The rising insecurity in Nigeria gives one concern. Every other day, we hear or read about one form of killing or the other occurring in various parts of the country.
Here’s what bothers me the most: we seem not to be doing enough in terms of using technology to improve national security and I am not referring to purchasing state-of-the-art fighter jets or sophisticated weapons; I am referring to simple things like fixing our national identity system once and for all and using technology to create more jobs.
The world is rapidly moving beyond the 21st century and we cannot afford to play catch up.
Quite frankly, can Nigeria achieve security of all her territory, which includes land and sea without the use of technology? Are we making the right investments in that direction or just playing lip service to the issue of national security?
The last couple of years have seen Nigeria grapple with one security challenge or the other. The most recent is the herdsmen challenge that has deeply divided this country.
One wonders what is stopping us from investing in solutions that can electronically tag every single cow in the country to their owners such that we know where they are at every point in time and as such monitoring becomes a lot easier. This is the type of challenge that blockchain is designed to solve.
May I inform those close to the seat of power that one of the biggest challenges before us is fixing our national identity crisis. We need to sort out who is who, where who resides, who owns what and so on.
Here’s a roll call of the data collection ceremonies that have been done by various government establishments as well as private organisations – Nigeria Identity Management Commission; Central Bank of Nigeria’s BVN; Nigeria Communications Commission; the Telcos; the Independent National Electoral Commission; and the Federal Road Safety Commission.
One wonders why the unnecessary and wasteful continuous collection of citizens’ data by different government establishments yet there is shamefully no coordinated effort to centralise the entire process. The willpower to pull all these data into a central database is the first way to go towards using technology to aid our national security.
In more developed countries of the world, birth and death registration in addition to unifying various identification initiatives play significant roles in national security especially when combined with DNA, facial recognition and finger printing technologies which operate on platforms provided by ICT. And that is why it is — Finish Reading on the Punch
