policy. We are working on that. I assure you that as long as we get somebody who needs our support and they want to develop their ideas, their apps and many more, we will go out of our way and provide help for them to develop their idea. We are thinking about the ICT ecosystem in Nigeria. So whatever our effort may be, it is to influence the ICT ecosystem.
Those we think that their idea need our support; we are willing to support them 100 per cent. Sometimes this support doesn’t need to be in cash, it requires at least mentoring, giving the connection of government by the agency of government to link them up with other centres. For example, it is already on the plan that we need to be sending some of them to Silicon Valley, the kind of support and guidance they would get from there and the motivation, the facilities that they have over there cannot be found here. So this is the idea that as long as we feel they can grow from there, we can go ahead and send them.
Cybercrimes, security
I have special interest in cyber-security. First, I have always believed that as long as we are online, we are always exposed to danger. And secondly, the rate at which cybercrime is spreading globally is even greater than the rate of ICT advancement. That is the reality of the situation. As an expert said, cybercrime is at the speed of light while cyber-security is at the speed of law. If we say at the speed of law, you can start a process of establishing an Act; it can spend between five and 10 years without achieving this. That is how law is, it takes time. You need to go to the National Assembly with a draft, start the hearing, public hearing, this and that, but cyber-crime is at the speed of light. And that is why what we started now is by establishing a cyber security department. Before I came to NITDA, there was no such department, now we have established the cyber security department and that is why you would see that NITDA now is proactive when it comes to cyber security issue. Like Wannacry, all of them as you see, in Wannacry, NITDA was the first agency, not in Nigeria but in Africa to alert the public. We were the first to alert on Petra. So now we are proactive, we try to be proactive immediately, and that is why our interventions supported a lot of organisations because our intervention did not only rely only on that publicity but also we went farther to the extent that we contacted Microsoft which sent us the patches for the Windows and we distributed to the relevant MDAs to at least update their own operating system. And we strengthened our computer emergency and response team in NITDA which is very active now. We are monitoring all over the country; we are alerting relevant MDAs. Cyber security is all about enlightenment, because no matter how your system is well secured, if you are not well educated, then for sure, you would be harmed. Our people are good at opening any message that comes to them. Any email they open, particularly those that promise to give money online, they would just see an attachment from Mali, or Morocco or South Africa or from Zimbabwe saying that my husband died last year and he left behind $60 million and I am looking for somebody that is trustworthy, and I want to give such person the money, and I am as well about to die with cancer. My doctor said in the next few weeks, I would die, so I want to give you $50 million; $25 million is for you, $25million is for charitable activities. Our people are eager to open emails. So that is why we need to create awareness; so cyber security is all about creating awareness. If your people are well enlightened, 70 per cent of the problem is solved already. No matter how well our system is secured, as long as our people still open unsolicited emails, opening and downloading any email without knowing the sender; and as long as our people are still using pirated copies of software on their operating system, and many more, it will be difficult for them to be secured online. So that is why creating awareness is very important. And also the issue of our young innovators, that is the reason why we bring them together. If you bring them together, this would support you to give them the necessary guidance. We give them the guidance, support and motivation they need. That is the wisdom behind bringing them together. Among the things we did, we studied all their apps, their strength and their weakness. When it comes to their strength, we commend them and when it comes to their weaknesses we point them out and see how we can improve them.
Financial support
We are willing to support them with the little resources at our disposal. We would always do that, our last start-up, we supported them. And like I said, the support will continue even after pitching. And as long as they are willing to progress in that field, NITDA is willing to support them. This financial support is only to show our appreciation and to show that the country is proud of them. But if their ideas require more than that, we are willing to go to any extent to support them and even if we don’t have the financial strength to do so. That is the wisdom behind using our connection to link them up, either national or multinational firms that can support them. We are willing to do that.
Amendment to NITDA Act
I always believe that whatever is done by human being is subject to amendment. No one is infallible. That is very natural. Even in the constitution of our country, you would see as amended, constitution 1999 as amended. This is to show to us that we are human and not infallible, only almighty God is infallible. As a matter of fact, I have certain reservations in my heart which I think should be amended. I was asked this question few days ago during our budget defence at the National House Assembly whether our Act needs amendment and I said yes. It requires amendment and we are in the process of doing that. A committee has been set up, we have even finished the in-house review of the Act and we came out with the area that we think should be amended.
Local content
Firstly, when I came on board, local content or national content development and entrepreneurship development are part of my pillars. This is because if you want a country to be successful economically, you must develop its national content. Secondly the question I asked them at OEI was what do you think NITDA can do to support you? Do you think we have a role to support you? They said yes, I identified some challenges they had and what we have done so far for them because we have been monitoring every MDAs. Any MDA we see patronising foreign products while we have it at home, we send a letter officially and we notify them that we can sanction them based on what they have been doing which I think it is very important. We send a letter to Bank of Industry, we send a letter to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), calling their attention to the fact they are not allowed to patronise any foreign product without seeking clearance from NITDA to confirm whether we have it locally or not, so we have been on top of the situation. And we have even been monitoring budget. During budget defence, we follow all the MDAs to see their ICT budget, as long as we see it, we monitor the implementation. To that extent, we have sent letters to all 400 MDAs in Nigeria, I signed them one by one, notifying them about our local content and the development of the ICT content in the country and many more. And we are monitoring even what they have been doing and because of this, we are trying to enforce executive order 003. Before the executive order, we have existing national content policy in place, Section 14,sub-section 2 and 3 which we have been using as well to ensure that we enforce the local content. And I think we are doing what we can at the moment. As we all know, Nigeria is not a small country like the Gambia with three million people. This is a country of around 180 million people, with between 70 million and 90 million online daily. So the capacity that can handle this population need to be a very huge too. My meeting with the OEMs allowed me to identify their capacity at the moment, because producing what can take care of 90 million digitally populated country like Nigeria is not a small work. So we have to do it bit by bit. Let me understand the capacity. Base on order 003, at 40 per cent minimum that can be incremental with time. But we have to start somewhere and now we begin with 40 per cent. So the meeting centered around their capacity, quantity and quality. And we even challenged them about the quality and some challenges or observations we have been receiving from their customers and because of that, they have agreed with us that they would establish their customer centers in Abuja and in other strategic places where they can at least contact customers and get feedback and where if there is a problem, you can sort it out for free or as the case may be.
Support for successful ideas
We continue to look for international donors that are willing to support the ideas. We are identifying our young innovators, young talented Nigerians that have great idea and proposed apps that we feel that if they developed, they could be useful globally. And don’t forget recently a Nigerian by origin in the US developed an app which was bought by Apple at $1 billion. This is a particularly an indication that Nigerians are doing well everywhere. What I think what we need to do now is to get more funding. Secondly, to give them more motivation, guidance and counselling and how we can bring them up because they need guidance, as long as they don’t have it, the moment they start their idea, they think they are successful, as one colleague said we should remain silent about our ides till we are successful. The success would make noise for us. That is very important.
We are doing a lot. We have met OEMs. The idea of that is to see how we can enforce our local content. That is the best way you can support them. To make sure that the local content is well patronised. And if you look at the recent executive order of the President, 003, ICT is to be encouraged to be developed locally. The executive order said that at least 40 per cent of our ICT gadgets would be local content. And I think by enforcing local content is one of them. And the reason for that is because it centers around how to support them because we even asked the question, what do you think NITDA can do to help you to be successful because I am after the challenge of how to support you? So you need to carry me along. I need to support you and you need to support me, it becomes a collective effort immediately. We even have a committee that we work with to see where NITDA as a representative of the Federal Government could support them, which I feel startups are just the primary while OEM are the secondary level. If you are supporting OEMs, by implication you are supporting startups. This is because the idea begins from the foundation and grows up and that is what we are battling with now.
Actually there could be timeframe which is difficult for me to say it now, because we would continue meetings with OEM. The meetings centers around seeing their capacity, the quantity of what they can produce. Nigeria is a country of around 100 million people and maybe we have 90 million on the internet on daily basis. So the manufacturers that can take care of these 90 million people I think is a huge one. So that is why let us annex they capacity of what can be developed locally and what can be assembled locally as thye case maybe. But it is very important and that is why the enforcement is very important and we doing it wisely because you cannot do anything without knowing what we have on the ground. So that is why we invite all of them, let us know the capacity of what you have on ground, what they produce locally and let us know the quality of what they produce. However we have our observations and suggestions which we have for them which I presented to them, but this is a clear indication that if we identify the capacity of what they can produce, the support they need from us or from federal government or from the banks for them to produce more. If we get that benchmark, it would allow us to know what to do next, because I think it is very important we need to take it step by step. ..That is the issue on it and we are on top of the situation so far.
