I DON’T know if Vanguard readers, especially Hi-Tech readers have heard or read of an American named Kevin Mitnick. In case we haven’t, Kevin David Mitnick (born on August 6, 1963) is now a computer security consultant, author, and former computer hacker. In the course of his 48-year life, he has been convicted of various computer-related crimes. At the time of his arrest, on February 14, 1995, he was the most-wanted computer criminal and hacker in the United States. What actually fascinates me about the life of Kevin Mitnick is that he is the product of a system that consciously seeks to develop the citizen to the fullest. In high school, at the age of 16, Mitnick’s teacher gave everyone in his class an assignment — they were to develop a code to find the first 100 Fibonacci numbers. By way of explanation, Fibonacci numbers are numbers with an integer sequence such that each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. (Example: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55…….). This sequence was named after the Italian mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci (1170 – 1250), also known as Leonardo of Pisa. Hacking career begins Mitnick did not do the Fibonacci assignment; instead, he developed a code to steal passwords with. For that, his teacher gave him an “A”, and from there, a career in hacking began. I am not interested in the criminal uses to which Mitnick put his knowledge; I am interested in the fact that at such a tender age such knowledge could sprout from his young mind, leading me to wonder how many such Nigerians we are growing. We make so much noise about Vision 20-2020, but our primary and secondary schools are not even wired for IT, while many tertiary institutions have just begun networking. How then are we going to achieve Vision 20-2020? IT prodigies Consider this: IT prodigies like Bill Gates (born 1955), Kevin Mitnick (born 1963), Michael Dell (born 1965), Yahoo co-founders, David Filo (born 1966) and Jerry Yang (born 1968), and Google co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page (both born in 1973) have impacted massively on their generation and country such that their collective efforts have put America and Americans at the head of the IT queue worldwide today. Enabling environment That is what an enabling environment is capable of doing, compared with the disabling environment we have at present. Many primary and secondary schools in this country, including the private ones do not have anything near information technology that can be used for instruction. What that means is that our youths get introduced to IT proper only at the tertiary levels. If that is the situation, when are we going to have our own IT prodigies that will truly liberate our economy? Sometime ago, there was much noise about a Nigerian version of the Silicon Valley. What is the status of that project now? State governments are hereby advised to invest massively in IT parks as a way of making the educational system IT-compliant, while we wait for the relevant authorities to convene a conference that will re-work the curriculum and make it 21st -century compliant
