The ability of the Nigerian Military to effectively shut down mobile networks during operations to counter terrorists might be difficult as terrorists are said to have gone ahead to acquire advanced satellite communication to beat shutdown by the military.
Making this disclosure in an interview on Channels Television, the Director General, National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA), Dr. Mathew Adepoju, said they (the terrorists) had now migrated from conventional mobile networks to satellite-based systems to evade security surveillance.
The NASRDA boss expressed worries that shutting down mobile networks during security operations had become ineffective since criminal groups now rely on more sophisticated satellite channels.
According to him: “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.”
Adepoju explained that many Nigerians misunderstand the capabilities of the country’s existing satellites, stressing that they were designed for imaging—not 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 ltravel around the globe,” he noted.
Adebayo said Nigeria’s current satellites—NigeriaSat-1, NigeriaSat-X and NigeriaSat-2—needed an average of three days to revisit the same location, which limits the country’s ability to respond quickly to fast-moving security threats.
The NASDRA D-G revealed that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had approved the launch of a new satellite constellation to shorten this revisit time to between four and six hours, depending on orbital placement.
He added that the Agency planned to further expand the fleet with four or five more satellites to achieve near real-time monitoring capacity.
He explained: “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.”
The NASRDA D-G also disclosed that the Agency had sealed an agreement with a U.S.-based technical partner controlling nearly 300 satellites capable of providing advanced signal analytics to strengthen Nigeria’s intelligence efforts.
However, he noted that the necessary funds to activate the partnership had not yet been released.
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