NCC: Telecommunications Central to Nigeria’s Digital Economy

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has emphasized the critical role of the telecommunications sector in Nigeria's digital economy, particularly in the current era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. Dr. Aminu Maida, the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, made this point in his keynote address at the second International Cyber Security Conference (ICSC-2026) recently held in Abuja.

The conference, organized by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) in collaboration with the NCC, focused on the theme of "Cyber Resilience in the Age of AI: Defending Minds, Networks, and Nations."

Maida, speaking through his representative, Executive Commissioner Technical Standards at NCC, Abraham Oshadami, highlighted that telecommunications has become the central nervous system of Nigeria's digital economy. He stressed that every transaction, conversation, public service, and enterprise operation relies on the telecommunications networks.

In the context of cybersecurity, Maida addressed the significant impact of AI on the cybersecurity landscape. He pointed out that the rapid advancement of AI has transformed the nature of cyber warfare. Traditional cyber threats, once posed by human hackers operating at human speed, have evolved into sophisticated machine learning systems that operate at microsecond computational speed. This shift in the cyber threat environment is a central theme of the ICSC-2026 conference.

Maida posed the question of what Cyber Resilience means in this new era of AI-driven threats. He clarified that traditional cybersecurity approaches, which primarily focus on keeping malicious actors out, are no longer sufficient. Instead, Cyber Resilience acknowledges the inevitability of cyber attacks and emphasizes the need to ensure that networks remain steadfast, unbroken, and trustworthy even in the face of relentless attacks.