It is with sincere concern that the Digital Literacy Advocacy Club speaks against the death of a player of Remo stars, who was allegedly accused of Yahoo-Yahoo and allegedly pushed out of a moving vehicle by men of the Special Anti-robbery squad.

Few days ago, we warmed against the criminalization of everyone as Yahooyahoo and even those going about their normal business.

Over the past few years, there have been concerns about the tag of cybercrime for young Nigerians under the pretext of upholding security in the Country.
While this incident is unfortunate, it opens us to what young Nigerians face in the hands of some bad security personnels where it is easy to be extorted and fixated with a cybercriminal tag.

While in the case of the deceased he was not caught with a Laptop, most cases before now have been of people who have laptops or have applications to aid their Digital technology related works. This must stop. We will continue to create fear in the minds of Nigerians to explore technology and Information Technology For Development when families get scared that working on a computer or laptop means criminality. It is also wrong to tag young Nigerians as criminals or cyber-fraudsters.

This act of security personnels will continue to make it difficult to convince people to embrace the world of Technology and Information Technology For betterment of the society.

Special Anti-robbery squad(SARS) is not the one responsible for fighting cybercrime and they should not derail from their core functions.

While it is true that criminal elements also use the new media, laptops and computer, it is high time that we begin to draft measures towards combating cybercrime rather than hurting the country.
The Information Technology and Digital Economy remains a high contributor to the GDP of Nigeria and we must stand against harming the future. Afterall, in other countries, they do not tag their youths as cyber criminals because they do Information Technology.
We also call on the Federal government through the Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy to liase with security operatives further towards fashioning ways of fighting cybercriminality without hurting the system.

Olugbenga Toki
Media Lead,
Digital Literacy Advocacy Club

The iliterate police will like this..