The Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, says the ministry will continue to advocate the full integration and implementation of the National Identification Number NIN, as a guarantee for the protection of Nigerians from any form of threats to life.
Pantami said this in Gombe during the 6th to 35th Convocation Lecture of the Federal College of Education, Technical, Gombe, tagged: “Deployment of Emerging Technologies to Enhance Security of Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria,” after he joined other dignitaries to commission various projects within the institution.
He said the ministry had introduced four major initiatives in Nigeria, which when implemented, would go a long way in addressing a minimum of 80% of Nigeria’s security challenges.
According to him, the integration of the NIN has helped in the profiling of citizens to help secure Nigeria.
He said globally, countries were deploying these emerging technologies to enhance their security, hence its application in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions would provide the needed security in such places.
Pantami said the topic was apt, because the constitution of Nigeria placed the responsibility for the security of life of Nigerians in the hands of the leaders, be it in schools or the society.
Enhanced security
Consequently, he said the use of the five emerging technologies would greatly enhance the security of Nigerian institutions, which are Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Robotics, Cyber Security, Blockchain Technology and 5th Generation or 5G.
According to Dr. Pantami, Artificial Intelligence produced a system that is deployed to behave like a human being, with a high sense of precision and accuracy, to protect humans and create time for them to rest. It is about generating huge data, analysing it, process and making sense of it.
He said the deployment of artificial intelligence would go a long way to protect tertiary institutions in Nigeria.
The evolving nature and increasing level of security in Nigeria called for the proactive stands by the authorities of higher institutions to plan ahead of the perpetrators.
Cybercrime
The Minister said Cyber Crime was a major area to be concerned about in the world, with research findings by the World Economic Forum revealing that by 2022, about 5. 2 trillion dollars would be lost to cybercrime, which represented more than the entire GDP of entire Africa as a continent.
He disclosed that cybercrimes were being committed from the comfort zones of the perpetrators, making it difficult to arrest them, because they do not necessarily use travelling documents to enter into countries to commit crimes.
Presently, global security relied on intelligence gathering, which does not require people physically gathering intelligence, but using emerging technologies to achieve that.
Using Qatar, the Minister explained how the country deployed the use of intelligence to access and assess the social media platforms of its citizens, which led to the findings on the ideology and social life of its citizens, without the physical deployment of people for the task.
He said the systems were used to check one’s posting on social media and conclusion reached as to whether such a person was a security threat or not, through the intelligence system of datafication, where data is generated, stored, processed and make sense of it.
Sequentially, he said Information systems gathered information, through the surveillance robots, which gather information and data, especially where human lives would be endangered, which is then processed to get the actual situation of things.
Dr. Pantami said the Reconnaisance System is used as a proactive system to gather information online, by identifying people that pose a threat to an institution or a country.
Dominica Nwabufo
