Tunde Okunoye: From Oluwole to NIMC - Institutional trust, digital IDs and digital finance in Nigeria
08. Jul
The DigID Team of Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) invites you to this upcoming workshop given by Tunde Okunoye (University of the Witwatersrand).
- Wednesday, July 8 / 12:30 – 14:00
- Room: C40.254 (Central Building, 2nd floor)
- Registration is not necessary.
Political scientists have long argued that the public bureaucracies have long been sites which have enabled the criminalization of the state in Africa. There is an extensive scholarship arguing that identification bureaucracies are notable examples of this phenomenon. This situation has triggered interventions from international development agencies like the World Bank's ID4D program which have sought to replace the corruption-prone paper-based national ID systems in Africa with biometrics. I also argue that although the World Bank’s ID4D program was an attempt to bypass these institutional weaknesses inherent in Nigeria’s document issuing bureaucracies (through embedding biometrics to strengthen the integrity of identification documents), there has been a continuity of this prebendalism-fueled corruption, through digitally-enabled means. This has happened because prebendalism, and the corruption it fuels, still holds sway among Nigeria’s elite as the explanatory logic governing public life, despite the change of actors, and despite the attempt of reform by the World Bank. This situation also has consequences for the integrity of the emerging digital finance sector in Nigeria.
Tunde Okunoye is a Doctoral Fellow under the Standard Bank Chair in African Trust Infrastructures at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg South Africa, where he is affiliated with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) and the Department of Political Studies. His PhD Thesis is titled, "Engineering or Undermining Trust? Biometric IDs and Digital Credit in Nigeria". More broadly, his research focuses on three strands of work. The first on the Politics and Governance of Institutions, Financialization, and Technology, and its impacts on access to services and development in Africa. The second on Technology and Cyber policy, including digital access, cybersecurity, and media and communications in hostile/repressive political contexts. The third on Health policy, for example the impact of Technology on access to healthcare and health information. He was a Fellow of the African School on Internet Governance (2018), an Open Technology Fund Senior Fellow at the Tor Project (2019-2020), and a Fellow and Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University (2020-2024). Previously he was a Staff Researcher at Paradigm Initiative, a Technology Policy non-profit based in Lagos Nigeria.