Ekiti and Osun as guinea pigs

We cannot live without technology, and that is at once the bane and grace of this age. Technology defines our age and makes great nations, and also unmakes their foes. All over history, nations grow on the level of their technologies. Whether it was the mechanics of Rome, the literacy of Greece, the navy of England, empires raise technology as their mistress of progress. Today, we have heard of new technologies, including the power of robotics.

Very soon, it will turn humans into ciphers of their handmaidens. We will become slaves of our doing. Our Frankenstein wonders will make us merry and mourn. 

Today the edge the United States holds over others derives from its technological superiority. Its military, especially its navy, is the best the world has ever known because of its technology. The best Air Force of the world is the United States Air Force, and the second best Air Force in the world is the Air force of the U.S. navy.

Security cannot be guaranteed with technology. The failure of Nigeria to tackle the menace of Boko Haram may be due to corruption, even if the President says stealing is not corruption. We are yet to know how all the trillions allocated to security in the past few years have been expended. We have soldiers and police even though we hosted the World Economic Forum with over 600,000 men who could have worked their way into Sambisa forest to chase down the terrorists and save the girls. But technology is prime guarantee, especially in monitoring and tracking the vermin of Boko Haram. It also helps in documenting and comparing data, what the United States used in decapitating Al Queda and dousing the life of Osama Bin Laden.

 Those who underplay the power of technology should read books on how Osama was tracked and killed. If members of our security council have not read them, at least they can watch the movie titled Zero Dark Thirty. They will realise how all the money we have wasted on corruption in the name of security could have made the help of the U.S. and other world powers superfluous.

Democracies also thrive on technology and nothing demonstrates this better than the vote. Over the years, elections have worked on a simple principle: one person, one vote. But to realise this, technologists have adopted a variety of methods. The most obvious has been the thumbprint. For decades, the issue was social. Who should vote? It was initially patriarchal. Only men had the right. Then the women’s movement rose from the martial femininity, ardour and articulations of such amazons as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her fellow suffragist Susan B. Anthony. By fighting the patrician logic of patriarchy, property and politics they railroaded the world by partnering with abolitionists. Female angst and turbulence led the world to cow to Seneca Falls when the beginning of women’s fight began and led to the woman vote. Then the other matter was colour and what we know as universal suffrage, empowering everyone to vote.

Here in Nigeria, feudal hubris that made only men and literate votes is succumbing. But we have a peculiar cultural problem with our vote. That is, the belief by an oligarchy that the vote is democratic only in theory but the result must favour their narrow agenda. That is why we have rigging. This has led to the abuse of our democracy, the fall of wisdom and the peacock reign of the bandit. When we fail to attack the essential nature of democratic banditry, we have rigged election and the wrong person takes reign. We lie that we have the right people in office. We gradually, if we don’t control matters, slide into the arms of the tyrant who parades himself as the people’s anointed.

“One person, one vote” cannot work without technology. Hence the trend towards computerisation of the vote is intended to avoid the corruption of mathematics by those who count the vote. As Einstein once said, “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”

That is the logic of the great world mathematician, and he was not necessarily referring to democracy of politics, but the democracy of sociology and economics, on which the democracy of politics partly depends.

Einstein was the progressive of numbers and the physical world. He knew little of the impact of his ideas on democracy. Technology today owes a lot to him. That is why in the world over, once a person votes, technology takes over. The more technical the process, the less rig-prone will the vote be.

That came to mind when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) decided not to use its latest technology of the card reader for the two upcoming elections in Ekiti and Osun states. The card reader, if implemented with integrity and purpose, is an antidote to the subversive cunning and impunity of the vote bandit. It records the imprint of the voter and forestalls the injuries of double registration and multiple voting. We cannot have a Mike Tyson vote and be counted in Nigerian poll.

INEC insists it will use permanent voter cards alone without the technology savvy of the card reader. It says it will use the card reader in 2015.

One can understand the fear of the electoral body about a new technology. It seems the best way to ensure its success is to try it in smaller elections. In Ekiti State where the election for governor will take place on June 21, 657,256 PVCs have been printed, although not all have been collected. In Osun State, where the election takes place in August, 1,256569 PVCs were reported printed but, like in Ekiti, not all have been collected. This is a fraction of the elections nationwide. This is manageable geopolitics. These states can be used as guinea pigs and lessons can be learned for the bigger ring of a national poll.

In democracies, local elections are laboratories. Also technologies always thrive when begun in small places. The strengths and weakness become platforms for improvements and assured implementation. Osun and Ekiti are small states. INEC has denied that it ever planned to use card readers. That is beside the point. It still has the opportunity to use it. It is good for the integrity of the umpire and it presages confidence in 2015.

The Anambra governorship poll is still wrapped in murk in so far as even the INEC boss felt helpless over an inconclusive exercise. Card readers are not magic, but they are the best armoury and counterfoil to fraud. As Alan Kay said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Societies have invented their futures with technology. INEC can do that for Nigeria by using card readers in the labs of Ekiti and Osun.

 In Touch, The Nation newspaper, 12/05/2014