Former President of the Nigerian Computer Society, Chief Orjinta Ala Ala has urged Nigerians to be patient as they go through the 2011 voters’ registration exercise, saying that a technology driven process like electronic registration requires practice and experience to get  right.

Ala Ala was reacting to barrage of complaints following the current voters’ registration exercise as many more people were finding it difficult to register.

According to him, the exercise would succeed only that it required  the public, the governments and the INEC officials to remain focused on the objectives of achieving a free and fair election through the exploitation of modern technology.

The former NCS boss said that the public must show resilience through maturity, patience and effective participation. He said that the finger printing process has become a challenge and the way to get about it is for the INEC officials to follow strictly the guidelines provided by INEC and the equipment manufacturers.

Being a technology expert himself, Ala Ala warned that excessive dirt, sweat and grease might affect the effectiveness of the scanners, advising everyone who goes for scanning to ensure that the fingers are dirt free.

For the registration operatives, Ala Ala charged them to ensure that the scanners are always placed on a flat surface while scanning and should never be cleaned with chemicals as this will damage it. He added that he was aware that INEC calibrated her Software to achieve high quality finger Print and that it may eventually cause slow scanning.

INEC had adopted a Linux software technology which experts say is slower than Oracle and many others, resulting in the slow process, particularly in fingerprint scanning and impressions. Meanwhile, even though major suppliers of the DDC machines, Zinox

Technologies said it had no business with the software that powers the scanning of finger prints, it however earlier announced the deployment of 2 Engineers to each of the 36 States and Abuja in anticipation of the teething problems with the new DDC technology.

The company said the cost of these 74 support staff was not part of the contract but a patriotic gesture to ensure that the DDC technology does not overwhelm the INEC operatives.

Also, the company has caused a full page color advertisements to be published in all national dailies to give vital tips, with graphic details on the DDC machines.