Confidence Staveley, the founder and Executive Director of CyberSafe Foundation, has explained that cybercrime in Nigeria is giving room for a lack of trust, which she noted is consequently threatening the country’s economy.
In an interview where she made this known, she explained that “ne of the strongest pillars on which the digital economy drives prosperity is trust.
“From e-commerce to digital service providers and all the new business models that have emerged to leverage the internet, trust is required for each and every transaction to be completed.
“Case in point, I want to use a ride-hailing service to move from point A to point B, I only use that app based on the trust that the drivers have been vetted and I won’t face physical harm.
“The trust that my payment details entered on the app will not be stolen by cybercriminals, that my location and destination will remain private during and after my journey.
“These are all decisions I will have to make as a consumer that requires me to have trust in the app or any other digital product or service I am consuming.
“Considering that the consumer is one of many other key stakeholders in the ecosystem, your guess is as good as mine that the other players will also be accessing and making decisions based on their level of trust in the system.
“Cybercrime threatens the Nigerian economy, particularly by attacking and eroding trust across the borderless ecosystem that the digital economy now presents us.”
Speaking further, Stavarley blamed the high unemployment rate on why cybercrime has been persistent in Nigerian society.
“Without sounding like a cybercrime apologist, I’ll like to point to the high unemployment rate in our country as a core reason. The Nigerian Bureau of Statistics reported that the unemployment rate has made a leap from 27.1% to 33%.
“If you also put this in the context of our very young population, with our numbers showing that the majority of the population are young people, you can clearly draw the line between how unemployment impacts our teeming youth population.
“This is a ticking time bomb, already exploding as grenades with a spike in crime rates across the country, not just cybercrimes,” she added.
