This should be about my third article on social media in the last six weeks. No doubt, the social media – and the Internet – have radically altered the way we do things. In the past, I’ve written and drawn attention to some vices that the phenomenon has thrown up which, unfortunately, has led to crimes such as murder and numerous cases of fraud. Whenever I sit with our students, one of my main concerns has always been what they do with social media platforms and how it impacts their education and lifestyles.
I had an opportunity to engage some of them last week and our discussion deviated from the usual into Nigeria’s certification of being Ebola free by the World Health Organization (WHO). One of them rightly pointed out that social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook played a prominent role in creating the awareness that led to the containment of the dreaded disease that kills more than 70 per cent of its victims. Most Nigerians – this columnist inclusive – were worried that the disease might assume epidemic proportion because of the “Nigerian way” of handling things.
Because of the clinical way it was handled, the students were convinced that all is not lost with the country as they believe they may still have a stake in the future. But one of them argued that curtailing Ebola was successful because “it has to do with death.” This drew a thunderous laughter from all. The lesson for me, however, is that Nigerians can do almost anything if they put their mind to it and have the right set of people handling issues. I ask myself, would we have had this level of success if a politician or non-professional were handling the Health ministry? That’s food for thought.
I was glad a few days after our discussion when the Minister of Communications Technology, Dr. Omobola Johnson corroborated our views by stating that the use of a combination of an Android app, Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in Nigeria’s fight to contain Ebola. The minister said this while delivering a policy statement during the International Telecommunications Union 2014 Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan, Republic of Korea.
She revealed that the phone app helped in reducing reporting times of infections by 75 per cent. She said that test results were scanned to tablets and uploaded to emergency databases and field teams got text message alerts on their phones informing them of the results. Johnson reiterated that the combination of the Internet and mobile cellular phones had opened up tremendous opportunities for countries like Nigeria.
According to her, a number of factors drive the sharp increase in mobile use, “particularly, the additional ways in which mobile phones are being used in Nigeria. Beyond conducting voice conversations, mobile phones are often the preferred channel for receiving data and for conducting transactions in Nigeria, therefore making phones an indispensable tool used as cameras, wallets, shops, music players, movie screens, and information or service centres of Nigerians.”
At the last Ngozi Agbo memorial lecture held in the University of Lagos, the online editor of this newspaper, Mr. Lekan Otufodurin took out time to educate the students on how social media has impacted positively on almost all endeavours of life. Using Journalism as plank, he took them down memory lane on how reporters in the past send in their stories.
Since there are few typewriters in the newsroom then, a reporter will write his stories on sheets of paper and pass it on to a typesetter to type. After that, the stories would be proof read and returned back to the typesetter for adjustments. When this is done, it is then taken to the editor who further edits the report and the process continues until the final copy is approved. For those of us in the writing business, when we look back we thank the innovators of the computer and the internet because they’ve made life so easy. Today a reporter can file his stories from anywhere in the world at the click of a button!
As the positive change continues, no one should be in doubt that the mobile Internet revolution spreading across the globe has come to stay. The challenge would be to create a viable environment for the proliferation of lower-priced devices, increased investment in network infrastructure, and increase availability of spectrum for mobile broadband in the knowledge that these will further drive growth in the Information and Communication Technology sector.
The revolution has indeed impacted positively on the education sector as there are loads of academic resource materials online and one can now earn a credible degree online as well. To further add to its credibility, there are now software’s that guide against plagiarism so that researchers can be original and innovative in their research. Many Nigerians are now exploring this online option of improving on their education, business and jobs.
In just over a decade, we have seen mobile subscription increase from 87 million active SIM cards to over 131 million and mobile Internet subscription stood at 67 million as of June 2014 according to the National Communications Commission (NCC). This means that close to half of the country’s population are hooked to the internet either through their phones or tablets.
Beyond just using phones and accessing data, the sector has been impacting positively on the economy. Mrs. Johnson pointed out in the address I mentioned earlier that: “The ICT sector’s contribution to Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product is growing and was about 10.44 per cent in 2013. The sector also indirectly affects GDP through its influence on other key sectors. For example, in the 2013, ICTs were responsible for 12 per cent of the value added by the finance and insurance sector to GDP. In terms of social growth, ICTs are helping government to meet health objectives, and are amplifying benefits in the education and agriculture sectors.”
Talking about agriculture, I was made to also understand that farmers are now contacted on phone by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development whenever new suppliers of fertilizer arrives through an initiative introduced by the minister Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Known as the Electronic Wallet System which allows smallholder farmers to receive electronic vouchers for subsidized seeds and fertilizers directly on their mobile phones and enable them to pay for farm inputs from private sector agricultural input dealers.
The system – I was also made to understand – has reached over 6 million farmers and enhanced food security for 30 million persons in rural farm households. Women farmers, previously marginalized under the old fertilizer distribution system, now have better yielding fields with subsidized farm inputs received on their mobile phones.
With the success of the electronic wallet system, Nigeria has become the first country in Africa to reach farmers with subsidized farm inputs through their mobile phones. The impact is already being noticed beyond Nigeria with several African countries, Brazil, India and China now expressing interest in adopting it.
There may still be some who have fears that technology – and by inference – social media may be going “too far” by replacing it with teachers. To answer that, let me take a portion of Bill Gates book “The Road Ahead.”
Gates wrote: “Some fear that technology will dehumanize formal education. But anyone who has seen kids working together around a computer, the way my friends and I did in 1968, or watched exchanges between students in classrooms separated by oceans, know that technology can humanize the educational environment.”
No doubt, the information superhighway has given us access to seemingly unlimited information, anytime and anyplace. I often encourage our students – both on and off these pages – to make best use of the information at their disposal. Previous generations never had this opportunity. But the sad part for me in all this is that people are reading less in an era of unsurpassed information generation.
