As Nigeria continues to battle insecurity from all fronts, an alarming trend has surfaced. The strategic kidnapping of school children and teachers portend grave dangers for the progress and development of Nigeria.
By making schools and religious worship sites lethal targets, the foundation of educational development and habitat of faith based ethical codes and moral instructions for societal development are under existential threats.
What is more alarming is the apparent inability of state and national security forces to dislodge the terrorists from their strongholds. No nation can survive in an environment of insecurity, fear and wanton destruction of lives without any hope of a robust response by government forces.
A situation where terrorists and bandits dictate bizarre and humiliating terms of negotiations to Government and state actors will ultimately force government to go on its knees to appease these _bestiae in carne humana_ or animals in human skins.
The recent abduction of school pupils and teachers in Oriire Local Government of Oyo State and brutal killing of some teachers has shown how seriously weakened the national security architecture is. The most relevant question now is: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (who Guards the guards?).
When the national security apparatus is headed and commanded by elements from the same tribes and ethnicity as the tormentors, a clear approach to security salvation is very dim and becomes a mental puzzle. Insecurity in this 21st century cannot be solved by field permutations alone but by a combination of force and cutting edge technologies. We have watched the USA and Iran war and seen at first hand how both sides have deployed highest technologies to counter and demolish enemy strongholds.
We have seen how America extracted downed pilots from deep enemy territories using technologies with pinpoint accuracy just to save three precious American lives. Security is all about surveillance, threat detection and prevention.
High level surveillance requires dedicated live satellite and internet communication. America leads the world with over 10,000 satellites in low and deep space with about 250 satellites dedicated to defence. Iran operates about 31 satellites in low orbit and has cross links with satellites of some allied countries.
Nigeria struggles with 3 or 4 non dedicated satellites. How then do we monitor terrorists’ right from their bases to when they are in motion? Satellites that can track and report suspicious movements are totally out of Nigeria’s direct influence.
Nigerian security probably depends on the same satellite communication that the terrorists and bandits bandits also use and deploy perhaps with better coordination. Nigerians conservatively, spend about 2 to 3 million Dollars on Elon Musk’s SpaceX every month and the terrorists and bandits are also active subscribers of the same Satelites via SpaceX STARLINK.
A query sent to an AI chatbot on the use of Elon Musk satellites to identify bandits in Nigeria brought startling responses. I will quote portions here: “Satellites from Elon Musk’s companies can be used to track bandits, but in practice, it is difficult and complex.
One of the early customers of Elon Musk’s Starlink internet are terrorists and criminal elements involved in kidnapping. Nigerian military and government face a frustrating paradox: while the technology exists to track these devices, bandits are actively exploiting Musk’s Starlink for secure communication, making them harder to find. Starlink provides high-speed, portable internet to deep forests and remote areas where traditional cell towers don’t exist.
This has unfortunately become a tool for non-state actors to coordinate and communicate with encrypted signals without detection.Tracking Difficulties: The Nigerian Presidency has cited that security agencies cannot easily trace or block internet activities from bandits using Starlink because the terminals operate directly from space, complicating standard IP-address tracking used for local networks.
Tracing a bandit’s connection often requires SpaceX’s direct assistance to pinpoint the exact locations. Aside from internet hardware, private commercial imaging satellites (like SpaceX’s partner imagery networks or services such as Planet Labs and Maxar) can capture high-resolution imagery of bandit camps and movements.
However, because they are constantly orbiting, they only provide periodic snapshots rather than real-time tracking, requiring coordination with on-the-ground intelligence to be truly actionable”. Nigeria does not have to be at a digital Cross roads here.
All Internet devices have unique and real time IP Addresses to function and be maintained. These devices are on regular subscriptions and have to be maintained by renewal of their subscriptions.
The bandits have hundreds of these devices and the Nigerian military have captured and confiscated more than 500 of these from terrorists camps. That’s a good way of tracing the pattern of purchase, registration and physical location and movements of these devices.
The Federal Government cannot allow foreign satellite operators to run business in the country without active regulation. Recently Elon Musk expressed worries about the ise of its satelites by the Trump Administration for defence but that’s all he can do. The American Government has powers to determine how much of SpaceX can be used by American enemies.
Bandits can easily afford satellite technologies access as it is less than N1,500 a day per device and they make far more than that from ransom payments. Nigerian security forces should lace up their boots and force satellite access providers to locations identified as terrorists’ bases to suspend or shut down such service at least temporarily to allow federal forces have full intelligence coordination of such locations.
It does not require rocket science to do this. I know certain European countries that have a central headquarters monitoring ALL GSM communications in the country through specialised Algorithms and codes silently scanning and digitally listening to all audio calls and chats and flagging off suspicious communication trails for further processing monitoring and investigation.
These are very complex and time consuming security architectures and networks but the results improve national security tremendously. All the huge monies paid out as ransom could have been better utilised to build this architecture. However it is doubtful if this can ever be done as long as the same ethnicity responsible for kidnapping and associated crimes are allowed to manage the national security architecture.
This is again where the failure of our national educational system is very glaring. Universities are centres of national development through cerebral and intellectual research and pursuits.
I am not aware of any university in Nigeria running programmes or research aimed at developing appropriate software and hardware designs that can be used for National Security. I am not aware of any direct or indirect link, synergy or partnership between our universities and national security installations.
Most of the critical intellectual components are probably still outsourced outside the country from Universities with less imposing physical infrastructure compared to our Universities but far more superior intellectual content.
There are 12 National Universities Commission (NUC) approved universities in Oyo state and not a single can make any intellectual contribution to the fight against insecurity and terrorism by way of intellectual support in Internet and Communication Technologies.
Our Universities curriculum should be totally overhauled for International relevance and not just be national monuments of white washed sepulchres.
- Professor Soji Adejumo (Ajiroba of Ibadanland) writes from Ibadan, the capital city of Oyo State of Nigeria
