One distinguishing feature of the last elections is the use of IT in INEC’s operations, though it was limited to voter’s registration, where the focal point was the capture of voters’data, including biometrics, which was subsequently verified on polling day and voting proceeded by the old manual method. Thus, the election itself was facilitated only in parts by IT.

But what cannot be denied is that the little part powered by IT helped in no small measure to manage our electoral problems — rigging, multiple voting, and other forms of malpractice that rubbished previous exercises.

As counseled in the immediate aftermath, INEC must rise to the challenge of fully automating the entire electoral process, so that the ovation it got, and the credit the nation derived from the conduct of this year’s election will get both louder and longer and more enduring.

While we look forward to that, President Goodluck Jonathan and the 36 state governors are busy forming new administrations. While the political horse-trading towards that is going on, the President and the governors must be reminded that this is the 21st century, and as such, analog thinking is simply not it if we are to achieve Vision 20-2020.

In more general terms, I am advocating that people who will become ministers at the federal levels and commissioners in the states must be digital-minded people whose private endeavours evidence automation.

By that I do not mean people who pack around the most expensive GSM handsets but do only voice with them; Nigeria now needs people who will actualise an effective, visible transition to a technology-driven society, which, in the 21st century, is what we should be.

For instance, whoever emerges Minister of Education must be someone with a burning desire to make our educational system 21st-century compliant; somebody who would work assiduously to ensure that the main teaching aid in our classrooms, from pre-school through primary to secondary and tertiary is no longer the blackboard, but the keyboard. In any case, the board stopped being black in many countries a long time ago.

Equally, whoever emerges Minister of Finance should have the same passion, and should be somebody willing to implement the UNESCO directive that 26 per cent of national budgets be devoted to education.

In the 2010 budget, education got about N210.5 billion appropriation, some 13 per cent of the budget. That is half of the UNESCO recommendation. Even at that, only N47.8 billion was for capital expenditures, with the rest going to recurrent — salaries, and the perks of the fat cats who run educational bureaucracies.

It is important that the educational votes be used by incoming education ministers and commissioners to power our schools with requisite IT equipment so that we can truly transform our society into one that is technology-driven.

I’m sure many of our leaders have been to South Korea, and its capital, Seoul. Thus, they know that Seoul’s infrastructure is technologically advanced, and it has a Digital Media City which is the world’s first complex for IT and multimedia applications.

Seoul was the first city to feature DMB, a digital mobile TV technology and WiBro, a wireless high_speed mobile internet service, and more. All these could not have been possible if the Korean educational system remained analog like ours. Now is action time!