Sauce

As is typically Nigerian, we have reacted to our latest national pastime, kidnapping, with a jerk of the knee. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and the Police have come together to offer registration of SIM cards as a panacea to this trade.

Is it?

There are a lot of things that these people do not seem to understand, and this lack of understanding on their part means that I for one will not at all be in a hurry to hand over my data to them. Now let us consider this scenario, Across the desk from me is a fellow called Olu Jacob, almost the same name as the rather famous actor who appeared alongside Christopher Walken and Tom Berenger in 1980's The Dogs of War.

Think about this, the way Nigeria currently is run, there is absolutely nothing that prevents me from taking a stroll to Oluwole, the forgery haven on Lagos Island, getting a complete set of identity cards made with his name, his address and my picture, then walking over and buying a new SIM card with that name and address. After getting these new toys, I can drive to the British International School and kidnap the child of one of our well-to-do individuals. The calls made from that phone would be traced to Mr. Jacob, and he would duly be ‘gbarbed' by the police. I would continue making calls from different locations, and our officers of the law would be none the wiser.

You see, the hot air being blown by the telecoms companies about being able to trace calls is just that -hot air. Phone calls from mobile phones can only be traced to the base station nearest to the cell phone that made the call. Now, the UN recommends that for a country's civilian population to receive adequate police protection, the country should have a ratio of 400 citizens to one policeman. The last reliable statistic (January 2001) placed the number of policemen in Nigeria at 163,722! Since then, we have had no accurate figures of how many have retired, how many have been killed, how many have been incapacitated, and how many have joined up. Yet these same people want to handle MY personal data?

Now let us go back to the kidnapper scenario. Let us assume that the police with the aid of the telcos are able to trace my phone call after I've taken rich man's child. Remember that I earlier indicated that they would not have traced the exact handset, but the base station of the network, which owns the base station.

Let's get a little technical here: depending on the strength of the transmitter, the distance between base stations is between 3 and 75 kilometres.

That gives a rather large radius of one and a half kilometres for the police to sweep for the person making the phone call at the best of times. At the worst of times, they have to sweep a radius of 38 kilometres. Do the math! Now imagine this: the kidnapper knew a thing or two and so decided to make his calls from different locations at different times all from a moving vehicle!

The current wave of kidnapping will not be solved by gathering data that will not be stored properly. The way these people act, the data would probably end up in the hands of those who will easily be able to trace the addresses of potential victims.