Establish centre for protection of infrastructure

Sep 07, 2011

WHENEVER there is a terror threat to some of the country’s strategic facilities such as the water purification plants and hydro electricity generation facilities, it always seems that the Government is left scrambling to close the security gaps at these facilities.

By Nodin Muzee

WHENEVER there is a terror threat to some of the country’s strategic facilities such as the water purification plants and hydro electricity generation facilities, it always seems that the Government is left scrambling to close the security gaps at these facilities.

This is like trying to plug the holes in a leaking dam with your fingers.

National infrastructure comprises the facilities systems, sites and networks necessary for the delivery of the essential services upon which daily life in Uganda relies.

Therefore, instead of the Government employing a patch work of security measures and having them become relaxed after several months, a sustainable solution would be to establish the centre for the protection of the national infrastructure (CPNI).

The CPNI’s protective security advice spans physical, personnel and information security disciplines. These are specialist areas and organisations need to ensure they have effective measures in place for all of them, right across their operations. The integrated approach to protective security advocated by CPNI encourages organisations to take forward the three disciplines together.

This centre should be an interdepartmental organisation, with resources from industry, academia and a number of government departments and agencies including domestic intelligence to provide real time information on threats such as cyber /terror attacks and espionage.

This agency should also sponsor research and work in partnership with academia, government agencies, research institutions and the private sector to develop applications that can reduce vulnerability to terrorist and other attacks and lessen the impact, if an attack does take place.

The British government has a wealth of experience in putting such systems in place and should be used as a role model.

Protecting the countries infrastructure is a never ending effort, failure to do so is a major detriment to investor’s confidence in the countries’ ability to protect herself.


The writer is a criminologist and security consultant

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