Nigeria’s fight against cybercrime is being held back by two problems that have nothing to do with technology. Inter-agency rivalry and delays in handling digital evidence are consistently undermining prosecutions before cases ever reach a verdict, according to justice sector leaders who gathered in Lagos at the weekend.
The warning came at the close of a four-day specialised training on Cybercrime, Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Evidence, organised for members of the Joint Case Team on Cybercrime and six designated Federal High Court judges. The training was run by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development in partnership with the Joint Case Team on Cybercrime, and funded by the Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Rotimi Oyedepo, Director of Public Prosecutions of the Federation, opened the conversation with a blunt assessment of how far cybercrime has evolved. He said it now covers AI-assisted crimes, deepfakes, voice cloning, ransomware attacks, cryptocurrency-enabled offences, identity theft, and complex transnational cyber networks, far beyond the conventional hacking and online fraud that older frameworks were designed to address.
He said criminals were adapting faster than ever, making old approaches increasingly ineffective. His message was direct: Nigeria’s response cannot remain static. It must be innovative, intelligence-driven, collaborative, and forward looking.
Despite the sophistication of modern cyber threats, Oyedepo identified two recurring institutional problems that are dragging down prosecution outcomes. The first is inter-agency rivalry, where competing interests between investigative bodies slow down coordination and weaken cases. The second is delays in international cooperation, which matters enormously in cybercrime cases that routinely cross multiple national borders.
He was explicit about what this costs Nigeria in practice, saying the fight against cybercrime cannot be won by isolated institutions, and that it requires partnership, trust, coordinated intelligence, and shared responsibility.
CSP Samuel Umezurike of the Nigeria Police Force National Cybercrime Centre added a practical dimension to this concern. He said interactions between investigators and judges during the training exposed investigative shortcomings that often weakened prosecutions in court, suggesting that even well-investigated cases were being lost because of avoidable gaps between what investigators gathered and what courts actually needed.
One of the more significant aspects of this training was the decision to include Federal High Court judges alongside investigators, prosecutors, analysts, and forensic experts. This is unusual and deliberate.
Oyedepo explained the reasoning directly. Cybercrime investigations ultimately end in the courtroom, and including judges strengthened the overall criminal justice process by giving both sides of the table a shared understanding of how digital evidence works, what it can and cannot prove, and what standards courts should apply when evaluating it.
Becky Jibo, a Prosecutor with the Federal Ministry of Justice, said the training deepened participants’ understanding of how to acquire, preserve, and present electronic evidence. She also stressed that investigators must obtain the necessary court orders where required and maintain an unbroken chain of custody throughout the process. Without that, even solid digital evidence can be challenged and thrown out in court.
Markko Künnapu, a Cybercrime and Electronic Evidence Expert from Estonia who delivered parts of the training, put Nigeria’s challenges in a wider international context. He said that getting access to electronic evidence quickly and using it effectively in criminal proceedings remains one of the biggest problems facing cybercrime prosecution anywhere in the world, not just in Nigeria.
His presence at the training also carried a practical message. Nigeria needs to continue strengthening cooperation through existing legal instruments and partnerships with governments and service providers abroad, since many of the servers, platforms, and financial systems used in cybercrime targeting Nigerians are hosted outside the country entirely.
Mrs Jamila Akaaga-Ade, Deputy Director and Head of the Cybercrimes Unit at the Federal Ministry of Justice and also Head of the Joint Case Team on Cybercrime, said collective action remains the central need in tackling cybercrime. She pointed out that effective international cooperation can only be achieved where strong national collaboration already exists among relevant institutions, meaning Nigeria has to fix its internal coordination problems before it can meaningfully engage at the global level.
ICMPD TIP-VAP Project Manager Matthias Esene brought the human trafficking dimension into the picture, noting that traffickers now increasingly exploit digital platforms, encrypted communications, social media, and artificial intelligence to operate. He said strengthening the Joint Case Team’s capacity directly contributes to Nigeria’s response to trafficking in persons through its partnership with NAPTIP.
The four-day programme covered more than 40 participants including investigators, prosecutors, analysts, and forensic experts, alongside the six Federal High Court judges. Topics included AI-generated crimes, voice cloning, deepfakes, ransomware, cryptocurrency offences, and the recovery, preservation, and presentation of digital evidence from phones, computers, and other electronic devices.
What stands out most from this training is the consistent message from every speaker: Nigeria’s cybercrime problem is not primarily a technology gap. The tools and legal frameworks exist. The Joint Case Team on Cybercrime itself is described by Oyedepo as one of Nigeria’s most strategic innovations, bringing investigators, prosecutors, regulators, and forensic experts onto one coordinated platform.
The problem is whether those institutions actually work together in practice, share intelligence without turf battles, and move quickly enough to preserve evidence before it disappears across borders. Training prosecutors and judges together is a step in the right direction. But as Oyedepo himself put it, nobody can be an island in the administration of criminal justice, and that shift from siloed thinking to genuine collaboration is still a work in progress.
