We said we were going to bring the cybersecurity industry to Minna. On 17 and 18 July 2026, in the New SICT lecture theatre at the Federal University of Technology Minna, that is what happened.
More than three hundred people came through the doors across the two days. Students from FUT Minna and from universities well outside Niger State. People already working in IT who wanted to move into security. People who had never opened a terminal.
The talks did not sell anything
The brief we gave every speaker was the same: no product pitches, no abstractions, tell them what the work is actually like and how you got in. Abubakar Isah Ogirima walked through moving from IT operations into cyber defence. Ridwan Adebayo talked about the cyber hustle as it really runs in Nigeria. Idowu David Ayooluwa took the room through picking a path when every path looks equally plausible from outside.
Two speakers joined from abroad. Justin Forbes, formerly of CISA, on the road from curiosity to a career. Wesley Thijs — the XSS Rat — on hunting bugs, and he left his methodology cheat sheet behind for everyone. It is still on the archive page.
Abubakar D Mohammed, Director of Cybersecurity and Data Protection at the Niger State Information Technology and Digital Economy Agency, made the case for cybersecurity as a government priority rather than a private-sector afterthought. Faruq Sokunbi Olamide of Ednux closed out day two on API security and supply chain risk.
The CTF paid out in full
The national Capture The Flag competition ran across both days and paid out the entire ₦500,000 pool at the closing ceremony — ₦250,000, ₦150,000 and ₦100,000 across the three places. No asterisks, no deferred prizes.
What it turned into
Fifty attendees were selected into the first CyberStarter Nexus bootcamp cohort before the weekend was out, across three tracks: Red Team, Blue Team and GRC. Three weeks, six days a week, a submitted task every day, and a tutor reading every submission.
That is the part that mattered. A summit is two days. What we were actually testing was whether a room full of people with no clear route in would take a structured one if somebody built it.
The north was where we started. Nigeria is where we are going.
The full archive — recording, speaker lineup, both days’ schedule, photos and the downloadable resources — is on the Summit 2026 page.