Irabor stated this during an interview on Generation Next: Youth, Power & The Future We Must Build, a live broadcast on Channels Television, held on Thursday to commemorate Nigeria’s 66th Independence Day anniversary.
According to the former Chief of Defence Staff, the required infrastructure would help integrate the various technological applications needed to effectively address insecurity.
Irabor explained that the challenge is not necessarily the availability or application of technology, but the lack of infrastructure needed to support and integrate different technological solutions.
“It is not about non-availability of tech solutions or non-application of tech solutions. First, you must understand that no matter the technology that you have, there has to be an infrastructure within which you are to apply those tech solutions and then those tech solutions must also be integrated because there is no single application or if you like single technology that addresses the complexity of the threats that we have.
“So, the overall infrastructure helps you to harmonise or integrate all the applications that you have for it to be able to make sense and I think that is where the challenge lies,” Irabor said.
He illustrated the challenge with the deployment of drones, noting that the technology alone would not be sufficient without the infrastructure required to process and analyse the information gathered.
Irabor explained that when a drone is deployed over an area of interest, the information it gathers can either be downloaded and analysed after the drone returns to base or transmitted in real time to a location where it can be analysed. However, both approaches require the necessary infrastructure.
“One simple example many people talk about is drones and that drones can do a whole lot and I ask, where you fly a drone across a territory, let’s say an area of interest, there are two things it can do, either it captures and then you return to base, download and analyse what happened or as it is capturing it is transmitting online in real time to where you are doing the analyses, there is an infrastructure that exists to make that possible.
“So, it is in the light of the fact that we are limited in infrastructure that one sees that as a challenge,” he said.
Irabor, however, noted that efforts are ongoing to improve the situation, adding that the gradual development of the required infrastructure has contributed to improvements in the country’s security situation.
“But then that does not imply that nothing is being done and I must also acknowledge that it is a process and there is a buildup and this is the reason why we are having some of the improvements on the security situation in the country,” he said.
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