ICT: Institute Urges Tertiary Institutions to Adopt Cyber-physical Integration as Survival Strategy

Kuni Tyessi in Abuja

The Digital Bridge Institute has urged tertiary institutions to adopt cyber-physical integration as a survival strategy, saying smart campuses are now essential for handling the country’s demographic, economic, and technological pressures.

Five pillars were laid for a Nigerian smart campus and they include, energy resilience, redundant connectivity, unified data fabric, human-centred adaptive learning, and cyber-resilience with board-level governance.

Delivering the keynote at the ComDICT-NTI Annual Conference in Abuja on Monday, Mr. Bankole Olorunba, speaking for the Institute’s President/CEO, Mr. David Daser, said the theme “Cyber-Physical Integration for Adaptive, Resilient, Smart Campuses” goes beyond academic discussion.

He called on ICT directors to move from being seen as “senior plumbers” to architects of institutional possibility and urged them to commission baseline audits, launch one flagship pilot, build coalitions across departments, invest in staff, and share solutions through ComDICT-NTI.

 “It is, for us in Nigeria, a question of institutional survival, national competitiveness, and intergenerational justice,” he told ICT directors from universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education.

He warned that blueprints from other countries will not work without adjustment.

 “What we need is a Nigerian cyber-physical architecture, one that assumes intermittent power and designs for it; one that assumes constrained bandwidth and engineers around it,” he said.

Declaring the event open, ComDICT-NTI Chairman, Daniel Inusa Yakmut noted that global disruptions from economic volatility, climate change, and rapid technological advances have exposed the weaknesses of traditional campus infrastructure.

Describing ICT directors as architects of a new reality, he tasked them with designing systems that anticipate change rather than merely reacting to it

 “The traditional university or polytechnic campus, relying on rigid infrastructure and siloed data, is no longer fit for purpose,” he said.

 “We are tasked with building campuses that, when faced with a network failure, a security breach, or a funding cut, snap back quickly and even learn to thrive,” Yakmut stated.

 “Learning never stops, where our networks are robust enough to survive erratic power supply via renewable integration, and our Learning Management Systems can function even offline during telco disruptions,” he explained.

He also highlighted the role of intelligent infrastructure, noting that IoT can manage scarce resources by “turning off lights in empty lecture halls, detecting water leaks, and predicting equipment failure before it happens.”

Yakmut was candid about the obstacles ahead, citing funding constraints, policy inconsistency, cyber threats, and the “JAPA” brain drain of skilled technical staff by adding that building this future is fraught with obstacles.

The two-day conference is structured around practical solutions with sessions on cybersecurity resilience, cloud migration, data-driven governance, and the ethics of AI.