How Nigeria’s Arrogance Over Blockchain Is Costing Us Our Democracy
The first time I learned about blockchain, like most people, was post the launch and boom of bitcoin. While many were pained at the opportunity they missed to invest in cryptocurrencies and tokens, I was actually happy to learn about the underlying technology, blockchain. A teenager at the time, and fresh off high school, with little access to the internet, I was really determined to understand the tech. It has been over 7 years since then and my enthusiasm for the technology and all the promises it holds are still very high. However, recent events in my country Nigeria really dashed my spirit, especially about how arrogance about blockchain technology gave us the worst elections we had seen since the inception of our country’s democracy. Nigeria’s 2023 election was marred by violence, death, voter suppression, and electoral violations had the most dubious character whose party masterminded the death of electorates and electoral malpractices emerged as the president. The European Union’s assessment of the election can be read here. As of the time of writing, Nigeria’s president-elect is a USA-documented drug trafficker. It just happened that during the time he banished himself to the United States on self Asylum, he was heavily busy laundering millions of dollars from heroin trade. Also, he has no known origin and has unscrupulous and forged academic certificates. But how did things get this bad? Where does blockchain even come in?
Nigeria’s elections have always been marred by electoral violence. Ballot snatching and rigging of votes are an everyday vocabulary for Nigerians.
However, in 2022 an electoral act which introduced the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) was introduced. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System is “an electronic device created to read Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) and verify the voter holding the card by using his/her fingerprints and facial recognition.” What BVAS was supposed to do, was cut down on electoral malpractices that can happen during voters' accreditation, voting, and collation. The body in charge of conducting the elections, INEC, also set up an online result viewer for transparency's sake as results from individual polling units would be uploaded there. After the results were collated, most were not uploaded because INEC restricted access to its platform. The joke is that at of the time of this writing, well over a month since the presidential elections, not all polling units have been uploaded, and a winner has been declared. It’s hilarious right?
In the Nigerian elections of 2023, there were cases of electoral officers and citizens profiling electorate members and denying them their franchise because of their likelihood to vote for a certain candidate. Those that resisted them were brutalized. Over 39 people died, much more are still hospitalized.
BVAS was great as it cut down excessive rigging, even though results from all policing units haven’t been uploaded, over 10% of the results that have been assessed on the results viewer have been marred in one way or the other. Also, electoral officers nationwide noted that they were unable to upload results because they were locked out of their access to the upload portal. The electoral commission claimed there were cyber attacks, but closer scrutiny of AWS, the server where the results were to be hosted, showed there was nothing of the sort. And that shows one of the dangers of centralized technology, it congregates power in the hands of a single authority. That makes it susceptible to abuse. And this brings me back to BVAS, although a noble innovation, politicians still found ways to beat it because of its centralized nature. Blockchain’s decentralized nature would have tackled this, but Nigeria botched its first outing with Blockchain’s poster child, Bitcoin.
In February of 2021, Nigeria’s central bank banned Bitcoin and cryptocurrency transactions in its belief that it would help the naira appreciate. Naira has hit new record highs since then and the ban is still on. To understand how into crypto and blockchain Nigerians are, a report looking at crypto adoption in 154 countries placed Nigeria in the sixth position. Pre and post-crypto ban in Nigeria, crypto adoption is gaining ground. Nigeria even occasionally ranks first on Google’s ranking of countries with the most searches for “bitcoin”.
You might be curious as to why Nigeria is a top crypto-using country. Firstly as a means of payment. One of the downsides of being in Nigeria is being limited by mainstream payment platforms like PayPal, this created a digital payment divide between Nigeria and the rest of the world. Of recent, the Nigerian government also banned dollar charges payment on domestic cards.
Another reason Nigerians have embraced blockchain and cryptocurrencies is because of trading, their lucrativeness, and their ability to revolutionize Nigeria’s data problems which blockchain as an immutable ledger has proven to be a sure solution.
These and many more are some of the reasons Nigerians have embraced blockchain, but Nigeria hasn’t. So what do we have on our hands as a result of this sham of an election? A president-elect who has drug ties and is known to be dubious through and through.
Blockchain voting is quite simple to miss it. Typically, electorates download the needed blockchain voting application, verify their identity, register for the election, get accredited by electoral officials across a decentralized peer-to-peer network to vote, and then they vote. It’s that simple.
As someone who has been a blockchain enthusiast since my teenage years, and now close to my mid-twenties. It is infuriating. I just hope for the best. My country’s arrogance over the blockchain is going to cost us a lot, including our democracy.
I am Jeremiah John, and as a blockchain enthusiast and content writer, I am passionate about technology. I believe it is one of the frontiers that we as humans must confront and conquer. With my experience and passion in the space, my goal is to steer personalities and startups away from the technicality problem. Trust me, it is very rampant in the space.
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