The Director General of the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA), Dr. Mathew Adepoju, has raised a serious warning that terrorist groups in Nigeria have moved from regular mobile networks to satellite communication systems.
In an interview on Channels Television on Friday, he said shutting down mobile networks during security operations no longer stops criminals from communicating.
“It breaks my heart when state governments shut down communication on our mobile phones, because most of them are not actually communicating through mobile networks. They are making it through the satellite platform. The terrorists are using satellites to communicate,” he said.
Current Nigerian satellites have limits
Mr Adepoju also explained that many Nigerians misunderstand what the country’s satellites can actually do. He said they were built for taking images, not for real-time video surveillance.
“Sometimes, there’s a misconception about what satellites should do and what they have the capacity to do. The one the military has and the one we’ve launched in the agency are imagers. They don’t record videos, and they travel around the globe,” he noted.
He said Nigeria’s satellites—NigeriaSat-1, NigeriaSat-X and NigeriaSat-2—take about three days to return to the same spot, which makes it difficult to monitor fast-moving security threats.
Gov’t approved new satellite plans
Adepoju revealed that President Bola Tinubu has approved a new group of satellites that will reduce the revisit time to four to six hours, depending on their orbit.
He added that NASRDA also plans to launch four or five more satellites to get close to real-time monitoring.
“If you want to have global coverage, we need to launch plenty of them into orbit. As one is going, another is coming. That’s why we went for the constellation of the four that the president has approved for us,” he explained.
The NASRDA boss also said the agency has an agreement with a U.S. technical partner that operates almost 300 satellites, which would help Nigeria get stronger signal analysis for intelligence work.
But he noted that the funds needed to activate the partnership have not yet been released.
