Nigerian Senate Warns of Security Risk as Communications Companies Plan to relocate centers from Nigeria to India

The Nigerian senate has on Thursday drawn the attention of the federal government to another dimension of security challenge that may threaten the country, due to undermining activities of telecommunication firms operating in Nigeria.

The total budget proposal was N18,750,951,876 while N11,206,732,734 and N7,544,169,142 represented recurrent and capital expenditure respectively.

 During the budget defense session of the ministry of communications, the Chairman, Senate Committee on Communications, Senator Gilbert Nnaji, announced “that some of the companies have started relocating their Network Operation Centres (NOC) from Nigeria to India, which has grave implication on national security, as these centres would be monitored by foreigners from outside the shores of Nigeria.”

Senator nnaji further expressed serious concern over “indiscriminate sack of competent Nigerian employees at the expense of their foreign counterparts, contravention of expatriate quota, casualization, intimidation and discrimination and discrimination of indigenous staff” by network providers.

The Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, responding to this, said he would critically review those issues and report back immediately to the committee with regard to measures to check them.

He stated that, before the end of the first quarter of the year, the ministry would inaugurate the implementation committee for the transformation of the Digital Bridge Institute (DBI) located in the six geo-political zones of the country into Information and Communication technology (ICT) University.