Nigeria’s Chief of Defence Space Administration, Rear Admiral William Kayoda, has disclosed how protesters during the #ENDSARS demonstrations embarked on a sabotage mission and attempted to cripple official websites of the military and Federal Government.
He said the attempts failed because the Defence Space Administration (DSA) ensured the websites were not deactivated.
“During the #ENDSARS protests, we were coming to work even on Saturdays and Sundays. Most of the government websites that they attempted to pull down, we were actually monitoring and we made sure that they did not deactivate them. We kept them active especially the military websites. We got a commendation for that from the Office of the National Security Adviser”.
Kayoda, who spoke when members of the Senate Committee on Defence led by the Chairman, Sen. Aliyu Wamakko, visited the agency on oversight, said the cyber centre was doing a lot in ensuring cyber security and Nigerians should expect a lot of activities in the defence of the country’s space to track movements and hideouts of terrorists and bandits in North-West and North-Central geopolitical zones.
He expressed optimism that the Armed Forces would win the war against terrorism, more so, as the DSA was formidable in providing space surveillance intelligence and tactics required to prosecute the war.
Kayoda lamented that paucity of funds was hindering the smooth operations of the agency. “We really require a lot of funding to quickly attack these issues from multiple angles. The situation on ground as regard overhead has not changed. We complained bitterly about the issue of overhead. We get N180 million per annum; N15 million per month. From the N15 million, we pay an average of N2.7 million monthly on electricity bill alone. We pay N6 million per subscription for the cyber centre. We really need our overhead to be improved”.
However, Senator Wamakko gave him of flicker of hope, saying the committee was at the agency on oversight visit to enable it address the agency’s challenges.
