Barely 24 hours after the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Prof. Isah Pantami opened up saying that “Generally, threats to public websites and portals in Nigeria averaged around 1,550,000 daily and that it however skyrocketed to 6,997,277 on Presidential Election Day,” analysts have started picking holes in the report.
Recall that shortly after February 25th election, the election umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) came out to rule out cyber-attacks, but claimed that it suffered technical glitches.
However, only yesterday, the Minister released a report saying websites and portals had been under cyber-attacks but the attacks were at its climax on the election day. Still yet, INEC never at any time said its site or result portals were under attacks.
At this point, one is forced to ask the Minister the essence of the report linking cyber-attacks to the day of presidential election when the election umpire never told Nigerians that it came under any form of cyber-attacks on election day.
According to Rufai Useni, the Minister needs to tell Nigerians the relationship between his report and INEC position to avoid a case of crying more than the bereaved.
He added that the Minister also needs to open up and list the attacked websites and portals whether they are private or public and link it to the general election which the report failed to do.
He queried whether is it possible for the Ministerial Committee to whose mandate amongst others include to “Monitoring of Telecommunication Infrastructure for the successful conduct of credible, free, fair, and transparent elections,” to know more than INEC concerning cyber-attacks on its systems.
In general, observers say the ministerial report clearly deserves more explanations on its direct and indirect linkages to the presidential election.
