By Adekunle Adekoya
LAST week, the nation’s top computer brains gathered in Asaba, the Delta State capital under the aegis of the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS), for the body’s 23rd National Conference, tagged RESDEMIT 2010. The theme, in sync with the national mood, was Realising a Stable Democratic Political System in Nigeria: IT tools & Strategies.

Uwadia

Monday July 26, the conference took off with a media outing to Delta Broadcasting studios, where NCS president, Professor Charles Uwadia led his executives for an interview.

Thereafter, the NCS delegation paid a courtesy call on the Asagba of Asaba, HRH Professor Chike Edozien, ostensibly for his royal blessings. The delegation was received at the Asagba’s palace by the Secretary-in-Council to the Asagba who is also the Olikeze of Asaba, Chief John Iloba. The following day, the conference proper got underway with an opening ceremony, presided over again by Chief John Iloba, who represented the Asagba at the occasion.

Speaking through Chief Iloba, the Asagba urged urged the Nigerian Computer Society to do all it can to help the nation automate the electoral process so that the nation will forthwith experience peaceful transitions through credible elections.

“In past elections,” Chief Iloba recalled, “we voted and ballots were counted and kept somewhere. If computer sciences are keyed into the electoral process, we will have credible elections since the entire voting system will have been preserved in computers. I commend the NCS for the theme of their conference, and hope that at the end, the conference will bring us good tidings.”

Politicians not into ICT
After Chief Iloba spoke, goodwill messages to the conference came forth from many notable personalities. One of them, acting chairman of the board of NITDA(National Information Technology Development Agency), Mallam Mohammed Bullama, commended NCS for the theme of the confab, but noted that the political class is yet to buy into ICT as a tool for national development..

His words: “There is no way you can re-engineer this country by whatever means in whichever manner without information and communications technology. So, the theme of this year’s conference is very apt. We at NITDA have noted that the political class is yet to buy into IT as a tool for national development and are working on that. As you can see, there are no members of the National Assembly here, just the professionals.”

Also speaking at the event, Mr Ibrahim Tizhe, President, Computer Professional Registration Council of Nigeria also lauded the confab theme. His words:

“There couldn’t have been a more relevant theme as the political turf gears up for the 2011 elections. No country can progress in the 21st century without information technology, and we hope that at the end of the conference, there will be recommendations to move the nation forward.”

NCS president, Professor Charles Uwadia told the gathering that the society chose that theme because the nation is attaining 50 years of independence, and as such is a time “for sober reflection over our experiences, achievements and challenges so far in our journey towards becoming a truly great nation.

As Nigerians and stakeholders, we owe it a duty to our motherland to join the discourse of making the country a better place for all of us through the instrumentality of information technology.”

NCS working with INEC
Uwadia then told the gathering that NCS had been engaging the Idependent National Electoral Commission (INEC) “on how to implement an IT-driven electoral system.”

His words: “You may recall that the first retreat between INEC and NCS took place in Grand Hotel here in Asaba between November 13th  and 16th in 2008. A follow_up stakeholders’ forum was held at Hamdala Hotel, Kaduna between July 7th and 10th in 2009. We are in discussion with the new INEC chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega on how NCS could be of assistance in the review of the voters’ register, among other tasks.”

On the sidelines of the conference, on Thursday morning, Professor Uwadia granted an interview in his hotel suite where he spoke more on the interaction of NCS with INEC. His words:

“Our interaction with INEC actually started in 2008 when Professor Maurice Iwu was chairman. We have held several meetings to seek ways on how we as Nigerians can have a credible, free, fair and transparent electoral system, and it is becoming increasingly clear that we cannot do that without the use of information and communications technology.

We had engaged the former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo on this and he actually started work on it but was unable to complete it before leaving office. After Professor Iwu left, and Professor Jega took over, NCS has also been in discussions with him with a view to seeing what we can do to assure credibility of our electoral system. Our efforts are geared towards ensuring that INEC is going the right way.”

Asked whether any software, designed by Nigerians is actually on ground, ready for use in the 2011 elections, Professor uwadia said:

“Let’s get one thing very clear; there will not be e-voting in 2011 because there is no enabling legislation for that. The issue now is about voters’register, and the processes of data capture that goes into it. That is an area in which we are interested to ensure we get things done properly, and in the right way.”

On Bullama’s remarks regarding the near-total absence of political leadership at the NCS summit, Uwadia, in a pained tone, said:

“I must confess to you that is really a bother. I must tell you personally that I’ve been reflecting on this in the last three days. This is something that has bothered us at NCS. Look at our conference here, the level of federal presence is low; the level of presence even by the state government is low, even legislators, their presence is here is almost nil. That has been the trend at other ICT fora, and for us that is a big challenge. What we see is a big disconnect, a big gap between the political class and the stakeholders.

In all, about 51 papers were listed for presentation in the Conference proceedings compendium. Some of those presented, which had to do with e-voting include those at the plenary session presided over by Professor Adenike Osofisan, among others.

In a paper titled “A three_tier Access Control Mechanism for a Secured e-Voting, delivered by Mba Odim of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Redeemers University, Ogun State, the case was made for the security of the voting system to make it inviolable by external influence and assure fidelity of the exercise.

Odim in his paper posited that to make e-voting secure, “we need to input the biometrics of the voter. Some biological characteristics are unique, like fingerprints. We therefore adopted the fingerprint minutiae-based matching biometric in conjunction with voters’ ID and PIN in our approach to provide a more reliable access control framework to an e-voting system.”

But a discussant, Dr Chris Uwaje faulted Odim’s presentation, saying there may be problems with authentication of the the source of the biometrics already inputed.

His words: “My own problem is with the processes leading to the capture of biometric data for e-voting. There are problems of verification regarding birth data, death data, residential data, even land data. All these are data that must be captured and verified to ensure that the person who says he is, is really the person that is voting.”

Another discussant, Dr Sola Aderounmu also faulted the entire concept of e-voting based on the nation’s infrastructural challenges.

“There are network problems. the network for e-voting must be robust enough. There are also bandwidth issues, as a result of which the network may be slow in some areas, in which case e-voting becomes problematic, or easy in areas where the bandwidth is sufficient. There are also problems associated with voter identification, as exemplified by the National ID card problem,” he said.

In another paper presented by A.S. Sodiya of the Department of Computer Science, UNAAB, Abeokuta, titled An Agent-based Framework for Secured e-Voting, solutions to some of the problems highlighted earlier were forwarded. These involved the use of agents, which are different kinds of software dedicated to performance of specific tasks in the e-voting process.

Uwaje lauded the presentation, but cautioned that input data must be clear and unambiguous to make it function well, and used our immigration data form as example, and reiterated that whatever e_solutions we adopt, what is crucial is the processes of data capture.

Aderounmu concurred, but warned of security issues in using agents. He also advised that co-ordination of what the agents are doing is also important.