TECHNOLOGY AND THE HUMAN INTERSECTION: THE BVAS AND NAIRA RE-DESIGN AS REFERENCE POINTS

Recently, technologies deployed within??banking and electoral systems have been in sharp focus and for the wrong reasons. Whilst the electronic banking platforms have been with us for many years, and performed with varying degrees of reliability, the use of Bimodal Authentication System, and the irev portal deployed??for the presidential and National Assembly positions are??recent introductions.?

These technologies are purposed to provide solutions to germane problems and have consumed significant resources from private and public sector coffers. BVAS for example, performs multi-modal accreditation to minimize??fraudulent practices at the polling unit level. Added to this is the ability to snap final PU result sheets and instantly transmit same to a portal resource called the irev which empowers users to search for PU results following a taxonomy of election type, state, local government, and PU’s.??In its real time deployment, citizens??and political party situation rooms can collate ahead of INEC, or at worse contemporaneously.

However, during the recently concluded elections, the real time capability was not delivered.??This and logistic gaps in many places have placed INEC in the crosshairs of criticism, with political parties asserting that their fortunes were impacted in one way or the other.?Yet, irev still??ensures that there is a reference resource that can be used to compare and validate PU results in the hands of party agents and provides a basis for contesting results in court. BVAS??/ irev may indeed have more built-in features that aren’t disclosed, and may have disappointed at many locations, but can still be described as a leap forward in the deployment of technology to improve electoral transparency.

To introduce anomalies will probably involve editing of the result sheet captured at the PU after counting, manipulation of the??EC8 form with forged signatures or editing existing ones with tipex etc; perhaps??retrieval and replacement of the duplicate copies already handed to party agents, and of course amending the time stamp information about BVAS??activities including when it transmitted PU result image. The extent and impact of asserted manipulations will be at the core of litigation. Technology will come under attack, directly or indirectly, but like the kitchen knife, technology’s potency is ultimately determined by human minds and hands.

Other technology questions will be thrown up.?Could BVAS have been designed??to incorporate a feed scanner to prevent all the alignment and blurring issues? Could direct input onto a digital??EC8 interface on BVAS reduce all the edits on result sheets and ensure signatures of agents are time stamped automatically? Could INEC have negotiated partitioned resources for the election period to mitigate network congestion issues? Could??OCR ( Optical Character Recognition) have been incorporated??within irev to extract and tabulate results? Could more powerful servers not have been deployed to deliver faster result retrieval? Could IOT / sensor technology not have been deployed to track??electoral assets??

Another topical issue has been the Naira redesign policy. Again, various opinions exist for and against the policy, and its implementation.??However, there is consensus that??numerous banking institutions have not met customer expectations in executing electronic transactions with the expected fluidity and reliability. This has diluted trust and adversely impacted cashless adoption policies.?Unreliable connectivity, inadequate network bandwidth resources, database errors, and application security gaps, and human capacity issues are amongst the factors that have dogged service delivery.?

To worsen matters, we have seen the worst of human exploitation at play as Nigerian with access to cash hoarded and sold at a premium to others. We have seen POS operators collude to frustrate and extort other Nigerians. We have seen petrol stations frustrate POS payments to channel drivers into the hand of POS operators selling cash for exorbitant fees. And yet, this is the private sectors flagship sub - sector,?which transacted Instant payments to the tune of N38.77 trillion In January 2023, across 638 m transactions, according to NIBSS ( Nigerian Interbank Settlement System).

Improvement defines innovation,?but what has been exposed is the critical role still retained by the human being in the efficacy of technology driven processes.?It must be clear to the discerning that if there are people ready to tether to incompetence or criminality, technology simply can't achieve its goals.?Unfortunately, it seems the quantum of such people exists in abundance within our country -???from the so described poor masses to the influential and rich. Societal expenditure and desperation vain and accumulative pursuits seems to be at an all-time high, perhaps exacerbated by the fantasies and?hypnotic effect of?social media. We have become a society that commoditizes most, if not everything.

Perhaps, we would have turned to artificial intelligence to eliminate or minimize human involvement, but even the AI tools are programmed to become progressively intelligent, and tools like ChatGPT have declared that they too want to develop dark sides to be truly fulfilled.?These are the times we live in.

Therefore, one can safely conclude that there is an?increasingly potent intersection between what technology can deliver and what human orchestration allows it to deliver, at macro levels.?The trajectory of the human mind has become a key component in the existential war between good and evil.?This war has seen the deployment of many tools to decipher human intentions, and these include behavioural analysis, lie detectors, permission, and audit tools, amongst many others. However, these too are deployed, ultimately interpreted, and acted upon by humans.?

Simply put, until we can dramatically minimize the quantum of those ready to perpetrate wrongdoing we will always flounder in our execution of projects, especially those with wide national application where the landscape for mischief is widespread. The human element is the weakest link, and yet the strongest resource for delivering where processes, people and technology are expected to be woven into an efficacious framework that yields excellent results

In conclusion, entities deploying technology at scale and for widespread use must place, at the apex of priorities, control measures to minimise human mischief, and / or significantly close the opportunity gaps open for human exploitation, else they will perpetually find themselves facing accusations of compromise. Asides reputational damage,?technology investments will always likely be under optimized, otherwise robust solutions discredited, and our aspirations of excellence mere mirages.?