Thursday, 28th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search
Breaking News:

Experts Urge FG to Rejig IT Curriculum

By Ken Nwogbo
31 December 2015   |   11:13 pm
INFORMATION and Communications Technology (ICT) experts under the aegis of ICT Experts Round-Table 2015, have called on the federal government to immediately transform the country’s education system by ensuring that innovative IT Curriculum is deployed at all levels of education – with special focus on the training and retraining of teachers of IT at all levels.

technology

INFORMATION and Communications Technology (ICT) experts under the aegis of ICT Experts Round-Table 2015, have called on the federal government to immediately transform the country’s education system by ensuring that innovative IT Curriculum is deployed at all levels of education – with special focus on the training and retraining of teachers of IT at all levels.

They also called for concerted efforts among stakeholders and especially from government circle that will help checkmate on the long run, the spate of cyber threats and attacks unleashed on the country’s cyber space.

The experts who gathered in Lagos to discuss the increasing cyber threats, insisted that urgent measures must be put in place by the federal government to nip in the bud the menace.

Prof. Sola Aderounmu, president of the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS), stressed the need for government to legislate on the protection of Intellectual Property (IP) addresses of software developers, to encourage them develop more.

Nodding in agreement, Dr. Ona Ekhomu, president, Association of Industrial Security and Safety Operations of Nigeria (AISSON) frowned at the situation where software codes for national use like the Bank Verification Number (BVN) and the voters’ registration card, as well as the SIM registration, were being handled by foreigners, when in the actual sense, Nigerians could handle them better than the foreign experts.

“Sensitive software for national use must be localised and certified”, Ekkomu said.

Also Pius Okigbo (Jr), president of the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON), stressed that software developers lose a lot of their revenue to IP theft.

At the end of the day, the experts resolved that a standard for the acquisition of software in Nigeria should be created and the office of the Chief Information Technology Officer of the Federation, established.

They also called for the endorsement and promotion of ethical hacking in Nigeria, which they argued, would help reduce malicious hacking.

They urged the government to finalise the issue of a single database of all Nigerians and organisations, which they said, would help to track cyber security attacks in the country.

“Cyber security needs to be demystified, a lot still needs to be learned by the public, and this calls for adequate publicity and awareness campaign that will make Nigerians understand the dangers of cyber attacks. The absence of serious attacks on the government has made light of the gravity of the threat of cyber insecurity, but this has to be addressed before it is too late,” the ICT experts said.

0 Comments