NASS’ll soon pass cyber security bill – Gusau

Sunday Folayan, Hon. Ibrrahim Gusau, Ope Odusan

*Reassures NIRA

The chairman, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Committee at the House of Representatives, Hon. Ibrahim Shehu Gusau, has promised that the National Assembly is working at ensuring that the cyber security bill is passed into law before the end of this legislative session.

He gave this indication during a courtesy call by the Executive Board of the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA) led by the Vice President, Mr. Sunday Folayan, in his office at the National Assembly complex Abuja on Monday.

He also said that the bill on cyber security has passed the first reading and the committee is working assiduously to make certain the bill scales through the relevant readings and processes to make it eventually a law that Nigerians would be proud of.

Hon. Gusau said that when the cyber security bill is signed into law it would assist the nation in changing the concept of Nigerian image online and globally.

“It has been read the first time and is on the second reading before it’s sent to the plenary session,” he said.

This, he said, would be of immense help to the Nigeria Internet Registration Association in creating the needed trust on its mandate to manage the nation’s country code Top Level Domain (TLD) name, .ng to Nigerians and to the world.

“We are going to pass the cyber security bill during the life of this session,” he said confidently.

While assuring NIRA board of his committee’s support, he implored them to step up the sensitization of Nigerians on the efficacy of .ng, stressing that NIRA should bank on the committee for support.

“You should expect to get more support from us,” he asserted, noting though that the publicity over .ng and NIRA has not been encouraging, hence he urged the organization to do more.

Advising that media campaign should be taken seriously for .ng, Hon. Gusau said that his office should be seen as an extension of NIRA’s office.

Earlier in his remarks, the leader of the delegation and NIRA’s Vice President, Mr. Sunday Folayan, said that NIRA is a stakeholder-based organization, which is made of three categories, namely the registry, registrars and registrants.

In the recent past, especially last year, he noted that NIRA had in efforts to sensitise and encourage Nigerians introduced a promotion tagged 50,000 in 50 days as part of events marking the nation’s 50 years independence anniversary.

“We have done some sensitization like 50,000 and corporate 1000 and now we are trying to sensitize MDAs on .ng hence we requested this meeting to intimate you and the committee on this,” he said.

Lately, he noted that NIRA held a campaign tagged Switchto.ng of which the second edition had been scheduled to hold in Abuja, the nation’s capital.

He urged the chairman of the committee on ICT to oblige the Switchto.ng workshop with his presence, mostly since the next session would be in Abuja.

NIRA, he further said was born out of the need to domesticate the hosting activities of .ng name space.

Also, he said that NIRA is building manpower around .ng and creating a framework to combat cybercrime.

“We have taken some of these head-on of which our server is now hosted locally at the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN),” he said.

Plans, Folayan said is under way to acquire the second server to give more space for operators within its domain name space, noting that during the last strike some of the websites in the country and privately owned were hacked.

“So, we work with government even though we’re private sector-led organization,” he said, adding that the board reports to the NIRA general house.

Equally speaking, the Chief Operating Officer, NIRA, Mr. Ope Odusan disclosed that currently the registry has over 40,000 domains and NIRA Registrars are collaborating with some international reputed organizations like Microsoft and Google to increase the usage of .ng.

“Right now we have over 40,000 domain names including ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs),” he said, enlightening that .gov.ng is for government and its agencies.

Some members of the Executive Board delegation included Mr. Biyi Oladipo, Mrs. Yetunde Johnson, Mr. Remmy Nweke, Mr. Muhammed Rudman, Mr. Temitope Fashedemi as well as the NIRA liaison officer, Ms. Uchechi Odo.

Remmy Nweke

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