Today in Osogbo, Osun State, the state government will be launching 'Opon Imo' – the Tablet of Knowledge – "a standalone e-learning tablet that provides senior secondary students with the learning materials required to prepare for school-leaving examinations."
Each tablet (it resembles an iPad) is pre-loaded with more than 50 textbooks, a set of tutorial questions, past questions, and education-based games. (For those interested in learning more there's a Frequently Asked Questions page on the website – www.oponimo.com – which tries to address a lot of the queries that might arise from the public).
I had the privilege of seeing and handling the tablet a few months ago, while it was still being readied for launch. I found it interesting that public school children – generally much less privileged than their private school colleagues – will be getting the opportunity to own and use devices that have come to define the world in which we live.
The state government says it has a plan to distribute 150,000 of these devices. The government says the project is "expected to radically democratise access to learning, regardless of means, location or status."
To me, the initiative is a radical idea within the Nigerian context, and there will be many of us watching to see it succeed. Especially considered against the backdrop of the successes and failures of the One Laptop Per Child project, which has in the last seven years seen the US-based NGO behind the initiative distribute more than two million low-cost laptops in 42 developing countries. (OLPC exists in Nigeria, but in a small pilot project status – from information available on its website, it has only distributed about 6,000 laptops in Nigeria, across a few states).
There's, however, a fascinating story from OLPC, told by the founder, Nicholas Negroponte. In April 2012, it dropped boxes of solar-powered Motorola Xoom tablets (pre-loaded, like Opon Imo, with books and games) in a number of Ethiopian villages, where the children had had no prior access whatsoever to formal education. This is how Negroponte describes what happened afterwards:
"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs (in English) in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some mischievous elements in our organisation or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."
Amazing. You can therefore imagine the size of the possibilities latent in the Opon Imo project; imagine what technological revolutions might be born over the next decade from having tens of thousands of laptops in the hands of an entire generation of schoolchildren.
Possibilities aside, it's crucial that the Opon Imo implementation team pay attention to existing projects like the OLPC. In my opinion, as Nigerians we need to work harder at learning from the past, to improve our chances future success.
The devil is always in the details. On paper, there's no lack of fantastic ideas in Nigeria. But our real expertise lies in bungling implementation. Inflated contracts (I'm sure there are still government agencies in this country buying basic desktop computers at a N1m per unit), obsolete equipment, lack of the will to implement in the face of vested interests – the reasons abound.
Look at how we bungled the National Identity Card scheme. (Now, the National Identity Management Commission is trying to revive the project; recently announcing a deal with Mastercard to roll out a pilot involving 13 million Identity Cards embedded with e-payment capability).
Look also at the Lagos CCTV coverage project. Four years after the initial announcement and pilot phase deployment, the project now seems to be in limbo. It's unclear who's actually now responsible for it – the federal or the state government?
The road to the Nigeria we seek to build (perhaps "rebuild" is a more accurate word) will be paved with the intelligent and impassioned use of technology.
The most compelling evidence of how far technology has come to change our lives can be seen in the mobile phones. A decade ago, they were luxury items – today, everyone you know has got at least one. They have become tools of economic empowerment (powering everything from business advertising to mobile banking) and political empowerment (electoral transparency now stands a better chance in a world in which every voter has a camera-enabled mobile phone – in fact one state governor was recently seen using his own phone to record the ill-fated Nigerian Governors' Forum's chairmanship election).
We should be seriously thinking of how we can apply technology to transform our education in interesting ways – empowering students and teachers, and making it harder for administrators to get away with mediocrity and dishonesty.
We can all agree that as a country we've failed our youths in terms of education. More than 10 million children of school age are out of school. For the millions who are in school, what they're getting doesn't seem like much of an education. Budgetary allocations to schools are delayed, and when they arrive, are stolen. There's nothing to show for the almost N1bn allocated to the National Commission for Nomadic Education between 2006 and 2009. A couple of interesting investigative reports by NEXT and Premium Times unearthed shocking accounts of fraudulent spending by that commission – millions of naira spent on such things as "VIP toilets", and invisible football fields.
The real tragedy is that no one will ever be compelled to refund these funds, or be prosecuted for the theft. And by that we reinforce the message that it's acceptable to steal funds meant to educate the future generation. I'd be willing to argue that there's a link between the corruption in the Nomadic Commission and the unfolding tragedy that is Boko Haram. A country is in deep trouble when children are being paid N5,000 to burn the schools they should be attending.
At the university level, I think it's a tragedy that our universities are not placing a premium on adapting to the times. There's a shocking disconnect between real life and the ivory tower. On the one hand, we have the mobile sector revolution, on the other, hardly any university-driven courses of instruction to build a generation of engineers who will get a chance to build Nigeria's own ZTEs and Huaweis.
I was indeed very excited when a friend who teaches at Bells University told me recently students could study telecommunications engineering there. Our oldest universities appear to be stuck in the age – so in Ibadan (which I attended, and of which I'm a proud alumnus) you can get a degree in Classics or Anthropology but none in software design or music entrepreneurship.
Our Universities of Agriculture appear to be creating everything but a generation of farmers who will inspire people to take to the farms with the same passion with which many are currently buying Big Brother and MBGN and X-factor forms.
These are the sort of debates we should be having across the country – how do we fix our education system? How do we restore in our youths a passion for learning (as opposed to an obsession with paper certificates), and seeking to convert that learning into professional and personal fulfilment?
It's what, in an ideal world, the governors should be gathering to discuss. (I'm here wondering how many governors have sat down with Governor Rauf Aregbesola to ask questions about the Opon Imo idea, with an eye on replicating it).
Alas, from that clandestine NGF video recording, it appears that many of our governors are most animated when they're playing politics at the basest level; issues like "democratising" access to education for young persons can always wait until after all rig-gable elections have been rigged, and after all rabble-rousing press conferences have been conducted.
