Nigeria’s Emergency Number Goes Live

A typical national emergency call number with links to Federal Road Safety Corps, police and fire service has been launched in Nigeria as the nation's first and only 24-hour national bureau of directory and information services.

Named "7411 bureau of information", the service also has businesses listings, people finders, driving directions, tax advices, address finders, health histories, record back-up, weather forecasts, reverse phone tracker, and jobs finder.

The technical company in charge of the project quoted the Director of Engineering at the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC), Mr. Sani Adamu, as saying that "to have easy access into information and life saving tips Nigerians residents can dial 7411 on any phone in Nigeria and +2347411 from outside Nigeria, or access the link on 411ng.com.

He added that the commission is committed to building information rich Nigeria.
He enjoined Nigerians to embrace the use of the services to aid
information knowledge level, business development and contribute to progressing the Nigeria we all desire.

"The need to correctly find and be found in Nigeria cannot be overlooked or pushed to the back in the development process of any
serious country wishing to make proper development.

Gone are the days when life changing information and tips are prized above money, we must not forget the role of information
accessibilities in human per capita development" Adamu said.
According to him, when fully operational, the national directory number can comfortably handle 670,000 callers at a time.
He said: "This is made possible by advanced simulative telecommunication technology, similar to that presently deployed in
Israel, United States, Britain and Dubai."

The Chief Technical Officer of the company, Matt Howard, said the data centre is an advanced one of a kind, built with over 13 million
different software used in B2B directory tracking, global positioning. It also has 24-hour traffic surveillance people finders, stock market analysis reporting, finger print readers, facial recognition software, vehicle tracking, crime scene reporting, CCTV Data records and backup, cross marketing and emergency response call forwarding to police and trained authorities.

Howard said: "The centre will presently receive in - bound enquiry calls from over 3,000 Nigerians at a time for now, and about 27 million enquiries can be processed every day as we speak. We are working to increase inbound trunks to accommodate 10 million callers at a time. This we should achieve before the end of June 2014.

As at today, we have employment for over 3,000 Nigerians, majorly trained statistics and data dissemination experts, multi lingual
Distress experts; anti-terrorist negotiators, doctors ,first aid nurses ,pilots, call centre agents, career development advisors,
weather experts, IT and Technical experts and so on. They will offer professional services daily to Nigerians."

The company's Chief Operating Officer, Ms. Denise Cann, also stressed that the directory number - 7411 might equally serve as a counter terrorism number into which the entire nation may dial into at the hour of need.

"Such distress calls or emergency will be forwarded to police or the joint task force as the case may be for rapid intervention. We will
work with major companies like Google GPS, NIGCOMSAT, CBN, GLO1 and Main one to achieve these noble feat" she said