Yes, it is a special type of crime and it is happening in Nigeria. According to the Nigerian Senate, Nigeria has lost about $450 million as a result of 3,500 cyber-related attacks on our information environment and cyberspace.

Senate yesterday stated that Nigeria has lost about $450million to 3, 500 cyber-attacks on its information and communication technology, ICT space, representing over 70 per cent of hacking attempts so far on the technology in the country.

The senate, which relied on revelations from studies to arrive at the amount, expressed worry that the government servers are currently under serious threat.

It lamented that the ICT shortfall in Nigeria is enormous, while its cyberspace is porous and that the system lacks a well-structured and effective approach to cyber-crime control, according to the oversight findings of the Senate Committee on ICT and Cybercrime.
The Senate therefore urged the National Security Adviser, Major General Mohammed Babagana Monguno (rtd) to alert all security agencies and financial institutions about the current and threatening dimensions of cyber-attacks in the country.

The problem is not that we have lost $450 million, but the very fact that we will keep losing money, as no one has taken this situation up with the urgency that it deserves. This is a war against Nigeria, and the government must understand this and act to secure our digital assets and economic infrastructures.

Cyberwar is not a war of choice. It will come to Nigeria even if the nation does not want it. Just as computer virus attacks computers, this warfare is waged at national level with consequences that can shut down a military control, financial systems, health informatics, and telecommunication networks. It is something that the nation cannot afford to waste time despite our failure to use technology or strong regulation to solve the embarrassment caused by the trivial Nigerian web fraudsters.

What is basically the threat of a cyberwar? It has been proven that people could remotely rewire networks logically and trigger avalanche of problems that can bring a nation’s economy to standstill. They plant logic bombs which on ‘explosion’ brings enormous damages to companies and private citizens. They could penetrate our oil installations, bank servers, electric grids, air-traffic controls, GSM networks, and military commands. We suddenly find out that nothing works in the land and all networks are broken.

This is perhaps the main drawback of computer networks- the ability to wage war through bits and bytes instead of the old fashioned way of firing bullets where the identities of the invaders are known. In cyberwar, the attackers could mask themselves and may even use your rigged networks to attack. It is also important to understand that the world ‘computer’ has since evolved. There are pills, watches, shoes, bags, cellphones that are indeed computers. And most systems are on networks with IPs assigned to them.

In the old warfare, people were trained to become spies or soldiers with enormous risks. But now, all they have to do is use a computer to launch their strikes to vulnerable nations. If we deny the severity of these threats, we will have ourselves to blame. It used to be copies of military notes; now, the digital spies could download an entire library of military strategy.

The cyberwar is real and it is already taking place in the world. The first Web War 1 was fought in Estonia where series of orchestrated attacks on Estonian digital infrastructure forced the government to decouple the nation from Internet. In other words, both government and business websites were brought down. That was followed in Georgia during its brief recent hostility with Russia. In that one, power systems and telecom infrastructures were affected.

It is important to understand that this is not an ICT problem. This is a serious engineering problem that requires the use of advanced mathematical models and analytics in digital offense and defense. It involves IT, electronics, policy and law.  For the cyber-battalion, a roadmap to design, develop and implement a national cybersecurity, cyberdefence and cyberwarfare command as cyber-battalion is critical. It will transform the nation with capability to survive the data wars of the 21st century with cyber experts that can use analytics to connect dots and identify security patterns via automated data changing in volume, variety and velocity.

What Nigeria Needs

The world has nuclear non- proliferation treaty, but none exists for cyberwar despite the potential economic and security dangers the latter poses to the world. Accordingly, many nations have started to deploy strategic commands to protect, defend and necessarily retaliate when their systems are attacked through cyber-means. The United States Pentagon has the Cyber Command inside the National Security Agency, the British has a similar unit inside the GCHQ. China, Iran, Russia, Israel, and many other nations have developed cyber-army to protect their economies. Nigeria needs to develop capabilities along these areas:

• Cyber Strategic Deterrence
• Cyber Decisive Response
• A Cyber Combat-Ready Force

And those capabilities must be homegrown and not importation of useless equipment that sees the problem from top-bottom. A homegrown plan is the only hope, as it will be adaptive and organic enough to adjust as the crime strategies evolve, without the constraints from foreign powers and technologies. That is why Nigeria has to invest in developing its cybersecurity sector. Our national IT strategy cannot be complete without a clear roadmap on how we can seed competent local companies in the cybersecurity domain that can help secure our assets.

For all the policies, the solution will come from technology because even if our people do not commit this crime, others can attack us. So, we need to be prepared for whatever, and have that capability through a NGCYBERCOM.

I make a case why Nigeria needs a military cybersecurity and cyberwarfare command (NGCYBERCOM). It will be a unit that drives our military strategy of proactive cyber defense and the use of cyberwarfare as a platform for attack where necessary. It will provide tools as the nation sees the global use of computers and the Internet to conduct warfare in cyberspace as a threat to national security.  Globally, Cyberspace technology is emerging as an “instrument of power” in societies, and is becoming more available to a country’s opponents, who may use it to attack, degrade, and disrupt communications and the flow of information. With low barriers to entry, coupled with the anonymous nature of activities in cyberspace, the list of potential adversaries is broad. Nigeria needs to defend its largest state, the Internet, which has more Nigerians in population than either of Lagos or Kano. NYCYBERCOM will do it.

You may not have noticed it, but Wema Bank is getting younger. That is amazing for a decades-old Nigerian bank. A new report confirms what many of us have already noticed.

The 2016 Ciuci Consulting Annual Banking Report- What Nigerian Retail Customers Want shows a significant climb for Wema Bank in the perception ranking of the 18 to 24 age group, where they moved from 16th place in 2015 to 7th place. Wema Bank is succeeding in capturing the hearts of the youth as the report shows a strong attraction by this age group as their ranking with them is much higher than the bank’s overall perception ranking of 14th.

So a bank that was founded in 1945 is getting younger, jumping from 16th place to 7th, in one year, in the highly competitive Nigerian banking sector, on youthful perception by the Nigerian young people. That is very amazing. The bank’s management has a plan and they are executing through these means:

• Wema Bank ALAT mobile app: The app was well received in the market when they introduced it. They marketed and promoted it as “Nigeria’s first fully digital bank”, and they may not be far from the truth. With ALAT,  a customer can do all  his or her banking transactions without being physically present at a bank.Yet, this ranking took place before the launch of ALAT, so expect Wema to even go higher up in the 2017 ranking.
• Products for youth: We know that our young people do not have so much owing to unemployment problems, Wema Bank is working with that construct. The Wema Bank Purple Savings Account requires only just N1,000 with the account activation done via mobile banking. Simply, they want the youth and they have a product that the youth can afford.
• Partnerships: The bank is working with schools, secondary and tertiary schools, to deepen its presence. It is focusing on these young people and bringing them into the financial sector
• Digital Channel: Wema Bank understands that the young people are in the digital domain. The bank has increased its digital channels to make it easier for these younger customers to do banking.

Wema Bank has a lot of work ahead of it, but it is on the right track. Technology can quickly change the perception of a bank as people evaluate how it is helping them to accomplish things in their lives. Once customers notice that a bank has that strategy, they always respond. Wema Bank is a case study in Nigeria: customers are responding as the bank delivers solutions that meet their needs, and which they can afford.

You have this great idea: build a solar farm and use blockchain to take Africa to the new age of electricity distribution and retailing. Congratulations for being ahead of the technology curve, in the continent. But I have a hard news for you: that project will fail in most African countries.

Why? It turns out that in places like Nigeria, for example, only the distribution companies (discos) can install meters. So, if they do not like your meter, there is nothing you can do about it. The electricity sector is bundled which means startups cannot just have access to the national grid unfettered. You have to go through one link to connect to the grid, and that is the disco. That is the regulation today. And when you go, you have to pay them. The government does not have any template on that revenue distribution. Technically, you are at a disadvantage in negotiating any contract with the discos.

So, before you begin to pitch investors on energy projects and how you can revolutionize Africa with solar and blockchain, check the regulation on what it can allow you to do. Electricity supply is terrible in Nigeria, and our entrepreneurs understand the opportunities in the sector. They can provide solar and some other supporting technologies to serve customers. But there is one problem:  if they serve customers, they will need to grow and scale. But to scale, the present regulation must be changed or updated to give them access to the national grid.

While you can have solar power in each home, the value will come when you can use solar to support a village or community. To have the capacity to do that, you will need to pipe the electricity through the national grid and meter it appropriately. (I do think you will not like to build new poles and connecting wires.) But the discos, knowing that they have no challenger, may not cooperate with your plans. Without the meter, which only discos supply, with specifications largely defined by government, you have no business. And right now, there is no specification that a smart meter can be powered by blockchain. Largely, discos may not be sold to that idea. They have no motivation to innovate because the territory is assigned to them.

In Nigeria, there are few of these discos spread regionally. Unless you can work with them and convince them, knowing that they have minimal incentive to innovate, do not waste your time.

It is only a new regulation that can change the situation. Simply, government has to unbundle the electricity sector so that entrepreneurs can help improve it. The biggest challenge today is not technical, but regulation, for entrepreneurs. We do hope they will lead there as they promised during the election. Perhaps, the entrepreneurs can lobby government to change the regulation. They need to find a way for discos and small players to co-exist for small competition to happen.

I like it when American media giants discuss China within the constructs of copycats. They have a right to do that. Everyone wants to be patriotic. For me, Nigerian jollof rice is better than the Senegalese one (and the whole of West Africa), irrespective of what any minister thinks in Nigeria. Sure, I like to call things the way they are, but for rice, I think there is no argument: Nigerians make better ones.

Now, to the issue at hand. China is actually huge in innovation. They have the best chatbot in the world. WeChat has advanced more than anything of its class including WhatsApp. With WeChat, you have a bank app, doing all kinds of things, including paying school fees and paying for bus ticket. Uber saw heat when a local rival, Didi Chuxing, challenged it and won. The best civilian drone maker in the world today is DJI which is a Chinese firm. The reality is that China is building category-king companies, across technology sectors.

But China is not just satisfied; it is going to the upstream of the technology pyramid. Huawei, a Chinese IT giant, plans to use artificial intelligence to redesign many features in mobile devices in order to challenge Apple and Samsung, the two industry leaders. The firm has built a new chip, Kirin 970, which it claims can preserve battery life on phones by up to 50%. The phone works using Neural Processing Unit (NPU) .

Artificial intelligence (AI) built into its new chips can help make phones more personalized, or anticipate the actions and interests of their users, Yu said.

As examples, he said AI can enable real-time language translation, heed voice commands, or take advantage of augmented reality, which overlays text, sounds, graphics and video on real-world images phone users see in front of them.

Yu believes the new Kirin 970 chip’s speed and low power can translate into features that will give its phones an edge over the Apple iPhone 8 series, set to be unveiled on Sept. 12, and Samsung’s range of top-line phones announced this year. Huawei is the world’s No. 3 smartphone maker behind Samsung and Apple.

“Compared with Samsung and Apple, we have advantages,” Yu said in an interview during the annual IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin. “Users are in for much faster (feature) performance, longer battery life and more compact design.”

Neural chips are not new, but using them in the consumer phone market is pioneering. What Huawei is doing is integrating the AI at the level of hardware, not just at the software level. It is having “Artificial intelligence (AI) built into its new chips”, beyond the software where many firms operate.

It brings together classic computing, graphics, image and digital signal processing power that have typically required separate chips, taking up more space and slowing interaction between features within phones.

Most importantly, Huawei aims to use the Kirin chips to differentiate its phones from a vast sea of competitors, including Samsung, who overwhelming rely on rival Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm, the market leader in mobile chip design. Among major phone makers, only Apple and Huawei now rely on their own core processors.

So in this race, Huawei is ahead of Samsung, because Samsung still uses Qualcomm Snapdragon. Chip design is not what you can clone. It requires a deeper level of engineering. So when they write-off China, be guided that most are not fair.

Huawei could be redefining the future of mobile and watch out for others to copy it. It has challenged Cisco to a draw, if you do not want to call it for Huawei. Its main problem, with competitors, is that it makes things free, because it always finds out the best way to make them cheaper. Besides any government support which everyone gets around the world, Huawei is winning on technology, not just on pricing. China deserves a lot of respect in the technology world.

I will not waste time here discussing Africa and what we can learn, except to say that the evolution of China offers us a clear roadmap towards our development. We can start small, and then over time, move to the upper level in the technology pyramid. China has stationed a good ladder and continues to climb, Africa must learn from that model.