By Chris Uwaje

Therefore, our national development roadmap should be strategically focused on a mission to preparing Nigerian for the 21st Century Knowledge Olympiad as a prerequisite for the participating in the Information Society.(IS).That should be the central vision of our national transformation agenda, if we must resolve the unspoken complex conflict in Nigeria such as keeping more than 30million slaves (of the underestimated 150 million) as house-helps, street hawkers, mai-guards and R-Fundamentalism -which are thankless labourers to the “Okada and Pure Water Economy!”

If transformation is our mission, then the first thing to do to survive as a nation, is to transform the mindset of Nigerian youths with respect to constructive IT capacity building and utilization on the one hand, and that of the elders with respect to unveiling the “Technophobia” dynamics clogging the economic development process layers of our country and other developing entities in ECOWAS and the world – who are faced with mastering the challenges of 21st century technology and globalization.

It must be stated with all clarity, that Nigeria owes it a fundamental duty — not only to the African continent, but indeed the various clusters of people of African decent in particular and the world in general — to massively invest in grooming knowledge-based Software Code Warriors (SCW) and/or Defenders.(SCD). Those are the machinery to defend the nation against external hackers and crackers at the economic, military and socio-political levels of digital attack.

Throwing cyber law alone at cyber criminals, in my opinion, is incapable of resolving the national cybersecurity and cybercrime challenges. An inclusive strategy of interdisciplinary e-knowledge collaborative defence is a better approach in minimizing the catastrophic consequences of the e-tsunami looming in the horizon. The WikiLeaks wire-leak experience is food for thought.

Computer code security and legal issues

It will be recalled that in a 2003 court case in the United States, it was ruled that source code should be considered a constitutionally protected form of free speech . Proponents of free speech argued that because source code conveys information to programmers, is written in a language, and can be used to share humour and other artistic pursuits, it is a protected form of communication.

One of the first court cases regarding the nature of source code as free speech involved University of California mathematics professor, Dan Bernstein, who had published on the internet the source code for an encryption programme he had created.

At the time, encryption algorithms were classified as munitions by the United States Government; exporting encryption to other countries was considered an issue of national security, and had to be approved by the US State Department. The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the U.S. government on Bernstein’s behalf; the court ruled that source code was free speech, protected by the First Amendment.

Time relativity

Time-relativity as factor of digital development may indeed be running out on Nigeria, with respect to her e-knowledge capability and competitiveness agenda. Technically, general-relativity is a metric theory of gravitation whose defining feature is its use of the Einstein Field Equations. The solutions of the field equations are metric tensors which define the topology of the space-time and how objects move inertially,

On the other hand, the internet time was a common catchphrase that originated during the late-1990s internet boom. During that period, internet workforce community had come to believe that “everything moved faster on the ‘net”, because the internet made the dissemination of information far easier and cheaper. This concept of “@ the speed-of-thought” and “information phenomena” on the internet continues to guide national and global development and haunt late-comers to the e-knowledge community simultaneously.

In layman’s terms, “Internet Time” involves efficiencies inherent to digital processes and transactions that are generated through virtual reality of products and services clusters provided to consumers from one server. This way, the amount of time required to conduct simultaneous transactions is reduced to irrelevance, as everything is occurring, compressed at one single site.

All said, it is time for Nigeria to have a rethink about her Computer Codes and Software potentials and resources – without which her 21st Century development and global competitiveness cannot be actualized. Fact is, time is running out real fast in re-aligning and ensuring our destiny and national survivability. CONCLUDED.