It is indeed a great honour and privilege for me to be invited to address this august gathering of ITU council members in this year’s High-level Segment (HLS) meeting of the council.

Your Excellencies, distinguished ladies and gentlemen. May I, on behalf of the Government and people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria express my profound gratitude to the ITU Secretary General, H. E. Dr. Hamadoun Toure and other members of the ITU council for this honour.

The theme for this year’s HLS “ICTs and Climate Change (including emergency communications for disaster relief and prevention)” and Cybersecurity” is apt for us in Nigeria, especially at this point in time when Nigeria is considered to be the fastest growing telecommunication market in Africa and most preferred telecoms investors destination in the world.

Your Excellencies, the exponential growth of the telecommunication industry being recorded in Nigeria is as a result of complete liberalization of the sector in recognition of the fact that telecommunications is a catalyst for socio-economic development and the enabling environment created through the establishment of transparent regulatory regime to drive the sector. This policy has attracted well over USD $12 billion in Foreign Direct Investment in the last 7 years in Nigeria to the telecom industry.

Undoubtedly, the liberalization of the telecommunications and Internet penetration policies of the government have yielded unprecedented growth in ICT, leading to increased dependence on the technology for the delivery of basic as well as critical services in Nigeria amongst citizens, businesses and governments. A robust and well coordinated cybersecurity program is therefore, necessary to compliment these great strides by government to secure and protect the underlying ICT infrastructures and boost consumer confidence.
Intelligent Systems and Networks are increasingly being employed to run mission critical services and sensitive processes in a number of sectors that are vital to our national economy such as telecoms, Energy, Financial Services etc. Thus computer systems and networks running those sectors constitute critical information infrastructure and their impairment would have negative impact on our national interests. Global practice dictates adoption of two basic strategies in this regard: regime for computer system and networks security and regime for critical information infrastructure protection, the combination of the two regimes is what is largely referred to as “Cybersecurity”

At the national level in Nigeria, a presidential committee on illegal online activities was established in April 2004, as an inter-agency body made up of all law enforcement and ICT agencies to develop national strategy for cybersecurity. Based on the recommendations of this committee, the Directorate for Cybersecurity (DfC) was created as a permanent autonomous body under the office of the National security Adviser with the mandate to develop and implement a National Cybersecurity policy for Nigeria. The national policy includes strategies for legal framework, capacity building, public enlightenment, public-private partnership and industry alliance as well as international cooperation to deal with cybercrime and cybersecurity for the country.

Nigeria is also actively involved at the regional level within the ECOWAS sub-region on all initiatives dealing with cybercrime and cybersecurity. As we are fully aware that cybercrime does not respect national borders, Nigeria is cooperating with all other agencies dealing with cybersecurity globally.

Your Excellencies, cybercrime being a global phenomena capable of undermining global peace and security will require global efforts. Therefore, I wish to call on the ITU to continue to provide the necessary platform for member nations to examine this issue and assist in providing relevant information and capacity building programmes, especially for the developing countries to equip them to deal with the challenges of Cybercrime and Cybersecurity.

Finally, may I use this medium to once again thank the ITU Secretary General, Dr. Hamadoun Toure and other council members for creating this forum and focusing on such topical issues relevant to global peace and security and hope that the outcome of these discussions will assist member countries to realign their national strategies for fighting Cybercrime.

Thank you.