The Nigerian Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Pantami, has called on young innovative Nigerians to utilize social media data as a source of revenue generation.
Dr. Pantami made the call at the 29th Convocation Lecture of the Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger state, North Central Nigeria. It was themed “Datafication of Society: Economic and Security Issues in Producing and Using Public and Private Data in Nigeria”.
The Minister explained that extracting valuable insights from data presents an interesting prospect for embracing datafication, saying that in many cases, these data mines can become a goldmine of resources.
Pantami made reference to Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and a famous footballer known as Christiano Ronaldo as modern day examples of those who have been able to mine data and transform the insights into fortune:
“Ronaldo has mastered the art of monetising social media data even more than he has monetised his skills on the soccer field; he makes an estimated $47.8million (about 43.4milliin EUR) per year from paid-Instagram posts, which far exceeds his 31million EUR annual salary from Juventus.”
While emphasizing the theme of the Lecture, he noted that datafication of objects transforms their purpose and turns the information into new forms of value:
“With the ubiquity of sensors and Internet-of-Things, basically everything can be converted into data.
Listing the perils of big data, the Minister quoted a six-month study, by an Enterprise Security company called Proofpoint, and released in March 2019, where over 70% of some major cloud service tenants have experienced the perils of data breaches at least once with 40% of the data subjects acknowledging that their accounts were compromised.
The Minister added: “In Nigeria, we are developing and implementing policies, standards, guidelines and frameworks that will enable us enjoy the prospects of datafication while also protecting ourselves against the perils.”
The Executive Vice-Chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Prof Umar Garba Danbatta, while speaking at the lecture said, “Nigeria is one of the lowest in cost of data in the world, however, the government is working on making it more affordable to all Nigerians.
