LAGOS - Of the more than 175 million people who live in Nigeria, 70 percent of them are young. And among those millions are more than 125 million mobile phone subscribers, the largest such market in Africa.
So, as Nigeria turned to a crucial national election last month, a group of political activists selected a smartphone application might galvanize a few million of those citizens and guarantee a free and fair election in a nation not known for its transparency.
Yemi Adamolekun is one of those who tapped that demographic with technology. Dressed in T-shirt and a trousers of Ankara fabric, Adamolekun walked briskly into Terra Kulture, a bookstore located in the high-brow area in Lagos State. Her simple clothing style and a natural hairdo underscore her no-nonsense approach to national affairs.
Adamolekun is the executive director of , a non-governmental organization promoting good governance and accountability in the country. The organization is known for the role it played in mobilizing Nigeria protests for a change in government in 2009 when President Umaru Yar’adua was ill.
The mass protest attracted global attention and intervention. When Yar’adua died, the vice president, Goodluck Jonathan, was appointed to replace him.
From those beginnings six years ago, Enough-Is-Enough in 2011 launched , a smartphone application that allows citizens to send first-hand reports about election activities in their neighborhood. Revoda is focused on empowering Nigeria citizens.
Adamolekun thinks good politicians need to encourage the use of the organization’s app. “A candidate that wants to win free and fair should encourage citizens to use Revoda,” she said.
Revoda is open app, a neutral platform that Adamolekun thinks can empower citizens to become election observers. Every voter’s card has a series of numbers that identifies the holder’s state, local government, ward and specific polling unit. Voters who download the app on their smartphones are able to report their election-day experience from their polling units.
“You don’t need to tell us where you are. So it is really a simple app. It allows you to tell us what particular location your are reporting from, if materials arrived on time, if the police were helpful or not, if there was any violence at your polling unit, if the counting was done the way it should be done and a text box that you could put in results,” Adamolekun said.
With young people making up over 70 percent of Nigeria’s 177 million population, Ademolekun was optimistic of high usage of the app in this year’s voting.
Nigeria is Africa’s largest mobile market with more than 125 million subscribers, according to statistics released by the Nigerian Communications Commission. Nigeria also ranks the eighth in the world with high Internet users. As citizens become more technology savvy, they are discovering how to foster citizen participation in electoral matters.
When Revoda was first created, users could only report election incidence from one polling unit.
“The big thing that has happened since 2011 is that INEC doesn’t report results at the polling unit level. They start at the local government and then aggregate upward. By the time you realize that the local government result don’t add up, you don’t know where it happened,” said Adamolekun.
But Revoda makes it easier to track those local results.
In addition to text reporting, users were encouraged to send photographs of activities in their polling units.
“We wanted to do photographs and videos but due to bandwidth issues, we decided not to worry too much. But photographs would allow users take a snapshot of results at polling units level,” she said.
The electoral act in Nigeria makes it impossible for ordinary citizens to declare a winner or announce result until The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had done so. However, Revoda being a citizen-generated platform allows users send statistics of the voter’s turnout at the different polling units.
Revoda was created over a weekend in March, three weeks before the April, 2011 election and launched without much publicity or funding. They also had very little cooperation from telecommunications companies and none were willing to give free SMS.
Nigeria’s INEC is also active in the use of social media and technology to conduct successful elections and foster citizen participation.
INEC Lagos says a lot has been achieved through use of technology, according to Seye Sorinyan, the head of information technology in the voter’s registry department.