By Prince Osuagwu, Emma Eebeke & Nnamdi Ojiego

Ekuwem

As more bombings go on nationwide, and in the aftermath of last week’s suicide bombing of the Nigeria Police Force headquarter in Abuja, the Executive Chairman, Technology Development Company Limited, Dr. Emmanuel Ekuwem has said non-adoption of advanced technologies that would enhance effective security surveillance, monitoring and policing across the nation, among others is part of the reason for the growing acts of insecurity in Nigeria.

According to him, the increasing spate of bomb blasts in Nigeria would not be effectively addressed if government fails to put in place appropriate ICT-based technologies that can enhance the automation of our national security operations. He said until government agencies appreciate the viability of installing hi-tech scanning devices in strategic locations, security breaches would continued unabated for a long time.

“Although President Jonathan has made security one of his top priorities, relevant authorities are not responding to that concern. The will is not enough without the wherewithal.

“The simple fact that the security agencies could not detect the passage of the bomb devices in a car into the Nigeria Police Force headquarters, of all places, is a clear indication that much still needs to be done to improve our security surveillance, monitoring and policing operations. Nigeria has a very robust ICT industry with enough experts to help the government devise water-tight security systems across the country,” he stated, wondering why relevant government agencies were not keen on taking the enormous advantages of ICT to leverage the country’s security operations as was the case in advanced countries of the world.

Dr Ekuwem who was immediate past National President of the Association of Telecom Companies of Nigeria, ATCON, said:

“There are modern technologies like Vehicle and Cargo Scanning System, VACIS, that enable the scanning of every piece of cargo, container, truck and vehicles that enter Nigeria at the seaports, airports and inland border posts. Even if criminals weld the explosives or bombs or whatever into the panel or chassis of the vehicles, the scanners will pick them out. The scanning radiation can penetrate six inches of concrete and very thick steel materials.

“The vehicle-mounted mobile ones will periodically or at a tip-off go on city scanning patrols. They can capture the number plates, biometrics of the driver as well as photographs and video clips of each port/border crossing into Nigeria by any cargo, container, truck, tanker or vehicle. They can scan on specific highways within Nigeria, roads, check-points, inland waterways, streets and roads leading to and entrances to big complexes like the Police headquarters, Federal Secretariat, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Eagle Square, Central Bank of Nigeria, National Assembly, Presidential Villa, FCTA, among other places and detect contents of cars, trucks, tankers, boats and ferries as the case may be.”

To him, other security breaches could be curbed if our security agencies could avail themselves of advanced ICT-based security technologies that are built to enhance intrusion sensing/detection, national identity data capture and management, biometrics data capture and storage, password-restricted access to stored data for both local and remote access, village-wide, town-wide, city-wide, state-wide and nation-wide surveillance (video with bi-directional audio) with local/in-situ, distributed and central/national storage/archiving with password-restricted access as well as with date-and-time-specific playback devices for crime monitoring, detection and investigations.

He said that when a person’s biometrics are captured and cross-checked against a national criminal database at check-in counters of airports, at hotel check-in counters, at bus and railway stations, in institutions of higher learning, by political parties while processing aspirants forms, by religious institutions and social clubs, etc, then ICT will ensure that there are no hiding places for criminals. We will drive them underground or help put them behind bars where they rightly belong.”

Ekuwem emphasized that government has no reason to appear helpless at this time of serious national security crisis when there exist quantum of technologies that could be relied upon for effective preventive remedies, adding that Nigeria’s ICT industry can assist in checking the growing insecurity by establishing criminal databases with exciting agency-specific graphical user interfaces for use by law enforcement agencies.

While condemning the dastardly act, the ICT professional pointed out that it was not enough to procure pieces of security equipment from businessmen with purely commercial interest and called on the government to engage reputable and patriotic professionals who possess the relevant expertise that would ensure the workability of every piece of security equipment procured for the country.