Now is time to digitalise certificates osundefender.org/?p=208997 If you have yet to hear about the argument concerning the secondary school certificate of the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Maj.-Gen. Mohammadu Buhari (retd.), then chances are that you are not politically trendy. The bigger picture is about Nigeria – a country where institutions do not have memory. This is not the first time the memory of our institutions is in test. More recently, on January 10, 2015, Saturday Punch ran a story about Pa Jacob Kehinde Babajide. The authorities stopped abruptly the pension of the 90-year-old grandfather in 2010. When he complained to the Pension Office, the response he got was that the only solution laid in the provision of his first appointment letter. Of course, he first got this letter from the now defunct Post and Telegrams under the Ministry of Communications about 64 years ago. The nonagenarian is still in shock at the side of the coin he is getting after serving the country for decades. If institutions functioned properly, an email from the pensioning institution to the Ministry of Communication that houses the Nigeria Postal Service activities would unearth claims of the old man’s previous service. This in turn would only be possible if institutions properly keep records and preferably have now processed hard-copy documents into an easily retrievable soft copy format. Another story in this light is that of the former Speaker, House of Representatives, Oladimeji Bankole, which gripped the public space in 2007. The report then was that the Speaker skipped the mandatory one-year National Youth Service that all Nigerian graduates below the age of 30 are expected to observe. Two things however turned the tide in favour of the then Speaker. One, a colleague of his who served with him made public a picture they took together on camp; and two, he made public his certificate of discharge. This was before Nigerians began to patronise twitter et alia in droves. Today, Buhari is the victim of the failure of our institutions. Tomorrow, it may be anyone of us. People are also beginning to ask President Goodluck Jonathan, Buhari’s co-contestant, to show evidence that he concluded his Ph.D. programme. I disagree with Nigerians who think that there was no need questioning Buhari simply because he had contested presidential elections three times and his school certificate result was no issue then. I equally find it puzzling that Mr. President’s thesis is not in public space. I will come to that later. The lesson herein for us as a nation is to draw from the digital system that has made it possible for institutions in the United States where Buhari had his training to reply with concise details and even with documents that are several decades old. The United States Army War College has stated that the retired general earned a diploma from the institution. The siddon look approach, apologies to the late Bola Ige, of the Independent National Electoral Commission is in order. Section 31, sub-sections 3 to 5 of the Electoral Act plainly stipulates the time frame for claims and objections. Buhari’s antagonists failed to use this window to register complaints. President Jonathan’s political foes also need to go to bed since they lost that opportunity. That the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate responded in accordance with the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 and Section 40 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 is something our legislators also need to look into in the coming legislative year. This will enable us not to spend quality time seeking answers to questions whose answers should be easily retrievable. Politics particularly is an interesting game. Whoever is not ready for scrutiny should not bother joining the fray? In my service year, I recall the clairvoyance of a director with the NYSC, who requested to have the corps members serving with the state to create time and begin the digitisation of the records of all corps members that had served in the state since inception. We never made good progress with the task until I passed out. It was an auxiliary assignment and other tasks overshadowed it. It was however a brilliant idea. Back to the issues, social media has truly enriched the discussions from the two warring camps. People are asking presidential candidates tough questions on social networks and they are responding with press conferences. There are now debates in cyber space and by extension on the street on issues, which ordinarily traditional media may choose to keep off the mainstream. The cartoons, the caricatures, the jokes, songs and infographs around the issues are proofs that Nigerians are creative and maybe in full truth we are undoubtedly the happiest people on earth since we are professionals at making jokes of all issues. Apart of the institutional memory, we will build by making conscious efforts to digitise our records, and researchers and scholars in Nigeria will be some of the biggest beneficiaries. It is almost an impossible task to research on Nigeria’s past in various fields. Where, for instance, does one get access to defunct newspaper publications? Digitising Nigeria’s past, which may currently be scattered in various Nigerian homes, is a solution in this light. Maybe, one of the 14 candidates contesting the presidency needs to throw solutions around problems like these into his or her manifesto. It is certain to resonate with a section of the electorate. It will rank in the same spectrum as ‘free Wi-Fi’, which some candidates in Lagos State are already promising their electorate. Maybe it will also taste better for our cerebral buds to know that the manifestos are no longer about issues like good roads, water, among other necessities. Back to Jonathan’s PhD, I think it is high time the National Universities Commission fixed issues surrounding thesis research records. It would not be out of place to have all universities archive titles of their research work and abstract in a space on the NUC’s website for anyone to view.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 01:28:49 +0000
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