Nigerian Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, said with the establishment of the data center and the new command and control center, Nigeria will be able to integrate data from different sectors, as well as to monitor regular border points in real time. , strengthening Nigeria’s security.

Tunji-Ojo, in an interview with ARISE NEWS on Wednesday, also revealed that Nigeria has become one of the first countries in Africa to implement an Interactive Advanced Passenger Information System (IAPU), a version advanced API, which will help in contactless profiling of people entering and exiting Nigeria.

The Interior Minister said this while discussing the recent commissioning of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu Innovation Complex (BATIC), which comprises a data centre, command and control centre, approval center visas (VAC), an ECOWAS biometrics center, a solar farm and a passport personalization center. .

Speaking on the innovation center, he said: “What was ordered by the president was not an immigration innovation center per se, rather it is a domestic innovation center named in honor of the president. And why is it internal? We realized that a lot of the problems that we were having, we were wasting a lot of money working in silos, and we just thought that as is done all over the world, even in the United States with the homeland, just like in With the UK Home Office, there is still a centralized hub, a centralized location, where data sharing, information management and monitoring and evaluation can take place in real time without eight agencies different ones work on different objectives.

He further revealed: “When we started (the data center), we had the ambition to build a Tier 4 data center of 1.4 petabytes, which any IT person would say is extremely huge. But what we were able to do, to the glory of God, was we were able to build an 8.3 petabyte Tier 4 data center, which is arguably one of the largest in Nigeria, if not the bigger. And anyone in the tech world will tell you the capability of that… It’s out of this world, it’s massive infrastructure.

Addressing the motivation behind the construction of the data center, Tunji-Ojo said: “We realized that passport data, which is the data of Nigerians, was stored separately. »

“So in the end there was no harmonization of the data, and the government did not have 100% control over the data, and we thought that was not right. I mean, the data is government property. Yes, you can bring in the private sector to come and work for you, to come and carry out certain responsibilities, but it is the government’s responsibility to keep the data secure, including in accordance with the Data Protection Act. So by creating this data center it means that we can now migrate our data, centralize it and of course have a secondary backup site somewhere else in case there are any issues here, so there’s a redundancy in place,” he added.

“Today we have a data center that even monitors our borders, because we now have the ability to monitor our borders in real time from our command and control centers – I mean conventional borders for now , these are the regular border points. This has been fully sunk in as I speak to you. What we hope to be able to achieve over the next year, hopefully by the grace of God, is regular ports of entry, because we believe that a secure border is a secure nation. If you cannot secure your border, if you do not control entry and exit into your country, you cannot secure your country, because you have to be responsible for the gate, which is the border in this particular case. So obviously all this data, we don’t want it to be like CCTV. There has to be storage capacity so that there can be cross-references and of course there may be a reason to go back to the archives and all that.

As part of efforts to improve national security, the minister highlighted that BATIC now includes a command and control center capable of monitoring borders and entry points in real time. This includes monitoring Nigeria’s sea, land and air borders. With international airports now linked to the command and control centre, Tunji-Ojo proudly noted that the system has been recognized by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) as “Africa’s flagship project”.

“We brought in IATA, we brought in foreign agencies to come and train our agents. They have trained 250 of our agents and they work 8-hour shifts, so three shifts per day. So, all our regular entry points – airports, sea border and land border are monitored 24/7. And of course, we have also integrated API through API. What do I mean by that? The API (Advanced Passenger Information System) has been integrated via the application program interface. So what that means now is that before, what we were doing was a scenario where we were doing what I call subjective profiling.

“But with what we have now, which is not just an API, we are one of the first countries in Africa to have what is called an IAPI, which is the latest version of the API, it That’s Interactive Advanced Passenger Information/PNR, that’s what we have now that’s been ordered, and it’s live as I speak to you. So, before you even leave your country, before. even leave your place of residence, we already have all your contact details We have your lifestyle, we have your travel mode, we know where you have been in the last 3 weeks, a month, two months et cetera. We know that you may have been to a country. that interests you and that I wouldn’t want to go into much depth about.

“So, based on that, when you come to Nigeria, the ease of doing business is now improved because if you are not a person of interest, there is no point in bothering you or asking you questions stupid, then leave. But if you are someone of interest, then there we can easily report you and of course, take control of this and protect the border.

Tunji-Ojo further noted that mainstreaming information sharing between agencies has led to better coordination, reducing inter-agency rivalry and fostering a more effective security apparatus.

He said: “Through the NSA office, a lot of coordination is happening. When you come now, especially to our centers, you no longer see DSS in the forefront as it used to be. That’s because there’s a handshake, there’s a sharing of information and there’s no rivalry between the agencies, absolutely none. In fact, it even made it easier, because what you get on one is what you get on the other, and that makes it easier to answer.

He then concluded: “What we’re trying to do is improve the ability of our agents to do their job objectively, because you can’t tell them to pre-profile themselves as if they have lasers in their eyes when you don’t give them the tools, the instruments they need to help them in their work.

Ozioma Samuel-Ugwuezi

Follow us on: