Fighting corruption with technology

Four events consolidated my belief that corruption has taken over the soul of our people. I will relate one of them. 

We traveled with Governor Abubakar Sani Bello to Kutigi, to supervise a school renovation project under my management. When the students were lined up to greet their governor, I distinctively heard one of them shouting “give us money. Give us our own!”

The essence of the boy’s appeal was that the leaders had stolen money, therefore he wanted his own share. 

That was a very sad day for me. I recall telling someone that with students like these, our future will be worse than the present. 

This also shows that corruption has become so pervasive that parents ignore to teach their children about eating only halal. 

The student may have a point that political leaders steal money. But even if that’s the case, would he or should he accept the money when offered? 

Or more directly, if he catches a thief, would he agree to share the loot with the thief? Our fathers wouldn’t,  would they? 

That same experience was replicated in every village we went. Even during the campaigns, we went to villages where women were asked what they wanted and all of them said money. Not better hospitals, homes or schools , but money. 

The point here is that we are more corrupt than our fathers and our children are likely to be more corrupt than us. Except something is done urgently. 

But how do we tackle corruption so that the future of our children is not made worse by it?

Some say we need strong institutions. Others say we need strong leaders to mold the strong institutions. Both are right. However, strong institutions, whether the foreman is a strong leader or a weak one , need time to form. 

Yet, technology has been used as a catalyst to solve many problems. One example is raising productivity. A farmer with access to a tractor (technology) can grow  more crops more quickly. And a manager can move ideas and decisions more efficiently and quickly with the internet (technology) than with snail mail. 

Can we employ technology in the same way to kill corruption. Yes. 

We don’t need to imagine how technology can help us fight corruption because we’ve already seen its effect in at least two areas. One of the them is how the enforcement of BVN and TSA has reduced the stealing of government fund by public officers. I concede that stealing still continues, but the industrial scale at which it was done before this administration of Buhari has been eradicated. 

Government officers no longer have access to hundreds of accounts from which to  divert money from their ministries and agencies into their private accounts. The CBN sees everything now under the more manageable Treasury Single Account. 

The same way BVN makes it easy to trace funds to individuals. Again I concede that people still stash stolen money in bank accounts. But it’s more difficult to do now. 

The political will to enforce the two processes by the president, even though he didn’t initiate them, counts as his biggest achievement. 

The second way technology has already helped us was through the card reader used in 2015 elections and since. It single handedly stopped  rigging. That’s why many Nigerians were unhappy when the Supreme Court ruled that elections can’t be annulled on the basis of refusal to use card reader. 

It’s also the reason why many of us are surprised that the Federal Government has not put in any serious effort to get the card reader into the Electoral Act. So that future elections can’t be won without its use. And it would be a basis to annul elections. Allowing the card readers to be used for elections is also the biggest achievement of Jonathan. 

Another way technology can help us is through the national identity card. In many countries everyone has a unique number. In Nigeria we’ve not gone far in making this a reality. Even though our efforts started since when Obasanjo was a military head of state. 

One of the excuses we like to give is that Nigeria is a nation of many people. But India has one billion people and over 95 percent of those eligible have been captured into the biometric database. 

With such an identification, it would be easier to move files from one agency to the other, e-governance would be simpler, insurance and government benefits would be easier and neater. 

For example, the Niger State uses technology to recruit citizens for the public service. The state uses it comprehensively,   not the same way technology is deployed half-heartedly by the Federal Government whereby after online application, people with access get in through the back door. 

All in all, the use of technology is the fastest way we can tackle corruption; and we should make it a duty to think of creative ways to use it to defeat the menace.