NCC: Telecommunications Central to Nigeria’s Digital Economy

Oghenevwede Ohwovoriole in Abuja 

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), has said the telecommunications sector is the central nerve of Nigeria’s digital economy, especially in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that is shaping the world.

The Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Dr. Aminu Maida, said this in his keynote speech at the second International Cyber Security Conference ICSC-2026, with the theme: ‘Cyber Resilience in the Age of AI: Defending Minds, Networks, and Nations’, hosted by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), in collaboration with NCC in Abuja recently.

Maida who was represented by the Executive Commissioner Technical Standards at NCC, Abraham Oshadami, said telecommunications today is central to the nation’s digital economy.

“Telecommunications is today a central nervous system of Nigeria’s digital economy. Every transaction, every conversation, every critical public service, and every enterprise operation runs across our networks,” Maida said.  

Speaking about cybersecurity issues, he said, “The rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has altered the speed and scale of cyber warfare. We are no longer defending against human hackers operating at human speed; we are confronting machine learning systems operating at microsecond computational speed. 

“This reality resonates with the theme of the conference. What does Cyber Resilience mean in this new era? Traditional cybersecurity asks a straightforward question: How do we keep the bad guys out? Cyber resilience accepts a harder truth. The bad guys will inevitably test our gates, so how do we ensure our networks never bend, break, or betray our trust?” he asked.