The country representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), to Nigeria, Cheikh Toure, has said the body is working with the Nigerian government to design a cybercrime policy for the country.

He disclosed this in Abuja on Thursday during the briefing to the authorities in Nigeria on the UN Cybercrime Convention. 

The meeting’s objective is to provide information to the authorities of Nigeria on the provisions of the Convention and highlight the benefits of becoming a signatory.

Toure said: “Currently, the UNODC has been very much side by side with Nigeria to work on some of the cyber-enabled crime that the country is facing or coming from this country. 

“This resulted in a long term partnership with the Nigerian Police Force, and currently, we just conducted an assessment on how the cyber crime strategy of Nigeria is moving forward, but also identified areas of improvement, and we are currently developing a program to ensure that with Nigeria, we are in phase to use cyber crime strategy and cyber crime law as a catalyst to develop impactful activities to protect the Nigerian citizen, but more so to use against cyber crime.”

Also speaking, the director of the Nigerian Police Force National Cybercrime Center, Ifeanyi Henry Uche, said it was important for countries to collaborate in the fight against cybercrimes.

He said: “The only way to go is for countries to collaborate. One thing about cybercrime is that it’s a borderless crime, and it’s not a crime that one country can fight. 

“We’ll need that close collaboration with other countries and NGOs for us to be able to navigate in the fight against cybercrime.”

He said the Nigerian internet penetration was increasing with over 40 million Nigerians using smartphones, adding that this poses more challenges in the fight against cybercrimes.

Speaking on the sidelines of the meeting, Senator Shuaib Afolabi Salisu, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on ICT and Cybersecurity, said: “This was the first time the United Nations would come together and have conventions on cybercrime”. 

He said it came at a time when the country was thinking about amending the cybercrime law to ensure that realities not captured in the first law are considered.

 

“You now have issues such as artificial intelligence. So this meeting presented an opportunity to know what the cyber crime conventions of the United Nations are and how we can marry that to ensure that we come up with a new legislation that borrows from global practices but is also nuanced to reflect our national values, national tools and our domestic laws. 

“So let us know what we need to do as a country to ratify the conventions. We want to ratify the convention with our eyes wide open,” Senator Salisu said.