Prospects of building a national database

And the jury is out whether or not he realises that as he continues to fumble, wobble and stagger to keep the assignment. By the time it’s over, we would be spending the highest amount of money for a review or is it the building of a voters register. What more, there are no iron […]

And the jury is out whether or not he realises that as he continues to fumble, wobble and stagger to keep the assignment. By the time it’s over, we would be spending the highest amount of money for a review or is it the building of a voters register. What more, there are no iron cast assurances that the register will be a good one and so down goes our dream to conduct the freest, fairest and most credible election. When that happens, it would have been money down the drain as usual.

One is particularly miffed at the secrecy surrounding the identity of those whose companies won the contracts for the supply of the DDC machines. We need the names of the directors and I don’t believe that such information is protected by the Official Secrets Act or any other law in force. Knowing who these people are will help Nigerians make up their minds whether these people are capable based on their company’s profile to provide what we need or whether Jega was arm twisted to favour people in office. Such information, available at the Corporate Affairs Commission, should be declassified and its disclosure could be a defence for Jega when history writes the story of his tenure. Isn’t it a shame that so soon, commentators are trying to compare what Jega got and what he has done with it to what Maurice Iwu received and what he did with it? Time forces man to see his past pains as fun when he lives in an absurd society.

But there is an opportunity here to make sense out of the nonsense. Take away the usual horrors of politicians hijacking machines, registration of the under-aged and of course, the importation of outright foreigners to boost the numbers; there is an unprecedented opportunity to make something good out of all these – for once to begin a national process of civic registration and better secure our nation using this data. And this should be our goal in an era when bombs are flying left, right and centre; armed robbery and kidnapping are on the increase and there is a state of general insecurity. Usually, any country that is unable to police itself is demonstrating what happens when it is unable to provide for the good of the generality of its people. We must borrow a leaf, as we are wont to do, at crisis moments, from the examples of police states such as the Americas and the United Kingdom where data is stored at all levels of human interaction and there is inter-agency cooperation in data sharing and use.

INEC’s database (when it is finally collated) may not be the best, but it should serve as a starting point for national data collation. In the age of the internet and its potentials; this should jumpstart an inter-agency cooperation that should benefit the Nigeria Police Force (and other affiliate intelligence groups); the Directorate of National Civic Registration; the Census Board; the Immigration Service and of course, INEC as foundation. The moment the collected data is uploaded, it should be linked in such a way as to ensure that each of the agencies mentioned supra have access to it, and (in the case of the NIS) be able to update or upgrade the data for crime prevention and other purposes.

One is not unaware of the lacuna in not automatically uploading present data on the internet even when we ought to have the capacity to do that. When the INEC  chairman informed the nation that machine snatching willnot work because he would be able to monitor the exact positioning of each registered machine, one had thought that he had a GPS or some other software which would enable him to do so. With the problems so far recorded, it would not be unthinkable that vital data disappears in the course of uploading especially in the hands of the rookies manipulating them. This may create a situation where those who are properly registered with proof may never be able to vote because their data is lost before, during or after the display of the voters register.

Whatever happens with inter-agency cooperation, citizens can update their own information from time to time – like when they change address, jobs etc which will allow for planning and monitoring. Using the necessary software, we can have a comprehensive national biometric and facial capture data available to licensed agencies and profitable for the issuance of national identity that cannot be forged.

Down the line, it means that these identity cards can be used for future votings and other things without incurring this huge expenditure. Indeed, with time, hospitals should be able to latch on to this database in some form with firewalls to ensure that each agency accesses only the kind of biometric and other information that it needs to perform its functions without infringing on individual rights and also with sufficient security passcodes to ensure that the data cannot be forged without dire consequences.

Beyond the euphoria of elections, government should begin to look into this and tap on its available human capital, especially from the diaspora to build this. It should be seen as a national priority.