If the many Gambian news media reports about the Securiport controversy are a reliable gauge of public interest in the NAO Management Letter, it should be no surprise that the President’s spokesperson, President Barrow himself, previously on the defensive, has now moved into attack mode with the help of Presidential IT expert Advisor Mr. Sulayman Camara.
A journalist from The Point Newspaper interviewed Mr. Camara and recently reported on Mr. Camara’s opinion on the topic.
Mr. Camara mentioned Securiport made a ‘heavy investment’ at the airport and further noted their investment is ‘quite impressive’. Well, take a close look – the computer hardware needed for such a system is not very expensive. Doubters can do a quick search for biometric scanners, servers, network switches, cabling, and assorted PCs to get a sense of the extent of their ‘heavy investment’. Possibly add to that estimate the cost of a dedicated GAMTEL fiber optic line to the airport.
Likewise, the system’s software, probably clones of the systems used by Securiport’s customers with some minor ‘tweaks’, is likely one of the commonly developed once-sellers that often sell cash cow packages. One possibly costly item is the purchase of a license for a database system. Other than that, much of the application software code needed for such a system is open source, which is free. The key element in similar systems is a capable database programmer who will get various databases to communicate over a network and present data to the users.
Maybe Mr. Camara’s gauge of ‘heavy investment’ is that it sounds like big money if Securiport’s Dollar or Euro investment is converted into Dalasis. The fact is, as pointed out by the NAO, Securiport’s return on their suspected meager investment is huge, much more than the return the GoTG hopes to enjoy. Securiport has collected, so far, much more than the obscene US$12 mil Jammeh had GAMCEL pay MGI for a telecom billing software license. The more things change the more they stay the same.
To get a sense of just how badly the GoTG might have gotten ‘screwed’ by what has been revealed so far about this Securiport contract, consider a somewhat similar deal the State Police of USA’s State of Michigan has with Kaseware and ShadowDragon, two prominent US cyber intelligence service providers that sell their security system services worldwide.
For example, the 5-year total cost to Michigan’s State Police for 300 Kaseware licenses and 60 ShadowDragon’s SocialNet licenses is US$2 mil plus US$1 mil for setting up things. You can read the 100-page contract here … https://theintercept.com/document/2021/09/21/state-of-michigan-2020-kaseware-contract/
A detailed report on what Michigan’s State Police get for their US$3 mil is here …
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/21/surveillance-social-media-police-microsoft-shadowdragon-kaseware/. The information these systems make easily available to police via a web browser is both stunning and worrisome, to put it mildly. The police get a huge ‘bang for their buck’.
Compare that US$3 mil with what Securiport has been collecting here since 2018, and add to that tidy sum they will continue collecting over the next decade. Quite a ‘cash cow’ for both Securiport and GoTG. No wonder the regime has pulled out the ‘big guns’ to defend the deal. It is too bad GoTG’s piece of that big pie is only a stingy 25%.
Mr. Camara’s other comments disparaging the work of the NAO – ‘half-baked report’ – suggest he had not even bothered to read the report in full. Securiport did comment on many of the NAO’s findings but failed to respond to other findings. It would be reasonable to expect an IT expert like Mr. Camara to temporarily set aside his political agenda and at least congratulate the NAO for exposing the many security flaws in Securiport’s computer system before malicious hackers could exploit them.
Viva NAO!
Over and out,
Guest Editorial