By Henry Uche
Corporate leaders across board have been charged to anticipate unexpected emerging risks and fortify their digital resilience if they must remain in business.
Delivering a keynote at the 2025 biennial lecture of the Chartered Institute of Directors (CIoD) in Lagos recently, the Chief Executive Officer of Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG), Dr. Tayo Aduloju, admonished captains of industries to cultivate a culture of resilience by promoting cyber-resilience-aware leadership, drive culture through leadership, eam trust through accountability and transparency, champion employee behaviour and provide continuous training.
Speaking under the theme: Building Digital Resilience: Governance Risk & Compliance, Aduloju advised they regularly assess and prioritize cyber risk by determining the risk context, assessments and prioritization, validate risk integration and drive risk-based decisions.
“We should establish and maintain core security fundamentals by leveraging security frameworks and industry standards. We should focus on common critical assets and core operations, reduce exposure, measure maturity and performance, and drive continuous improvement.
He stressed the need to incorporate cyber-resilience governance into business strategy by instituting cyber-resilience governance, establishing Board oversight of cyber resilience and appointing an accountable officer.
“We must ensure design supports cyber resilience, promote resilience by design, optimize across functions and innovate for the future. Ww should encourage systemic resilience and collaboration by earning trust through accountability and transparency, promote ecosystem-wide collaboration and improve ecosystem-wide cyber-resilience capabilities.
“Organisations should drive digital resiliency efforts. Eliminate siloed thinking to ensure that the team can see across department and business units to deploy technology solutions and identify any resilience gaps.
“Organisations must strive to understand and reflect on their enterprise’s resilience to face future disruptions. The global industry and market systems will continue to be volatile and susceptible for some time; it is critical to future-proof your organization and reduce time spent in the reactive phases of response.
“Corporate leaders must build resilience across all domains of digital and cyber resilience and have a clear understanding of how business and IT leaders in your organisation will simultaneously support and build digital resilience capabilities. Boards must authorise the upfront investments and guide the digital architecture evolution to ensure future-readiness.”
Meanwhile, the President & Chairman, Governing Council of CIoD, Alhaji Tijjani Borodo, urged his successor to take the Institute to a higher level. “We must promote corporate governance at all cost. My resul of my three-point agenda, the 3Rs: Review, Reform, and Reinvigoration is glaring. I believe with maximum support from corporate leaders doing the right thing at all time, Nigeria will become better for all of us,” he affirmed.
Other economic experts maintained that in the face of growing digital disruptions and systemic cyber vulnerabilities, Nigeria urgently requires a new digital economy resilience analytics tool to support institutional preparedness for economic development.