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Over the past month, one question seemed to be on everyone’s
mind at the economic conferences I attended in Europe: How did referees miss a
goal that England scored against Germany in their World Cup match?

Soccer reform wasn’t the stated focus of these conferences.

But thinking about how to improve the sport’s regulations comes
naturally to economists, especially after a few beers, because some of the same
principles should be applied to economic regulation.

The first is that the regulator – in this case, the referee – is
fallible. So the rules should make the regulator’s job as easy as possible.

Second, regulators can’t detect every irregularity, so the
emphasis has to be on getting the big stuff right. Finally, we want
performance, not regulators, to determine the outcome. The best regulators are
those we don’t notice.

In soccer, one head referee has to cover a “pitch” larger than
an American football field. He has three assistants who must stand on the
sideline. There is plenty of evidence beyond that missed English goal that
referees are indeed human. For example, referees call more fouls against the
visiting team, and against bigger players. So, what can be done?

ADD REFEREES Put at least one more ref on the field. (Basketball
has three referees on a much smaller court.) The idea is under consideration by
FIFA.

This is a no-brainer for the World Cup, which generates billions
of dollars in revenue, but in the world of financial regulation, adding
referees is costly. Governments will need to cut budgets, so we need to make
regulators more efficient, not more numerous.

ADD TECHNOLOGY Although instant replay showed that England’s
goal should have counted, FIFA officials have resisted using technology that
could help.

Many technological solutions, including embedding an electronic
chip in the ball, would make the determination of goal scoring faster and more
accurate.

Technology can help in other regulatory areas as well, and is a
good way to increase efficiency. For example, requiring banks to file their
compliance data electronically drastically reduces the time it takes to conduct
an audit.

INCREASE SCORING In the most recent tournament, the teams
together scored 2.27 goals per match, the second-lowest number in history. The
problem with low-scoring games is not just that they bore uncultured Americans
like me. Low scores magnify the importance of referees’ decisions. When a team
is awarded a penalty kick, it scores about 75 percent of the time, and that’s
very likely to affect the outcome of a low-scoring game.

In finance, a useful analogy is to increase the capital
requirements for banks. By requiring banks to have a bigger security blanket,
regulators themselves have greater margin for error.

REDEFINE ‘OFFSIDE’ The offside rule is now too hard to enforce.
When a player passes the ball downfield, no one on his team can have any part
of his body farther downfield than any defender, aside from the goalkeeper. The
linesman calling these violations runs along the sideline, keeping parallel
with the offensive player closest to being offside – all while watching the
ball.

This requires wide-angle vision that humans don’t possess. Short
of eliminating the rule, we might limit offside calls to players whose entire
body is ahead of the defenders. That should be easier to detect, and might lead
to more goals scored.

The general point is to make the judgment tasks of regulators
easier. The Securities and Exchange Commission had trouble assessing the
technical arguments that strongly suggested that Bernie Madoff was a crook, but
they could have easily had a rule requiring him to document his assets under
management.

RETHINK PENALTIES Another idea is to adjust the silly yellow/red
card penalty system. There are three levels of fouls in soccer, depending
partly on whether the action is “careless,” “reckless” or “using excessive
force.” It is asking too much to think a referee can distinguish between
careless and reckless on the fly.

A system similar to basketball’s, in which accumulated fouls
lead to expulsion, and “flagrant” fouls are heavily punished, would be easier
to put into practice, especially if an off-field official kept track of the
running totals.

The general principle here is that we don’t want small
differences in behavior, which are difficult for a regulator to distinguish, to
lead to large differences in punishment.

REDUCE FAKING Finally, there is the problem of diving. After
falling, players routinely writhe on the ground until the referee either
believes they’ve been injured, ignores them or, rarely, imposes penalties for
“simulation.” These instant injury judgments are very difficult for a single
on-field referee.

Such decisions might be turned over to referees watching video
monitors – and empowered to impose stiff penalties for faking. Diving is the
soccer version of the inevitable attempts to influence financial regulators, in
matters both legal and illegal. One can think of video replays as a
transparency requirement. We can’t expect to eliminate special pleading by
financiers for taxpayer bailouts, of course, but perhaps we can reduce the
impact of such efforts by opening them to public view through increased
disclosure about the process and its beneficiaries.

New rules in either soccer or finance shouldn’t put any more
burden on individual referees. As Larry Summers, the director of the National
Economic Council, said recently, in revising financial regulations, we do not
want to require anyone to get any smarter.

Richard H. Thaler is a
professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business
at the University of Chicago.

© 2010 New York Times News Service

Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re
still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 –
the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died – the hottest
such stretch on record.

Of course, you can’t infer trends in global temperatures from one
year’s experience. But ignoring that fact has long been one of the favorite
tricks of climate-change deniers: They point to an unusually warm year in the
past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!”
Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date – but the point is that
the record-breaking temperatures we’re currently experiencing have made a
nonsense argument even more nonsensical; at this point it doesn’t work even on
its own terms.

But will any of the deniers say “OK, I guess I was wrong,” and
support climate action? No. And the planet will continue to cook.

So why didn’t climate-change legislation get through the Senate?
Let’s talk first about what didn’t cause the failure, because there have been
many attempts to blame the wrong people.

First of all, we didn’t fail to act because of legitimate doubts
about the science. Every piece of valid evidence – long-term temperature
averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume,
melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows – points to a
continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.

Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior.

You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against
climate researchers – allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning
e-mail of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has
received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was
eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then
bought into by many in the news media. You don’t believe such things can
happen? Think Shirley Sherrod.

Did reasonable concerns about the economic impact of climate
legislation block action? No. It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort
of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of
markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to
put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in
limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s
growth rate.

So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that
killed action on climate change. What was it?

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow
the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a
price on carbon, but certain industries – above all, the coal and oil
industries – would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation
campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate
change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think
tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy.
Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of
funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has
spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch
Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two
decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously
opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You
already know the answer.

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the
aid of cowardice – above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a
threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted
their posts at the crucial moment.

There are a number of such climate cowards, but let me single out
one in particular: Sen. John McCain.

There was a time when McCain was considered a friend of the
environment. Back in 2003 he burnished his maverick image by co-sponsoring
legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas
emissions. He reaffirmed support for such a system during his presidential
campaign, and things might look very different now if he had continued to back
climate action once his opponent was in the White House. But he didn’t – and
it’s hard to see his switch as anything other than the act of a man willing to
sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years
added to his political career.

Alas, McCain wasn’t alone; and there will be no climate bill.
Greed, aided by cowardice, has triumphed. And the whole world will pay the
price.

(c) 2010 New York Times
News Service

The recurring crises in Jos, heartland of the Middle Belt, call
for prayers, vigilance, atonement and repentance. Too much blood has been shed;
too many dreams aborted in the evil and misguided belief that something good
can come out of violence.

In the last decade thousands of lives have been wasted. In the
first quarter of this year, close to 1000 people were killed in a mindless orgy
of violence. Since then combatants on the different sides of the divide have
perfected the stealthy act of smoking out their victims in the dead of the
night before hacking them to death.

It is an unconventional warfare, conceived by hatred, nurtured
by bigotry, and executed with cruelty. The latest harvest of deaths came
Saturday, July 17 in Mazzah village where another eight lives were snuffed out;
four alone from a clergyman’s household comprising of his wife, two children
and a grandson.

Regrettably, this wanton destruction of God’s children is a
manifestation of lingering ethno-religious-socio-economic problems, which have
not been addressed with the honesty of purpose they require.

The economic basis of the crises is rooted in the clash between
pastoral and agrarian communities in their search for land to pursue their
livelihoods.

Because the parties involved are broadly split into two dominant
ethnic groups, expressing two religious faiths, the conflict also wears an
ethnic and religious toga.

It is economic because largely itinerant Hausa-Fulani herdsmen,
in search of pastures to graze their cattle, periodically clash with Berom
farmers, who see the incursion of the pastoralists as an unfriendly invasion of
their farmlands.

Because the Berom are largely Christians and the Hausa-Fulani
predominantly Muslims, each party also sees the contest as a religious contest
for supremacy.

This explains why religious houses are easily targeted; churches
and mosques are burnt to shake adherents’ faith, confuse and disorient them.

The failure of governance over the years to manage this tension
between the two faiths has deepened distrust so much that access to government
patronage through employment, provision of social amenities, and business
contracts is seen through Christian-Muslim prisms. This cocktail of economic
injustice, religious persecution, communal frustration, ethnic subjugation, and
social discontent, has stunted efforts to build trust upon which progress,
peace and development are hinged.

The result is the easy recourse to violence to redress these
feelings of injustice.

Because past perpetrators of violence are seldom punished, the
state has sustained a culture of impunity, which encourages reprisal attacks,
in the unending cycle of each party wanting to prove to the other it does not
have a monopoly on violence.

The skewed federalism that we practice has also contributed to
this pervading insecurity.

A state governor, in theory, is described as the chief security
officer. In practice, internal security is in the hands of the police, a
federal institution. A state commissioner of police takes his directives from a
federally appointed Inspector General of Police. Intelligence passed to the
police at the communal or state level is subject to federal approval.

When the army is involved, presumably to help the police bolster
security, the pattern of uneven handedness also prevails. A perceived policy of
religious favoritism in the security network especially in the last three
decades lends credence to the growing charges that such centrally controlled
security machinery is inadequate and should give way for a more compact,
trust-engendering, community-based security arrangement that can respond faster
to states’ security needs.

Nigeria must make up her mind on the political philosophy of
development she wants to embrace. Our professed liberal democracy guarantees
religious freedom, which expects that no one should be molested while
exercising his/her constitutional rights. It has no room for burning of places
of worship, or vengeful killings while the security officials appear helpless.

Conflict resolution does not have a quick fix approach. It
requires a judicious blend of short and long-term measures that will deliver an
enduring outcome. In the short term, internal security should be reappraised.
Since the Jos metropolis is as important as its outskirts these dawn assaults
on poor citizens in the villages must be contained by expanding the frontiers
of protection. The state must partner with relevant citizen-groups to create
confidence-building measures that will engage the populace in the business of
reconstruction and drum in the message that nothing good comes out of destruction.
Lopsided appointments in the top echelons of our security outfits should be
avoided.

An equitable arrangement must also be fashioned to protect
economic rights of farmers while developing buffer zones for pastoral grazing
in the short term; ultimately the transition to modern ways of cattle husbandry
will bridge the gap between the past and future.

The time is now for all people of good conscience to partner
with the state in this search for peace, knowing that we are all God’s children
tied together to understand ourselves, appreciate our differences, but
acknowledge our common ancestry as creations of a truly awesome God.

The people of Abia State are living in a
perpetual, some would say primal, state of fear – and that is no
exaggeration. Observers will tell you that the security situation in
the state is grave. A recent report by this paper shows that citizens
have no faith that they are safe, even in the most basic way.

This is after all the state where armed bandits
now give victims notice before an onslaught. In June, when robbers went
into First Bank and Fidelity Bank right in the centre of Aba, they had
written to inform the banks of their intention.

And they kept their word.

It’s the stuff of urban legend, and it would have
been funny if it weren’t so tragic. What kind of spectacular failure
would our security services have to be that they cannot even prevent a
crime about which they have been pre-informed? There can only be two
options: either the forces are working in tandem with the crooks, or
they are just incapable of responding to the threats to life and
property.

Morbid as it sounds, we can only hope that the
former is the case. It is surely better to imagine that our lives can
be protected; that the government responsible for our well being has
the capacity to keep us safe and simply chooses not to do.

But to imagine that there is no minimum ability to
safeguard life and property; in essence that we live in a society where
anything goes, we shudder to imagine the consequences.

The new trend of course is kidnapping in the east,
of which Aba has now become the capital, starting from 2009. The
stories are truly fear inspiring. Residents speak of criminals using
sledgehammers to break through the wall of houses. It gives a whole new
meaning to brazen.

Anarchy, lawlessness: these are not words one
expects to associate with any political grouping in any civilized
society, much less a supposedly functioning democracy, but people who
live their lives and run their business in the area find that these are
the only words that capture the essence of their daily realities.
Beyond mere formality, little evidence exists in much of this region to
show that government still functions. And it’s been downhill for
everything.

Aba used to be famous as one of the country’s
commercial nerve centres. Compared to its reputation however, it has
now become a ghost town, and this goes beyond the fact that nightlife
has all but disappeared. Businesses are closing up on a regular basis,
and it goes without saying that no one is in a hurry to invest in the
area. Those who still have businesses standing complain about a drastic
drop in sales. Indeed, Aba used to be the place where customers buy in
bulk and bring to Lagos and other urban centres to sell. No more.

“Things have somersaulted in this town”, says Uche
Awa, the Chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association, Aba branch, all of
this leading to even more jobless youths lining the streets of a city
already bursting at the seams with the unemployed.

There are no empty words of faith or hope to offer
the people of Aba and other parts of the state. Their government –
including the governor, the police, and the president who is in charge
of the police force – seems to have abandoned them to their fate.

But of course, on hand to give much-needed
re-assurance to a panicked people is a senior police officer who calmly
tells us it is all in our minds. Ebere Onyeagoro, Area Commander of the
Aba Area Police Command, thinks the whole situation is greatly
exaggerated and the people of Aba just like a bit of drama. “The thing
is not so high,” he says. “The only thing is the people are blowing it
out of proportion. In those days there was more of it but now it is
only once in a while.” This is despite the fact that even corporate
organisations including Lever Brothers, Nigerian Breweries, Aba Textile
Mills and, most recently, Dana Motors have had to, yes, flee the area.

Well, at least – unlike the Imo State governor – he didn’t blame it on the Stock Exchange.

The fate of our languages was brought into focus
recently during the second International Conference on the Extinction
of Igbo Language held in Owerri, Imo State. The Minister of Labour and
Productivity, Chukwuemeka Wogu, who represented President Goodluck
Jonathan, made a revelation that should not surprise anyone.

Quoting the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), Mr. Wogu said that the Igbo
language might become extinct in the next fifty years.

The fact is that it is not only the Igbo language
that is under threat of extinction in the country. All our indigenous
languages are endangered species and there seem to be no visible
efforts to rescue them. A few years back Babatunde Fafunwa, a professor
of education and one-time minister of education conducted a controlled
research in Ife where some pupils were taught all subjects, including
the sciences, in Yoruba and the others in English. At the end of the
experiment both groups were examined and those taught in Yoruba
performed better than those who had their lessons in English. At the
end of the experiment Mr. Fafunwa campaigned for the adoption of
indigenous languages as medium of instruction in schools across the
country. His recommendation was implemented for a while, and then
abandoned.

The endangered status of our indigenous languages
has become more pronounced in the new world order, represented by
globalisation, and with the advent of the borderless Internet, which
has succeeded in giving English fresh dominance at the expense of our
local languages.

This is mistaken. In Japan children are taught all
subjects including the core sciences in Japanese and the country today
is a leader in the all facets of science and arts. Russia too has
demonstrated this in its arts and literature.

Its world renowned writers such as Leo Tolstoy,
Fyodor Dostoevsky and a host of others wrote in their native languages
and attained world fame based on the translations of their works.

In Africa, this debate has been ongoing and a
writer such as Ngugi wa’ Thiongo has since decided to write in his
native Gikuyu language and translate to English later.

In recent times some State Houses of Assembly have
resolved to conduct debates in local dialects as a way of encouraging
the revival of the local tongue. In Anambra State, Governor Peter Obi
has outlawed the treatment of Igbo as ‘vernacular’ in public schools,
while his Edo counterpart Adam Oshiomhole has advocated the teaching of
Edo language at both primary and secondary school levels.

We appreciate these gestures but the way to
achieve what they intend goes beyond tokenism. Structures must be put
in place to help achieve the aim. For example literature publishing in
local languages should receive government support.

The huge task ahead is however not for the
government alone; parents and teachers have important roles to play as
well. The idea of treating our local languages as inferior to English
or any other foreign language must be discouraged.

Language is bound up with our history and identity and our sense of
who we are as a people. Our local languages must not be allowed to
succumb to the ravaging flood of globalisation. We must not allow our
local languages to die and end up on the UNESCO’s listing of ‘dead’
languages. This can – and will – happen if we fail to speak our
languages, and to teach our children to speak and to write them.

Inhabiting
cyberspace is something that should suit wanderlust. Cyberspace
provides a relatively free environment for one to migrate from one
location to the other. Cybernomadism, the habit of constantly migrating
from one location in cyberspace to another, seems very attractive for
many reasons.

With the collapse
of community in real life, or at least the serious threat to community,
online migration is already a kind of coping strategy. Human beings
must look for communities to replace those they have abandoned or
forfeited. So, first of all, one escapes online to see if one could
meet those with whom one could commune. But, of course, even when human
beings mutually hallucinate about their alternative cyber communities,
they have not quite abandoned their humanity. Even as fictional
characters, they come to those online communities with the same
tendencies that endangered their actual communities. In fact, conflicts
in online communities are intensified by the very fact that members of
such communities interpret and pursue their freedoms in ways that
frequently endanger interpersonal relationship and create instability
in community life.

Cyberspace,
especially the Internet, frequently creates new attractions,
introducing new environments with exciting features such as free email
services, blogs, storage locations, and so on. Free services have
always been ways of baiting the crowds and using their presence to
sell. Reduce or remove the free services and you find that the
migratory tendency in online life would be reduced. The fact that
YahooMail, for instance, is free means that one can have an intra-mail
service migration, creating several Yahoo accounts, or maintain several
email accounts with Yahoo,

Gmail, Fastmail,
Hotmail, AOL, Excite, etc along with official institutional email
accounts. As they say in Nigerian pidgin, “Who talk say free ting no
sweet?” As an experimental and evolving world, cyberspace is home for
many in search of adventure into ideas, practices, and applications of
self. Already, this attraction has become an addiction for many,
heightening their Netizenship (being a subject of the Net) in ways that
affect their domestic and professional responsibilities and
relationships tremendously.

The addiction to
online life seems to be based on the principle that says, “keep
moving.” When one tries to stop, one experiences the fear of having
missed something wonderful in that other online location. Part of the
desire is to be everywhere and nowhere. To stop permanently somewhere
is to be crippled. The pleasures of wanderlust are not complete in one
journey; never.

The problems that
some Netizens encounter in locations they have migrated to online also
make them to want to keep moving, for example finding yourself in an
email service that is frequently under virus attack, or that has no
effective way of checking spam mails, would naturally be frustrating
and you would want to pack and leave. How does one stay with an email
service that cannot prevent spam mail about Viagra and that invites one
to increase the size of one’s penis? Definitely, one would tell
oneself, “no, this is not the place to be,” or “this is not yet the
destination.” But email homesteading appears always to be temporary,
not only because there could be an online Katrina that could demolish
the home and erase all of one’s important mail, but also because one is
not quite sure that home is actually a particular location. One is not
quite sure that the symbol “@” in emailing has not completely turned
one into a rock or a stone statue, trapping one in ways that entail
predictability and controllability.

The cybernomad redefines home as a location that also moves, and such a location could be an idea or a culture.

What we therefore
call “home” becomes a mere stopping point, mere “bus stop” where one
has the opportunity of disembarking for few moments to stretch one’s
legs, buy or share some communication, and then continue the journey.

One could make a
stop at a listserv where there are many touts or pundits, or touting
pundits, and hang around to enjoy all the “garagara”. It would be some
fun to join in the “garagara” about how people have made ideas their
home, at least to understand that it is part of the excitement of
homesteading and that one could use each homesteading to redefine and
authorize one’s voice within a fictional heteroglossia.

Perhaps one will return someday to that location from which one
escaped. One playful contemporary Igbo proverb advises: “Onye mee n’afa
nna n’ihu, ya mekwaa ya n’azu, maka o maghi ma o bu n’azu ka Jeso
ga-esi bia ozo” (One who makes the sign of the cross in the front
should also do it at the back, for one is not sure whether Jesus will
come from behind next time). Abandoned homes do not abandon themselves;
they too keep moving to some newness. It is left for the cybernomad to
learn to return to the newness of the old abandoned homes.

Nigerian
Writer, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani recently won the Commonwealth Book Prize
(Africa Region) for her book “I do Not Come To you By Chance” which is
a brilliant fictional account of the Nigeria cyber crime story. In the
book, Kingsley the main protagonist, a young man eager to help his
family, loses his idealism and joins his mothers infamous brother,
Boniface aka Cash Daddy in a successful and lucrative crime syndicate
that relieves unsuspecting but often greedy westerners of their hard
earned money from the safety of cyber cafes littered all over Nigerian
urban centers.

The story of cyber
crime in Nigeria is now so familiar to the point of cliché. The
perpetrators have been so aptly named “Yahoo Yahoo boys”, a term that
has now joined our lexicon along with such other words like “maga” and
“mugu” both of which describes victims of the activities of the yahoo
yahoo boys. However, in attempting a definition here so as to put this
discourse in proper context, I would refer to Cyber Crime as the use of
computers and or computer networks to commit crime. Computer assisted
crimes include but are not limited to e-mail scams, hacking, cyber
theft, credit card theft, impersonation, spread of hostile software and
cyber terrorism.

Worldwide, we enjoy
negative popularity as a criminally minded people with Robert Mallet,
former US deputy Secretary of Commerce for example complaining once
that the more aid the US was giving to Nigeria, the more they were
losing to Nigeria through cybercrime. He alleged that US citizens lose
approximately $2 billion a year to Nigerian fraud of all sorts.

Similarly,
according to the 2007 Internet Crime report of the Crime Complaint
Center (IC3), Nigeria ranks third among the cybercrime committing
countries in the world. In the US alone, Nigeria scam e-mails accounted
in 2007 for 1.1 percent of the top IC3 complaint categories received.

The enormity of
this problem has long been appraised. Several Nigerian administrations
have in the past taken steps towards checking the vice. In 2004 the
Federal Government established the Nigeria Cyber working Group (NCWG).
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has also been
working to monitor public cafes, stopping night browsing and tracking
suspected parcels procured fraudulently online.

As sincere as some
of these efforts have been, they have not been as successful as would
have been desired thus the need to develop more result oriented steps
to fight the crime. You cannot fight today’s crime with yesterday’s
technology. A successful fight against cybercrime requires not just
Information Technology Knowledge, but Information Technology
Intelligence on the part of the security agencies. They must be
equipped with the right skills, the know-how and the insight necessary
to rise to the challenge. In this regard, I advocate the development of
software that can monitor Internet usage in the country without
interfering with users’ right to privacy with the aim of tracking and
arresting fraudsters.

New and more
defined laws against cybercrime must be enacted to give bite to the
efforts of law enforcement agencies. These new laws must spell out
stiffer penalties and machinery for proper enforcement must be put in
place. One of such machinery is the dedication of a special court for
corruption cases in general. This will ensure speedy litigation and
punishment of fraudsters and would in a positive feedback mechanism act
as a deterrent to would be fraudsters.

Besides the laws
and their enforcement, there is the need for advocacy, public
enlightenment and national re-orientation. There has to be a conscious
effort both on the part of government and civil society to take the
fight against cybercrime into the consciousness of Nigerians, to
highlight its negativity and its consequences and to emphasise that
hard work remains the surest path to fame and fortune. There has to be
a return of civic education into our curriculum at the primary and post
primary levels with the aim of instilling in the young minds a sense of
responsibility towards their nation and the pride and dignity of honest
labour. On the other hand, private organisations should come up with
initiatives that exploit our rapidly expanding pop and music culture to
pass the same message.

An interesting
initiative in that regard comes to mind. In February 2010, we witnessed
the release of “Maga no need pay” a music video produced by a
collaboration of popular Nigerian artists amongst which were Cobhams,
Modele, Omawumi, MI, Rooftop MC’s, and Wordsmith. The video was to
support the Microsoft Internet Safety, Security and Privacy Initiative
for Nigeria (MISSPIN) aimed at fighting cybercrime among youths.

Finally, it is
important to note that cybercrime cannot be divorced from the
widespread corruption, harsh economic climate and ubiquitous poverty in
the land. To fight crime, you must attack the cause. Attacking the
cause in this context comes by the way of good governance, transparent
electoral processes and accountability in government all of which
translates into food on the table, more good jobs, better schools, a
fairer investment climate and ultimately a reduction in the tendency of
our citizens to want to go into cybercrime.

This piece is an excerpted version of the 1st runner up in the YGC/MISSPIN National Anti Cyber crime essay competition 2010.

“The people deserve the government that they have.” —Karl Marx

Last week we were told that Attahiru Jega, INEC
chairman, wanted N55billion to successfully rehash the voter’s
register. The sum of N55billion was what you would have been told if
you read NEXT. If you read The Punch, you would have been told it is
72. Between all of the papers, those were the limits. For the purpose
of this write-up, let us work with the smaller sum.

Prof. Jega drew on the example of Bangladesh in making his claims.

According to him, and he is quite correct, it took
the Bangladeshis eight months to complete their voters’ registration.
We have four months. He also said that the Bangladeshis completed their
registration with 30 000 units of the scanning machine. Then he pointed
out that the machines cost $2000 per unit.

30 000 units at a cost of $2000 each would come to $60,000,000.

Multiply that by 150 (converting to Naira), and we
get N9,000,000,000. Unless my maths is incredibly faulty, that is
N9billion! Even if we make room for a doubling of the number of
machines needed because we have half the time that Bangladesh had, we
would still arrive at N18billion. So where does this extra N37billion
that would make the lower limit of N55billion come from?

More questions, fewer answers…

When I first raised these questions, some people
tried to justify Jega’s maths. Some reminded me of what it would cost
to pay the staff who would complete the exercise. Others said that
because of Nigeria’s terrain that we should take into account the
diverse terrain (Nigeria has a more diverse climate and geography than
Bangladesh), so getting the equipment to the locations would be
costlier.

I think that is hogwash given the amounts involved.

For the record, Bangladesh is almost all swampy
rainforest like Nigeria’s south, so they probably would have more
difficulty in getting things around. But that is nit picking.

The important point here is this: why is it that
our leaders never give us a detailed breakdown of what the money is
for, and how they intend to use such monies?

Would Prof. Jega not have neatly avoided this
furore if he had told us, machines would cost N9 – 18billion, and this
is precisely how we intend to make use of the N37 – 46billion remaining
from the N55billion we are asking for?

On Monday morning we were informed that our House
of Representatives have approved the bumper sum of N17billion for the
two-day jamboree that is going to be our independence celebrations. You
can get the breakdown of the expenditures at NEXT’s website so I won’t
go into all that here. What is interesting however, is that this
breakdown is not detailed. The approved budget was done only in lump
sums for the subheads only!

To cap it all, Ayo Adeseun who is the head of the
Committee on Appropriation refused to offer explanations. He claimed
that he needed to consult the records before offering explanations?
Would any of you give money to someone who cannot tell you what for and
how he intends to use the money?

Even more interestingly, the chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Appropriation refused to speak to the press.

At the end of the day, all of this is possible
because the Nigerian people never complain. Yes, we do moan in the
privacy of our homes, but we almost never take those complaints
outside, and when we do, we are too easily divided, settled and
dispersed.

Our leaders do not feel responsible to us for
their actions or inactions, and this is what the National Assembly is
clearly displaying.

Despite our rejection of the independence
jamboree, they are going ahead to approve large sums of money that
would no doubt find their way into private pockets. The average
Nigerian would remain oblivious to all of this…

In more serious countries with serious people, a
general strike would be in the offing. Come to think of it, N3.8billion
to replace carpets at the International Conference Centre?

Damn!