‘Nigerians spend N1tn on imported software, devices yearly’

Office for the Nigerian Content Development in ICT (ONC) has said that Nigerians spend at least N1 trillion every year in foreign exchange in the importation of ICT devices and software.

According to the agency’s national coordinator, Mr Inye Kemabonta, Nigeria lost N250 billion to the importation of foreign software, and N750bn to importation of millions of hardware.

Kemabonta who made this known at a media briefing in Abuja Wednesday, said four million phones were imported into the country every month while most of our data were hosted abroad.

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“Nigeria is facing security and economic risk because we import virtually all the ICT devices and software we use in the critical sectors of our economy,” he said.

He added that Nigeria may not have been brought to its knees because it has not posed any threat to technological giant countries.
“Many of the phones shipped into this country have hidden chips in them. We do not have any state agency with engineers to check this before the phones are allowed into the market.

“This is a security threat; our government may be shut down, our economy may be shut down. They don’t need to shoot a gun. The next World War will be fought using ICT,” he said.

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