Telcos, Banks Undermine R&D in Nigeria

Telecommunications companies and banks in the country are conspiring to hobble research and development by outsourcing critical aspects of their operations to foreign companies, according to Mr. Rock Adote, head, IT Security and Research, Nigeria, International Electronics Services Limited.

Adote told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek that research and development part of businesses in Nigeria have remained immature and may remain so if nothing is urgently done to address the unpatriotic trend.

“To be specific, what you see around the country is that technological ventures try to offer related software, but they prefer to patronize those (foreigners) that even lack the tenacity to contain infiltrations. 

“For instance, banks tend to outsource critical software related projects to foreign companies. How do we rejig our national R&D schemes if they should continue to outsource. This has raised some concerned, because most of the software most companies in Nigeria use have been identified with critical vulnerabilities as far as attacks are concerned.

 “So, in the aspect of R&D, Nigeria is not really doing the right things yet. That is the reason why you see big companies, especially among the telecoms outsmarting their competitors, because when they look at local contents they engage the skilful people and they form their in-house thing, but majority are not concerned about what the indigenous software companies are doing and it backfires on then,” Adoke said.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that Nigeria’s R&D allocation was $ 0.582 Billion (PPP) in 2007 which was approximately 0.0004% of the World’s expenditure on R&D as at 2011.

This figure represents 0.2% of R&D expenditure as percentage of the national GDP and was ranked 127th out of 139 countries assessed in the 2011 Global Competitiveness Report.

Presently, Nigerian universities are nowhere to be found among the world’s top 500.

Adote said that “Therefore, it has been identified that outsourcing induces one to exposing critical data to the wider world, even sometimes to the hands of an unseen enemy.

“Have we asked ourselves how secured are the information? It is like what America is doing with the India and what Huwai is doing to America. Huwai too is a Chinese company and the major network equipment supplier to the United States, even at the Federal level. At a time, there were insinuations of conspiracy that Huwai equipments are capturing America government data for the Chinese. This is a paradigm shift in IT,” he cited.

He called on the government, as a regulator, to play its role in discouraging the trend. “People have not seen the role of R&D, but if we fail to exploit the potentials now it is going to be detrimental to our future ambitions and technology. We have a rich number of intellectuals.

For instance, “Nigeria scam” is something they use to teach experts in ethical hackers. Nigeria has become notorious about cyber criminality. It was even a Nigerian that countered the anti-spam engine developed recently,” the IT security expert identified.

For Nigeria to achieve macroeconomic development and assume its rightful position among the committee of emerging economies, he said that it is needful to reorder the nation’s priorities by committing more funds to R&D activities “to meet UNESCO standards of having at least 1% of GDP committed to R&D as well as creating a National R&D Fund”.