Early last week, the news wafted through the horizon like harmattan fire: another Nigerian teenager proved to the world that the Nigerian DNA is of very high quality. 17-year-old Ifeoma White-Thorpe, a New Jersey high school senior, daughter of a Nigerian woman, Patricia White-Thorpe (nee Eluemunor) and Andre White-Thorpe ( a computer specialist) was accepted into all the eight Ivy Leagues in America plus the prestigious Stanford University. The cheery news buzzed around the globe from CNN through UK Daily Mail to USAToday and the legion of online news portals across the world. The heavily slanted Western media reports as usual carefully avoided the Nigerian parentage of Ifeoma’s mother, but we should not all gloss over it as though it didn’t matter.
Ifeoma is not the only teenager of Nigerian parentage to pull such excellent academic stunt in the US in recent history. I still recall the case of Harold Ekeh, then 17, who in 2015, pulled the same stunt. He got accepted into all 13 schools he applied to. Ekeh’s Nigerian parents left Nigeria for the US when he was 8, as reports put it, to give better opportunities to their children.  While Ifeoma heads the student government in her school and also won the national Selma speech and essay competition; Harold in his time at Elmont Memorial High School boasted a grade-point average of 100.5 percent, a SAT score of 2270 and was a semi-finalist in the national Intel Science Talent Search.
Just to pump up the elation, another Nigerian teenager, Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna, born to Nigerian parents, of the same Elmont Memorial High School in 2016 achieved what young Harold did the previous year. She was accepted by all eight Ivy Leagues, an honour she shared with Kelly Hyles. For effect, she got offers from four additional institutions including the high flying Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Augusta was a valedictorian at Elmont High School with a weighted grade point average of 101.64.
So, for three consecutive years in America, with all the children of Silicon Valley billionaires and the super kids of Wall Street mandarins, three Nigerians have commanded the highest stakes in the highly competitive admission to Ivy Leagues. On the average, a typical Ivy League admits only 14 percent of applicants yearly. And unlike Nigeria’s post-JAMB admission racket where your purse takes the place of your brain, admission into US Ivy Leagues is strictly on merit.  Even if you are Donald Trump’s son or Obama’s daughter or even the scion of Bill Gates, if you don’t make the grade you don’t go beyond the gate. But here, Nigerians rule the roost.  These teenagers of Nigerian blood triumphed because they found themselves in the right environment where hard work is rewarded and where intellect is respected.
Enough of the exploits of young Nigerians in America; let’s return home. Destination: the Senate. The Nigerian Senate of late has morphed from a lawmaking chamber to a theatre of the absurd and the banal. Well, not that the Nigerian Senate has always been a chamber of the noble and the sage for the benign purpose of making laws for the good governance of the nation; it has in the past manifested inane tendencies some too primordial and primitive even for the most despicable medieval man to be proud of. We have seen the Senate accept bribe to pass budget; we have seen Senators flaunt their illicit wealth not the number or quality of bills sponsored; not contributions made on the floor. We have witnessed senators engage in motor park-style fisticuffs.  In recent weeks, the upper legislative chamber took its chicanery to an all-time ridiculous height; beefing with the Executive, suspending its member for daring to challenge the leadership and turning its statutory duty of confirmation of Presidential nominees for critical positions and national assignments into a weapon of vendetta.
But in the midst of all this, the Senate penultimate week, without prodding and without any self-serving fanfare, amended the Electoral Act of 2010  thus ending over six years wait of the amendment in the red chamber. The amendment will legalise the use of smart card readers for the authentication of accredited voters as was done in the 2015 general election. The implication of this amendment is that going forward, electronic voting is possible in Nigeria. This has been the plaintive cry of those desirous of electoral purity in the country.
The amendment also empowered the presiding officers at polling units to, in addition to the smart card reader, use any other technological device that may be prescribed by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) from time to time for the accreditation of voters to verify, confirm or authenticate the genuineness or otherwise of voters’ card.
The passage of the Bill for an Act to Amend the Electoral Act 2010 and for other related matters followed the consideration and adoption of the report of the Senate Committee on INEC. The bill also stipulates that votes and recorded results must be transmitted electronically directly from polling units in an encrypted and secured form. But there is a caveat. The amendment provides that if for some reason the encrypted data is compromised, the presiding officer would have to rely on manual collation. Where the encrypted data is safe, it completely overrides the manual results.
The amendment removed any ambiguity that may occur in the event a candidate dies after the commencement of elections and before the declaration of a winner by INEC, as was the case during the Kogi gubernatorial election. There are other ennobling components of the amendment that would conduce to promoting free and fair elections in the country. This is the context in which the senate should be commended. The senators kept away their various selfish motives and took the path of nationalism and patriotism.
Ordinarily, a bill of this nature that has the potential of making some of the senators not return to the senate via election would only be allowed to gather mould and mildew in the file. But the senators, at the risk of their own political career, passed the bill. They deserve commendation at least, on this one. However, they have one relentless Nigerian to thank for ever proposing and proving that the introduction of technology into our electoral process which will culminate in electronic voting is the best path towards achieving a semblance of free and fair polls.
Leo Stan Ekeh, the man Obasanjo once described as ‘Icon of Hope’ for his unrelenting commitment to birth a knowledge economy and produce a generation of digitally savvy young Nigerians, was the one who paved the path of electronic voting in Nigeria. He takes full credit for the introduction and implementation of Direct Data Capture (DDC) machines as the medium for verification of voter identity; a novelty that conferred legitimacy and credibility on the 2015 general elections in which an incumbent party was dethroned via popular votes by an opposition party.
It goes without saying that democracy has come to stay in Nigeria. The challenge is to deepen the processes of democratization and this includes the electoral process. And one sure way to achieve this is to drive the electoral process with technology. It will eliminate snatching of ballot boxes; reduce down time and delays in transmitting election results; cut off significantly human interference and intrusion with its attendant manipulation of the process and ultimately confer integrity on the electoral exercise.
Going forward, INEC and by extension, the Nigerian government, must embrace electronic voting complete with technology-enabled electioneering. We have demonstrated that it is possible; we should now prove that it is sustainable. Once again, congratulations to the Senate and to our pretty outlier, Ifeoma White-Thorpe.

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