Education has been described in various quarters as the balm of freedom, civilization and human development. To this end, responsible governments of nations allocate huge sums to improving the quality and advancement of formal education thereby facilitating human development and capacity building.

No wonder UNICEF recommended that 26 per cent of the income of a nation should be committed to education. It has also been argued that Science is the hub upon which creative education revolves.
The level of government commitment to education in general and Science in particular, directly manifests in the quality of teachers and Science laboratories, research materials and institutes across the country. It equally reflects in the quality of graduates churned out from various universities across the country on yearly basis.

In fact, Professor Chris Ikporiko, the vice chancellor of Niger Delta University, said that the bane of Science education in Nigeria is lack of quality Science laboratories. He maintained that most Science schools, which are supposed to lay the science foundation for students, either do not have the teachers or laboratory explaining that the dearth of science facilities is responsible for low science intake both in secondary schools and universities.

Professor Ikporiko has only lent his voice to the myriad of voices of well meaning Nigerians who keep stating the obvious about the state of our educational system especially Science education.
However, my concern here is not to join the bandwagon of those calling for better funding, better remuneration for teachers, better laboratory and so on. I am worried about the impact of ICT on our graduates and already dwindled educational system. How conversant are our graduates with this field, which has established itself firmly as an indispensable field of study because of its role in redefining and re-ordering the process of life activities?

Even the blind can see that ICT has enhanced knowledge through e-learning, gathering information and other research materials via the Internet library. The emerging trend of convergence is drastically reducing the world to a place where suffering is brought down to the barest minimum but only for those who can apply ICT tools in their work.

It has been said that by Year 2010, in all developed and developing countries, 95 per cent of workers will use Information Technology tools in some form to do their job. To buttress this further, Professor Lateef Hussain, vice chancellor of Lagos State University once said, “irrespective of your academic qualification, you are an illiterate if you cannot operate the computer”.

The question now is, what becomes the fate of our undergraduate including those studying Engineering and Computer Science that have a mere passing knowledge about ICT? What is their relevance upon graduation to a new world, a new society, a new labour market, a new job placement entirely dictated by ICT competence and determined by ICT professional certification?

Employers of labour no longer consider the weight of one's degree but the number of ICT certification attached to it. This to my mind, reduces the value of university degrees and exposes our graduates to joblessness and unemployment while leaving job opportunities for the very few who could afford to pay for ICT education along with the throat cutting university tuition fee.

It is a therefore, a challenge to Nigerian education authorities especially in the universities, to wake up to the reality of ICT. University administrators should now see it as a matter of urgent national importance to integrate ICT into their curriculum. It is difficult to understand the snail crawl effort by the authorities of our institutions of higher learning in adopting this all-important branch of study into the school study program.

The government on the other hand, should address the decay in Science education, as this is germane to ICT development because ICT itself has the greatest potential to economically empower the citizenry. India, Japan and China are case studies.

Osueke is on tha staff of ICT TODAY Magazine

I've always believed in the importance of maintaining a well-designed emergency response capability. For many years I helped organize security operations centers (SOC), computer emergency response teams (CERT) and incident response teams (IRT). No company is ever 100% secure.

Breaches happen and will continue to happen. “Secure” companies are the ones that are able to efficiently and effectively mitigate the damage from a security incident. Looking back, I would probably do things a bit differently now. A key difference would be the balance between company privacy and involvement of law enforcement.

The response plan has to include a policy on the involvement of law enforcement, both whether law enforcement is involved and when they are notified. Today, it seems that most companies choose to “handle things quietly” to avoid reputation damage. Thus law enforcement is most often not notified.

Numerous statistics back this assertion, but the most telling is the effect of SB1386, the “sunshine law.” Ever since the passage of SB1386 required companies to notify victims of identity theft, there has been a deluge of reports of stolen laptops and lost backup tapes. It's not as if these things didn't happen before, only that the reporting rate was probably lower than 1%. If that's the case in identity theft, you can bet that disclosure rates on cybercrime not covered by SB1386 remain abysmally low.

Well, it's time that companies revisit the policy of nondisclosure. It's feeding a cybercrime beast that is getting larger and larger. Not only is cybercrime lucrative, but compared with any other kind of crime it is quite low risk, partly because companies don't pursue prosecutions. There are many reasons why a company would choose to keep things quiet:

* Concern about negative publicity.

* Fear of retaliation.

* Low expectation of prosecution (especially with attacks from other countries).

* Concern about intellectual property leaking in a court case.

These are all valid reasons, but they tend to emphasize short-term benefits over longer-term damage. Reputation risk is becoming less and less of an issue. In a way the deluge of publicized breaches makes it obvious to consumers that no company is immune or 100% secure.

In most cases the damage to stock prices is only temporary. Law enforcement agencies are getting much better at protecting the victims from being revictimized through the legal process. The Department of Justice has published best practices to protect companies that report cybercrime hoping to improve reporting rates.

Antonopoulos is a senior vice president and founding partner at Nemertes Research