In 2016, I bought two voting machines online for less than $100 apiece. I didn’t even have to search the dark web. I found them on eBay.Surely, I thought, these machines would have strict guidelines for lifecycle control like other sensitive equipment, like medical devices. I was wrong. I was able to purchase a pair of direct-recording electronic voting machines and have them delivered to my home in just a few days. I did this again just a few months ago. Alarmingly, they are still available to buy online.WIRED OPINIONABOUTBrian Varner is a Symantec special projects researcher on the Cyber Security Services team, leading the company’s CyberWar Games and emerging technologies development. He previously worked at the National Security Agency as a tactical analyst.If getting voting machines delivered to my door was shockingly easy, getting inside them proved to be simpler still. The tamper-proof screws didn’t work, all the computing equipment was still intact, and the hard drives had not been wiped. The information I found on the drives, including candidates, precincts, and the number of votes cast on the machine, were not encrypted. Worse, the “Property Of” government labels were still attached, meaning someone had sold government property filled with voter information and location data online, at a low cost, with no consequences. It would be the equivalent of buying a surplus police car with the logos still on it.My aim in purchasing voting machines was not to undermine our democracy. I’m a security researcher at Symantec who started buying the machines as part of an ongoing effort to identify their vulnerabilities and strengthen election security. In 2016, I was conducting preliminary research for our annual CyberWar Games, a company-wide competition where I design simulations for our employees to hack into. Since it was an election year, I decided to create a scenario incorporating the components of a modern election system. But if I were a malicious actor seeking to disrupt an election, this would be akin to a bank selling its old vault to an aspiring burglar.I reverse-engineered the machines to understand how they could be manipulated. After removing the internal hard drive, I was able to access the file structure and operating system. Since the machines were not wiped after they were used in the 2012 presidential election, I got a great deal of insight into how the machines store the votes that were cast on them. Within hours, I was able to change the candidates’ names to be that of anyone I wanted. When the machine printed out the official record for the votes that were cast, it showed that the candidate’s name I invented had received the most votes on that particular machine.This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines—those that were used in the 2016 election—are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as “next generation,” and still in use today, are worse than they were before—dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation.To be fair, there has been some progress since the last Presidential election, including the development of internal policies for inspecting the machines for evidence of tampering. But while state and local election systems have been conducting risk assessments, we’ve also seen an 11-year-old successfully hacking a simulated voting website at DefCon, for fun.A recent in-depth report on voting machine vulnerabilities concluded that a perpetrator would need physical access to the voting machine to exploit it. I concur with that assessment. When I reverse-engineered voting machines in 2016, I noticed that they were using a smart card as a means of authenticating a user and allowing them to vote. There are many documented liabilities in certain types of smart cards that are used, from Satellite receiver cards to bank chip cards. By using a $15 palm-sized device, my team was able to exploit a smart chip card, allowing us to vote multiple times.In most parts of the public and private sector, it would be unthinkable that such a sensitive process would be so insecure. Try to imagine a major bank leaving ATMs with known vulnerabilities in service nationwide, or a healthcare provider identifying a problem in how it stores patient data, then leaving it unpatched after public outcry. It just doesn’t fit with our understanding of cyber security in 2018.Those industries are governed by regulations that outline how sensitive information and equipment must be handled. The same common-sense regulations don’t exist for election systems. PCI and HIPAA are great successes that have gone a long way in protecting personally identifiable information and patient health conditions. Somehow, there is no corollary for the security of voters, their information and, most importantly, the votes they cast.Since these machines are for sale online, individuals, precincts, or adversaries could buy them, modify them, and put them back online for sale. Envision a scenario in which foreign actors purchased these voting machines. By reverse engineering the machine like I did to exploit its weaknesses, they could compromise a small number of ballot boxes in a particular precinct. That’s the greatest fear of election security researchers: not wholesale flipping of millions of votes, which would be easy to detect, but a small, public breach of security that would sow massive distrust throughout the entire election ecosystem. If anyone can prove that the electoral process can be subverted, even in a small way, repairing the public’s trust will be far costlier than implementing security measures.I recognize that states are fiercely protective of their rights. But there’s an opportunity here to develop nationwide policies and security protocols that would govern how voting machines are secured. This could be accomplished with input from multiple sectors, in a process similar to the development of the NIST framework—now widely recognized as one of the most comprehensive cybersecurity frameworks in use.Many of the rules we believe should be put into place are uncomplicated and inexpensive. For starters, we can institute lifecycle management of the components that make up the election system. By simply regulating and monitoring the sale of used voting machines more closely, we would create a huge barrier to bad actors.The fact that information is stored unencrypted on hard drives simply makes no sense in the current threat environment. That they can be left on devices, unencrypted, that are then sold on the open market is malpractice.Finally, we must educate our poll workers and voters to be aware of suspicious behavior. One vulnerability we uncovered in voting machines is the chip card used in electronic voting machines. This inexpensive card can be purchased for $15 and programmed with simple code that allows the user to vote multiple times. This is something that we believe could be avoided with well-trained, alert poll workers.Time and effort are our main obstacles to better policies. When it comes to securing our elections, that’s a low bar. We must do better; the alternative is too scary to consider in our current environment. Through increased training, public policy, and a little common sense, we can greatly enhance the security and integrity of our electoral process.WIRED Opinion publishes pieces written by outside contributors and represents a wide range of viewpoints. Read more opinions here.More Election Coverage from WIREDHere are the races to watch on election nightInside Facebook’s plan to safeguard the 2018 electionIn Texas, techies are trying to turn the red state bluePaper and the case for going low-tech in the voting boothIt’s true: tech workers overwhelmingly support Democrats in 2018Fake Beto O’Rourke texts expose new playground for trollsSTEM candidates try to ride a pro-science wave to CongressIs the US leaning red or blue? It all depends on your mapMeet the man with a radical plan to use blockchain for voting
October 2018
Catholic Church in Nigeria has reacted to the call for the sack of Bishop Matthew Kukah from the National Peace Committee by the Buhari Media Organisation, BMO.
The Church also noted that Buhari, who met with Muslim clerics in Aso Rock recently and solicited their support for his re-election in 2019, to which the clerics pledged their support, has no right to talk about clerics being partisan.
The BMO had called for Kukah’s withdrawal over his presence at the reconciliatory meeting between former President Olusegun Obasanjo and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.
The Caritas Nigeria and Justice Development and Peace Commission, JDPC, condemned the call for Kukah’s withdrawal in a statement by the Director Church and Society, Catholic Secretariat of Nigeria, Rev. Fr. Evaristus Bassey.
JDPC, which is an organ of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria for relief and development pointed out that it was mischievous, since a man cannot commit an offence by doing his job.
The statement said, “The animosity between ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar his erstwhile deputy, has long remained a national embarrassment. Bishop Kukah and the peace committee have been making efforts behind the scenes for their reconciliation.
“These attempts have been on long before Atiku became the presidential candidate of the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP).
“If the members of the BMO read Kukah’s explanatory notes, they would not come up with the misleading call for his withdrawal from the peace committee. That the move was eventually hijacked and politicised is not Bishop Kukah’s fault at all.
“How can the president who met with Muslim clerics to endorse him on one hand, goes to an interfaith conference to berate other clerics for being partisan. Is it just because the notable clerics were involved in a reconciliation move that had opposition elements as the object.”
The statement added that in 2015 when Buhari was contesting for the presidency, he visited the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria and was given audience.
“Why has it suddenly become a crime for a National Peace Committee convener to do his job of facilitating peace between two national figures?
“What we want to let the BMO know is that a Catholic Bishop is ordinarily so well trained and experienced, and so full of the sense of the common good, that the only partisanship he may have is what promotes the good of the poor.
“If the fear of losing elections that is the main concern here, the BMO should be rest assured that the election outcome would depend mostly on how voters assess this government, and not whether Kukah reconciled Obasanjo with Atiku, that is, if the elections would be free and fair,” he said.
The Nigerian Governors Forum, NGF, has explained why it’s afraid of the upward review of the minimum wage.
The Chairman of the Forum, Gov. Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara, gave the explanation while briefing journalists on the outcome of the forum’s meeting held on Wednesday in Abuja.
It is recalled that the Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr Chris Ngige, on Wednesday, restated federal government’s stance on the new minimum wage.
Yari said that the issue was not just on agreed figure to be paid by the governors, but the “ability or resources to take care of that agreed minimum wage.”
He said that the forum had made it clear that the governors were not against any upward review of salaries or against the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) to get minimum wage reviewed.
“But, the problem of state is the capacity to pay what is agreed. As we are talking today we are struggling with N18,000. Some of the states are paying 35 per cent, some 50 per cent and still some states have salary arrears,” Yari said.
“So, it is not about only reviewing it but how we are going to get the resources to cater for it.”
Yari added that the National President of NLC, Comrade Ayuba Wabba, was invited to brief the forum on states performance in the use of London and Paris Club refunds.
“So, we invited the National President of NLC to give us details on how some states performed. Some other states that are not up to date, where are they,” he said.
“So they have signed Memorandum of Understanding with the NLC at the national level and their representative in states on when they are going to overcome the issue of salary.”
He described the reports as false and embarrassing. In a statement by Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Otunba Dayo Adeneye, Amosun said: “Those behind the unfounded rumours are doing so to heat up the polity ahead of the 2019 general elections. They are doing it on behalf of their paymasters for cheap political motives. It has become a routine of many political jobbers in Ogun State.
Robert made the clarification on the second day of the resumption of his defense in a case of money laundering brought against him and his company by the Economic and Financial Crimes, claiming that he received an undeserved payment from the Office of the National Security Adviser and laundered the money, thereby committing a crime. The lawyer cum environmental activist said that he risked his life and traversed the vast Niger Delta creeks and interacted with the elements who were bombing oil facilities and disrupting oil flow in the area, adding that the move resulted in the oil firms being able to increase production from less than 700,000 barrels per day to over 2.2 million barrels per day.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) has said that former President Olusegun Obasanjo has commenced moves to make the United States government with it’s alleged travel ban on PDP Presidential candidate and former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar.
In a statement signed by the Acting National Publicity Secretary, Yekini Nabena, the party said it has credible information that Obasanjo has started lobbying the US government to issue Atiku with an entry visa.
The statement reads “we have come across credible reports that former President Olusegun Obasanjo has made moves to secure United States entry visa for the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alh. Atiku Abubakar, whose candidacy he endorsed on Thursday.
“It is learnt that that the former President who during and after leaving office insisted on Atiku’s unsuitability to govern Nigeria based on his knowledge of the latter’s extensive corrupt practices while he served as Vice President, is lobbying US authorities to withdraw the ban reportedly placed on Atiku from entering the United States following a 2005 $500,000 bribery scandal that involved Atiku, his fourth wife, Jennifer and former United States Congressman, William Jefferson.
“Recall that the former president while in office had deployed enormous resources of the country on a global dragnet coordinated by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in getting Atiku prosecuted for corrupt enrichment and money laundering.
“A report by the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Carl Levin reported that Atiku used offshore companies to siphon millions of dollars to his fourth wife in the United States, Jennifer while still the vice president of Nigeria between 2000 and 2008.
“The report further stated that then President Bush had on the strength of his report, barred Atiku and other corrupt politically exposed persons from being issued visa to the United States, a reason for which he has been unable to travel to the United States till date.
“Former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s intervention in Alh.Abubakar Atiku’s ban from the United States of America is evidence of Obasanjo’s legendary hypocrisy and self-serving interest in national affairs.“
Outgoing Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose Friday evening handed over the instruments of office to the Head of Service, Dr. Gbenga Faseluka.
He surrendered the handover note to Faseluka at a special valedictory State Executive Council meeting at the new Governor’s Office in Ado-Ekiti, the state capital.
Fayose said history would be kind to him the way he managed the resources in trust for the people of the Fountain of Knowledge.
That would be the last time he would preside over the cabinet meeting in his capacity as the state chief executive.
The departing governor said he would be available to answer questions on who he ruled the state anytime he is called upon to do so.
The special cabinet meeting was attended by traditional rulers, legislators, senior government officials and party leaders.
In an emotion-laden voice, Fayose said: “What has a beginning must have an end. It is not the number of years spent but the quantity and quality of achievements.
“I thank the people of the state for their cooperation and urge them to extend same to the incoming administration.
“There should never be a vacuum; our priority in Ekiti must be discharge of our duties.
“I’m a man who came, saw and conquered. I can’t finish all, I have done my best.
“History will be kind on me as a man who has given his best to the people. I will remember all for your support, I bear no grudges against anyone.”
Thanking the people of Ekiti for their support, Fayose urged them to cooperate with the incoming administration to take the state to greater heights.
Earlier, Fayose had inaugurated the new Speaker’s Lodge named after the last occupier of the state number one legislative seat, Kola Oluwawole.
Oluwawole was removed as Speaker on Thursday by the state lawmakers and was replaced with Adeniran Alagbada.
Fayose urged the deposed Speaker to see his impeachment as a “price of leadership.”
He told Oluwawole: “If I were you, in the interest of Ekiti, I will tell them to carry on. Everything works for good.”
Zamfara State Governor, Abdulaziz Yari, on Friday said that he has been under intense pressure to defect from the All Progressives Congress (APC) with his supporters.
Yari, who is the Chairman of Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) spoke with State House correspondents after meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari at the State House, Abuja.
He also handed over the results of the primaries conducted in the state to the President after the Jumaat prayer.
He promised that despite the pressure from his people to dump the APC, he will remain with the party and fight against any injustice.
According to him, his supporters were aggrieved over the turn out of events following the party leadership’s refusal to acknowledge the primaries conducted last week in the state.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had also barred the APC from fielding any candidates for the 2019 poll in Zamfara for not conducting primary elections in the state.
He explained that the development has caused frustration among his supporters.
The governor also warned the national leadership of the party not to present any list that did not emanate from the primaries conducted before the expiration of the deadline for the primaries in the state.
Reacting to reports of his purported romance with the opposition Peoples Democratic Party on the social media, Yari, who was flanked by the Kano State Governor Abdullahi Ganduje, said, “I don’t know whether that is a joke or otherwise.
“But for me, if you check my history since 1998, APP, and 2002 when Buhari joined ANPP, and 2015 APC, no time that I shifted from one party to another. That is not in my culture. So, the issue of leaving the party is not true.
“But some other people are sending rumour through the social media. I have seen my picture with the PDP and other parties. Yes, I cannot deny pressure from the people that we should leave APC but what I told them is that what we are looking for is just justice.
“We conducted election and we want to see what the result is going to look. But I think for any body to come under the national secretariat and say he is going to nominate a candidate, I think, it is a very huge joke.” he said
The Zamfara State Governor wondered why the INEC could claim that there were no primaries in the state when the government agencies including the Resident Electoral Commissioner of the electoral umpire was at hand to monitor the process in the state.
He said though there were some hitches in some places in the state that made the committee to postpone primary elections in the affected areas, the process he said was concluded the next day.
He said, “There were hitches somewhere but we decided to suspend the area there were problems until the following day. So, the following day, we continued and we concluded the election by the people nominated by that committee to conduct election but the committee ran away and refused to collate the results.
“So, what we did was that we filed the results and kept it under the watch of those people and waited to see what was going to happen. The second committee waited 32 hours to the closing, we thought the committee will hasten and come up with modalities for the election.
“But committee wasted about 18 hours discussing about how the modalities were going to be. So, when we realised that, we were actually advised by the supervisory agency that is INEC and other agencies there that the best thing to do as the people had voted and since it was 7am was to start counting.
“When they finished, they released the materials and we adopted the numbers. Already, we had produced our own set of forms for the national Assembly which we have done and then, when we concluded, I didn’t see members of the committee until one and half hours to the time.
“Then, when they came I asked them what they came for, they said they came for reconciliation and I said which reconciliation? People can not reconcile over a month and you are trying to reconcile in an hour. Then, I realised that there was a game that was being played so that we can run out of time.” he said
According to him, the national body of APC had other crude ways to produce candidates contrary to section 87 of the Electoral Act that the party must follow a process before producing any candidate.
“Therefore, the most important is that we conducted election on the 3rd and 4th of October and all agencies, INEC, Civil Defence, Police, and DSS were there and they signed for us and the report was written by the REC that elections were conducted.
“Unfortunately, for the INEC to say that there was no election, we don’t know where they got their information but we believe they have a report directly from their representative there that election was held in Zamfara state, so, it depends on what they want to do.
“But, in any way, we were advised when the chairman of the committee came out and said there was no election in Zamfara state, we realised it was going to be a litigation issue. We quickly rushed to court, we filed a case and the case is coming up next week.
“So, I think that is the only saving grace for the party and INEC for court of competent jurisdiction to give judgement on Zamfara matter that there was election.” he stated.
President Muhammadu Buhari’s Personal Assistant on Social Media, Lauretta Onochie has faulted the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, for allowing its Presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, pick Peter Obi as his running mate.
Onochie maintained that the prayer of Nigerians was responsible for PDP’s mistakes.
She stated that the opposition party first made a mistake by picking Abubakar who she described as “prince of corruption” as its Presidential candidate.
In a tweet, she insisted that the party made another mistake by allowing Abubakar pick Obi.
“What is wrong with PDP? Nigerians don use prayers scatter dem.
“PDP chose Prince of corruption as their flag bearer.
“PDP has now chosen Gov. Peter Obi, a man who took PDP to the 3rd position behind APGA and APC in Anambra. Chai, everyone knows Gov. Obiano is Gov Obi’s husband.”
Activist lawyer, Femi Falana (SAN) has reacted to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s endorsement of ex vice president, Atiku Abubakar, for the 2019 presidency.
Atiku is the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Falana, however, said he hoped God will forgive Obasanjo for making a u-turn after his declaration that he won’t support the Wazirin Adamawa.
“Former President Obasanjo has a constitutional right to support any presidential candidate of his choice”, Nation quoted him as saying.
“It is however hoped that God will forgive him for supporting Alhaji Atiku Abubakar”, he said.
Meanwhile, Abubakar, has selected ex Governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi as his running mate.
Director General of the Atiku Abubakar Presidential Campaign Organisation, Otunba Gbenga Daniel in a statement on Friday, said Obi’s choice was largely influenced by his youthfulness, vast knowledge of global and local economics, as well as being a financial expert.
“This ticket will be able to steer our nation back on the path of progress, economic prosperity and unity,” he had said.
Osun Poll Protest: Saraki, Murray-Bruce, Melaye drag Police to court over invitation
After the Ekiti governorship election, where it was bested by the All Progressives Congress (APC), the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) raised a terse allegation that it was outdone in that election by vote buying by its conqueror. The noise was so pervasive that it soon became a national anthem. Yea, Vote buying has become a new demon riddling the country’s electoral system and the survival of the country’s democracy was rested on crippling this anomie! Yea, it sounded good as that frenzy trended! Sure, the PDP must find a convenient alibi for its failure. It couldn’t fault the transparent manner the election was conducted. It couldn’t compare the election with the notorious brigandage it did in Ekiti in 2014 whose noxious trails still ricochet today. It can’t even see the similarity between the election and what PDP had been dishing to Nigerians as elections when its dubious reign lasted. So vote-buying suddenly ceased to be one of the ageless acrid tools in PDP’s multifarious election-rigging archive. It became a new invention and the entire country suddenly started belching hot airs against vote buying and efforts were made to pin the life of the country on it.
But then, days before the Ekiti election, visual images of PDP supporters and faithful queuing up in Ekiti government house and other public places to receive handouts to vote for the defeated PDP candidate were all over the social media. More gruesomely, several Ekiti indigenes advertised the transfer of cash to their bank accounts to sway them to vote for the PDP candidate and these were very prominent reportages leading to the conduct of the election on July 14. No one asked the PDP how it managed through these indicting evidences to start a fresh campaign against alleged vote buying to which it put no verifiable indexes to prove that its opponents were more culpable than it in that allegation. But an impressionable citizenry eagerly queued up to this clap trap and a frenzy of outbursts against vote buying started.
Again, it was in the same Ekiti where quite bizarre forms of inducements were used in 2014 to justify PDP’s outright ventilation of the state governorship election. It was then we added ‘stomach infrastructure’ to the rich lexicon of Nigerian electoral contests. This refers to the multifarious inducements the PDP unleashed on citizens of Ekiti so as to justify a farcical removal of a hard working governor and installing of an alternative that excelled in his acerbic and corrosive values. This anomie was christened stomach infrastructure and the impression was created that all a candidate needs to do during election is to deploy cash, rice, salt, clothes and other such freebies to get voters to his side. Pray, what else is vote buying?
Added to these, in the history of electioneering in Nigeria, no party had been more complicit in employing all manners of subterfuge to buy and cajole Nigerians to patronize it during elections than PDP. The bizarre monetization of the 2015 elections trumps all known plots to buy and seduce Nigerian electorates during elections. It got so bad that an incumbent president had to directly share foreign currencies and all manners of privileges to Nigerians on the streets so as to get their votes. The 2015 elections remain one of the most monetized elections in world electoral history and PDP reveled in this indecent lasciviousness as it lasted. It was a period corruption was unabashedly laundered for purposes of swaying voters and it was as tolerable to PDP mandarins and supporters as it lasted.
So how come PDP suddenly harped on ‘vote-buying’ as soon as it lost Ekiti election? Why was it that Nigerians pretended they never knew about this malaise even with the notorious 2015 case until the PDP started that deliberate hoax after it was trounced in Ekiti? How come many Nigerians displayed such hypocritical mien that shows they were just knowing what vote buying is as well as its bad impact on the country’s election?
Last weekend, PDP conducted its presidential primary in Port Harcourt Rivers State and what was most prominent in the reportage of that even was the indecent unleashing of United States dollars by the contending aspirants to buy delegates that voted in that primary. Several mainstream and social media platforms reported the dollar spree with glee and how open trading happened in a bid by the contending aspirants to outdo each other and secure PDP’s presidential ticket. With the antecedents of the contending aspirants, it was not difficult to trace these wholesome dollar splash to our purloined treasury that was raided down to the last kobo during the period the PDP was in power. But that is not the subject of this report. The main issue is that none of those that developed a sudden rush of adrenalin over vote buying immediately PDP lost the Ekiti election, has seen anything wrong with the indecorous dollar spree at PDP convention as to raise his or her voice in protest. Pray, what else is vote-buying? Can the indecent dollar trading for delegates be removed from the cancerous vote-buying phenomenon the PDP fully promoted while in power and which it now rails against?
Let’s face the fact and give PDP the benefit of being rightly concerned by vote buying despite its own putrid past as the most notorious culprit in vote buying, can the party defend its late stance on vote buying while its own internal selection process is riddled with very demeaning acts of trading delegates for dollars? Can PDP straight-facedly come out again and talk about vote buying while it had laid a notorious precedent in trading votes to the highest bidder even in its own internal selection process?
Going further, where are those Nigerians and groups that latched unto PDP’s wolf crying after the Ekiti defeat to position vote-buying as the biggest problem the country’s electoral system faces? Why are they mute in the face of the hideous trading that happened at PDP’s convention? Even if we forgive their pretense of not knowing that vote-buying was one of the greatest factor that kept PDP in power for sixteen years, why have they gone conspiratorially quiet on the dirty transactions that marked PDP’s selection of its presidential candidate? Are they of the belief that such selective campaigns as they did on Ekiti election will deceive Nigerians on their mercenary roles in tolerating more hideous cases of vote buying when PDP was in power and now crying wolf when PDP loses in an election? Even if they deceived us of their roles during the PDP days vis-à-vis their role when PDP got its back to the wall, do they think it will be so afflicted not to notice when they pretend not to know the negative role of the deprecating and sordid acts of vote buying that happened during the PDP presidential primary?
The bottom line is that nothing will be achieved when we choose to invest on selective pursuit of justice just because we fall victim to an act we not only initiated but deepened when we are privileged to so do. Yes, vote buying is condemnable but dealing with it must be weaned of the bland hypocrisy with which PDP and its allies who deepened this malaise are approaching the issue. It demands a value-free holistic approach that digs back to where the cancer started and the turns and twists it had taken to this day. Pretending the negative ennui just started because PDP, its principal projector, procures it as a convenient alibi to its dwindling electoral fortunes will not make a dent on the issue. If the PDP can conveniently agree with the maniacal trading that happened in its presidential primary, then it should quit raising laughable complaints about vote-buying which is an age-old tactic it used to keep itself in power for sixteen years.
Peter Claver Oparah
As Nigeria marked its 58th anniversary, gospel musician, Aity Dennis has declared that Nigerians cannot give up on their motherland. Nigerian flag Nigerian flag “No matter where in the world we travel to, Nigeria remains our true home,” Aity began, gushing, “as we celebrate another Independence anniversary.
We should bear in mind that this is our God-given country and we must continue to stand in our place and do all we can to make sure it is well with Nigeria.” “When it is well with Nigeria, it will be well with Nigerians. Nigeria is a blessed country and one thing I appreciate about Nigerians is that we possess that indomitable, unstoppable, obstacle-crushing spirit that makes us excel everywhere we go. I am not only a proud Nigerian, I am a proud Akwa Ibomite anytime any day. And I showcase my Nigerianness in my music everywhere I go across the world. I pray for God’s mighty hand of mercy to rest upon our land, to touch and heal our nation and move us ahead. Happy Independence Nigeria.” Meanwhile, Aity Dennis has just dropped a new single entitled You Are The Greatest,featuring fusion rock icon, Eben. This is coming on the heels of the success of her latest video entitled Call My Number.
Naomi Osaka won her first Grand Slam title Saturday, beating Serena Williams in a controversial US Open final that saw the American docked a game after calling the umpire a “thief.”
It’s a little before three on a sunny Friday afternoon and Laugardalur Park, near central Reykjavik, looks practically deserted. There’s an occasional adult with a pushchair, but the park’s surrounded by apartment blocks and houses, and school’s out – so where are all the kids?
Walking with me are Gudberg Jónsson, a local psychologist, and Harvey Milkman, an American psychology professor who teaches for part of the year at Reykjavik University. Twenty years ago, says Gudberg, Icelandic teens were among the heaviest-drinking youths in Europe. “You couldn’t walk the streets in downtown Reykjavik on a Friday night because it felt unsafe,” adds Milkman. “There were hordes of teenagers getting in-your-face drunk.”
We approach a large building. “And here we have the indoor skating,” says Gudberg.
“I was in the eye of the storm of the drug revolution,” Milkman explains over tea in his apartment in Reykjavik. In the early 1970s, when he was doing an internship at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City, “LSD was already in, and a lot of people were smoking marijuana. And there was a lot of interest in why people took certain drugs.”
Milkman’s doctoral dissertation concluded that people would choose either heroin or amphetamines depending on how they liked to deal with stress. Heroin users wanted to numb themselves; amphetamine users wanted to actively confront it. After this work was published, he was among a group of researchers drafted by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse to answer questions such as: why do people start using drugs? Why do they continue? When do they reach a threshold to abuse? When do they stop? And when do they relapse?
“Any college kid could say: why do they start? Well, there’s availability, they’re risk-takers, alienation, maybe some depression,” he says. “But why do they continue? So I got to the question about the threshold for abuse and the lights went on – that’s when I had my version of the ‘aha’ experience: they could be on the threshold for abuse before they even took the drug, because it was their style of coping that they were abusing.”
At Metropolitan State College of Denver, Milkman was instrumental in developing the idea that people were getting addicted to changes in brain chemistry. Kids who were “active confronters” were after a rush – they’d get it by stealing hubcaps and radios and later cars, or through stimulant drugs. Alcohol also alters brain chemistry, of course. It’s a sedative but it sedates the brain’s control first, which can remove inhibitions and, in limited doses, reduce anxiety.
“People can get addicted to drink, cars, money, sex, calories, cocaine – whatever,” says Milkman. “The idea of behavioural addiction became our trademark.”
This idea spawned another: “Why not orchestrate a social movement around natural highs: around people getting high on their own brain chemistry – because it seems obvious to me that people want to change their consciousness – without the deleterious effects of drugs?”
By 1992, his team in Denver had won a $1.2 million government grant to form Project Self-Discovery, which offered teenagers natural-high alternatives to drugs and crime. They got referrals from teachers, school nurses and counsellors, taking in kids from the age of 14 who didn’t see themselves as needing treatment but who had problems with drugs or petty crime.
“We didn’t say to them, you’re coming in for treatment. We said, we’ll teach you anything you want to learn: music, dance, hip hop, art, martial arts.” The idea was that these different classes could provide a variety of alterations in the kids’ brain chemistry, and give them what they needed to cope better with life: some might crave an experience that could help reduce anxiety, others may be after a rush.
At the same time, the recruits got life-skills training, which focused on improving their thoughts about themselves and their lives, and the way they interacted with other people. “The main principle was that drug education doesn’t work because nobody pays attention to it. What is needed are the life skills to act on that information,” Milkman says. Kids were told it was a three-month programme. Some stayed five years.
In 1991, Milkman was invited to Iceland to talk about this work, his findings and ideas. He became a consultant to the first residential drug treatment centre for adolescents in Iceland, in a town called Tindar. “It was designed around the idea of giving kids better things to do,” he explains. It was here that he met Gudberg, who was then a psychology undergraduate and a volunteer at Tindar. They have been close friends ever since.
Milkman started coming regularly to Iceland and giving talks. These talks, and Tindar, attracted the attention of a young researcher at the University of Iceland, called Inga Dóra Sigfúsdóttir. She wondered: what if you could use healthy alternatives to drugs and alcohol as part of a programme not to treat kids with problems, but to stop kids drinking or taking drugs in the first place?
A couple of minutes ago, we passed two halls dedicated to badminton and ping pong. Here in the park, there’s also an athletics track, a geothermally heated swimming pool and – at last – some visible kids, excitedly playing football on an artificial pitch.
Young people aren’t hanging out in the park right now, Gudberg explains, because they’re in after-school classes in these facilities, or in clubs for music, dance or art. Or they might be on outings with their parents.
Today, Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 per cent in 1998 to 5 per cent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 per cent to 7 per cent. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 per cent to just 3 per cent.
Image: Youth in Europe
Image: Dave Imms
The way the country has achieved this turnaround has been both radical and evidence-based, but it has relied a lot on what might be termed enforced common sense. “This is the most remarkably intense and profound study of stress in the lives of teenagers that I have ever seen,” says Milkman. “I’m just so impressed by how well it is working.”
If it was adopted in other countries, Milkman argues, the Icelandic model could benefit the general psychological and physical wellbeing of millions of kids, not to mention the coffers of healthcare agencies and broader society. It’s a big if.
Image: Dave Imms
Have you ever tried alcohol? If so, when did you last have a drink? Have you ever been drunk? Have you tried cigarettes? If so, how often do you smoke? How much time do you spend with your parents? Do you have a close relationship with your parents? What kind of activities do you take part in?
In 1992, 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds in every school in Iceland filled in a questionnaire with these kinds of questions. This process was then repeated in 1995 and 1997.
The results of these surveys were alarming. Nationally, almost 25 per cent were smoking every day, over 40 per cent had got drunk in the past month. But when the team drilled right down into the data, they could identify precisely which schools had the worst problems – and which had the least. Their analysis revealed clear differences between the lives of kids who took up drinking, smoking and other drugs, and those who didn’t. A few factors emerged as strongly protective: participation in organised activities – especially sport – three or four times a week, total time spent with parents during the week, feeling cared about at school, and not being outdoors in the late evenings.
“At that time, there had been all kinds of substance prevention efforts and programmes,” says Inga Dóra, who was a research assistant on the surveys. “Mostly they were built on education.” Kids were being warned about the dangers of drink and drugs, but, as Milkman had observed in the US, these programmes were not working. “We wanted to come up with a different approach.”
The mayor of Reykjavik, too, was interested in trying something new, and many parents felt the same, adds Jón Sigfússon, Inga Dóra’s colleague and brother. Jón had young daughters at the time and joined her new Icelandic Centre for Social Research and Analysis when it was set up in 1999. “The situation was bad,” he says. “It was obvious something had to be done.”
Using the survey data and insights from research including Milkman’s, a new national plan was gradually introduced. It was called Youth in Iceland.
Laws were changed. It became illegal to buy tobacco under the age of 18 and alcohol under the age of 20, and tobacco and alcohol advertising was banned. Links between parents and school were strengthened through parental organisations which by law had to be established in every school, along with school councils with parent representatives. Parents were encouraged to attend talks on the importance of spending a quantity of time with their children rather than occasional “quality time”, on talking to their kids about their lives, on knowing who their kids were friends with, and on keeping their children home in the evenings.
A law was also passed prohibiting children aged between 13 and 16 from being outside after 10pm in winter and midnight in summer. It’s still in effect today.
Home and School, the national umbrella body for parental organisations, introduced agreements for parents to sign. The content varies depending on the age group, and individual organisations can decide what they want to include. For kids aged 13 and up, parents can pledge to follow all the recommendations, and also, for example, not to allow their kids to have unsupervised parties, not to buy alcohol for minors, and to keep an eye on the wellbeing of other children.
These agreements educate parents but also help to strengthen their authority in the home, argues Hrefna Sigurjónsdóttir, director of Home and School. “Then it becomes harder to use the oldest excuse in the book: ‘But everybody else can!’”
State funding was increased for organised sport, music, art, dance and other clubs, to give kids alternative ways to feel part of a group, and to feel good, rather than through using alcohol and drugs, and kids from low-income families received help to take part. In Reykjavik, for instance, where more than a third of the country’s population lives, a Leisure Card gives families 35,000 krona (£250) per year per child to pay for recreational activities.
Crucially, the surveys have continued. Each year, almost every child in Iceland completes one. This means up-to-date, reliable data is always available.
Between 1997 and 2012, the percentage of kids aged 15 and 16 who reported often or almost always spending time with their parents on weekdays doubled – from 23 per cent to 46 per cent – and the percentage who participated in organised sports at least four times a week increased from 24 per cent to 42 per cent. Meanwhile, cigarette smoking, drinking and cannabis use in this age group plummeted.
Image: Dave Imms
“Although this cannot be shown in the form of a causal relationship – which is a good example of why primary prevention methods are sometimes hard to sell to scientists – the trend is very clear,” notes Álfgeir Kristjánsson, who worked on the data and is now at the West Virginia University School of Public Health in the US. “Protective factors have gone up, risk factors down, and substance use has gone down – and more consistently in Iceland than in any other European country.”
Jón Sigfússon apologies for being just a couple of minutes late. “I was on a crisis call!” He prefers not to say precisely to where, but it was to one of the cities elsewhere in the world that has now adopted, in part, the Youth in Iceland ideas.
Youth in Europe, which Jón heads, began in 2006 after the already-remarkable Icelandic data was presented at a European Cities Against Drugs meeting and, he recalls, “People asked: what are you doing?”
Participation in Youth in Europe is at a municipal level rather than being led by national governments. In the first year, there were eight municipalities. To date, 35 have taken part, across 17 countries, varying from some areas where just a few schools take part to Tarragona in Spain, where 4,200 15-year-olds are involved. The method is always the same: Jón and his team talk to local officials and devise a questionnaire with the same core questions as those used in Iceland plus any locally tailored extras. For example, online gambling has recently emerged as a big problem in a few areas, and local officials want to know if it’s linked to other risky behaviour.
Just two months after the questionnaires are returned to Iceland, the team sends back an initial report with the results, plus information on how they compare with other participating regions. “We always say that, like vegetables, information has to be fresh,” says Jón. “If you bring these findings a year later, people would say, Oh, this was a long time ago and maybe things have changed…” As well as fresh, it has to be local so that schools, parents and officials can see exactly what problems exist in which areas.
The team has analysed 99,000 questionnaires from places as far afield as the Faroe Islands, Malta and Romania – as well as South Korea and, very recently, Nairobi and Guinea-Bissau. Broadly, the results show that when it comes to teen substance use, the same protective and risk factors identified in Iceland apply everywhere. There are some differences: in one location (in a country “on the Baltic Sea”), participation in organised sport actually emerged as a risk factor. Further investigation revealed that this was because young ex-military men who were keen on muscle-building drugs, drinking and smoking were running the clubs. Here, then, was a well-defined, immediate, local problem that could be addressed.
While Jón and his team offer advice and information on what has been found to work in Iceland, it’s up to individual communities to decide what to do in the light of their results. Occasionally, they do nothing. One predominantly Muslim country, which he prefers not to identify, rejected the data because it revealed an unpalatable level of alcohol consumption. In other cities – such as the origin of Jón’s “crisis call” – there is an openness to the data and there is money, but he has observed that it can be much more difficult to secure and maintain funding for health prevention strategies than for treatments.
No other country has made changes on the scale seen in Iceland. When asked if anyone has copied the laws to keep children indoors in the evening, Jón smiles. “Even Sweden laughs and calls it the child curfew!”
Image: Dave Imms
Across Europe, rates of teen alcohol and drug use have generally improved over the past 20 years, though nowhere as dramatically as in Iceland, and the reasons for improvements are not necessarily linked to strategies that foster teen wellbeing. In the UK, for example, the fact that teens are now spending more time at home interacting online rather than in person could be one of the major reasons for the drop in alcohol consumption.
But Kaunas, in Lithuania, is one example of what can happen through active intervention. Since 2006, the city has administered the questionnaires five times, and schools, parents, healthcare organisations, churches, the police and social services have come together to try to improve kids’ wellbeing and curb substance use. For instance, parents get eight or nine free parenting sessions each year, and a new programme provides extra funding for public institutions and NGOs working in mental health promotion and stress management. In 2015, the city started offering free sports activities on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and there are plans to introduce a free ride service for low-income families, to help kids who don’t live close to the facilities to attend.
Between 2006 and 2014, the number of 15- and 16-year-olds in Kaunas who reported getting drunk in the past 30 days fell by about a quarter, and daily smoking fell by more than 30 per cent.
At the moment, participation in Youth in Europe is a haphazard affair, and the team in Iceland is small. Jón would like to see a centralised body with its own dedicated funding to focus on the expansion of Youth in Europe. “Even though we have been doing this for ten years, it is not our full, main job. We would like somebody to copy this and maintain it all over Europe,” he says. “And why only Europe?”
After our walk through Laugardalur Park, Gudberg Jónsson invites us back to his home. Outside, in the garden, his two elder sons, Jón Konrád, who’s 21, and Birgir Ísar, who’s 15, talk to me about drinking and smoking. Jón does drink alcohol, but Birgir says he doesn’t know anyone at his school who smokes or drinks. We also talk about football training: Birgir trains five or six times a week; Jón, who is in his first year of a business degree at the University of Iceland, trains five times a week. They both started regular after-school training when they were six years old.
“We have all these instruments at home,” their father told me earlier. “We tried to get them into music. We used to have a horse. My wife is really into horse riding. But it didn’t happen. In the end, soccer was their selection.”
Did it ever feel like too much? Was there pressure to train when they’d rather have been doing something else? “No, we just had fun playing football,” says Birgir. Jón adds, “We tried it and got used to it, and so we kept on doing it.”
Image: Dave Imms
It’s not all they do. While Gudberg and his wife Thórunn don’t consciously plan for a certain number of hours each week with their three sons, they do try to take them regularly to the movies, the theatre, restaurants, hiking, fishing and, when Iceland’s sheep are brought down from the highlands each September, even on family sheep-herding outings.
Jón and Birgir may be exceptionally keen on football, and talented (Jón has been offered a soccer scholarship to the Metropolitan State University of Denver, and a few weeks after we meet, Birgir is selected to play for the under-17 national team). But could the significant rise in the percentage of kids who take part in organised sport four or more times a week be bringing benefits beyond raising healthier children?
Could it, for instance, have anything to do with Iceland’s crushing defeat of England in the Euro 2016 football championship? When asked, Inga Dóra Sigfúsdóttir, who was voted Woman of the Year in Iceland in 2016, smiles: “There is also the success in music, like Of Monsters and Men [an indie folk-pop group from Reykjavik]. These are young people who have been pushed into organised work. Some people have thanked me,” she says, with a wink.
Elsewhere, cities that have joined Youth in Europe are reporting other benefits. In Bucharest, for example, the rate of teen suicides is dropping alongside use of drink and drugs. In Kaunas, the number of children committing crimes dropped by a third between 2014 and 2015.
As Inga Dóra says: “We learned through the studies that we need to create circumstances in which kids can lead healthy lives, and they do not need to use substances, because life is fun, and they have plenty to do – and they are supported by parents who will spend time with them.”
When it comes down to it, the messages – if not necessarily the methods – are straightforward. And when he looks at the results, Harvey Milkman thinks of his own country, the US. Could the Youth in Iceland model work there, too?
Three hundred and twenty-five million people versus 330,000. Thirty-three thousand gangs versus virtually none. Around 1.3 million homeless young people versus a handful.
Clearly, the US has challenges that Iceland does not. But the data from other parts of Europe, including cities such as Bucharest with major social problems and relative poverty, shows that the Icelandic model can work in very different cultures, Milkman argues. And the need in the US is high: underage drinking accounts for about 11 per cent of all alcohol consumed nationwide, and excessive drinking causes more than 4,300 deaths among under-21 year olds every year.
A national programme along the lines of Youth in Iceland is unlikely to be introduced in the US, however. One major obstacle is that while in Iceland there is long-term commitment to the national project, community health programmes in the US are usually funded by short-term grants.
Milkman has learned the hard way that even widely applauded, gold-standard youth programmes aren’t always expanded, or even sustained. “With Project Self-Discovery, it seemed like we had the best programme in the world,” he says. “I was invited to the White House twice. It won national awards. I was thinking: this will be replicated in every town and village. But it wasn’t.”
He thinks that is because you can’t prescribe a generic model to every community because they don’t all have the same resources. Any move towards giving kids in the US the opportunities to participate in the kinds of activities now common in Iceland, and so helping them to stay away from alcohol and other drugs, will depend on building on what already exists. “You have to rely on the resources of the community,” he says.
His colleague Álfgeir Kristjánsson is introducing the Icelandic ideas to the state of West Virginia. Surveys are being given to kids at several middle and high schools in the state, and a community coordinator will help get the results out to parents and anyone else who could use them to help local kids. But it might be difficult to achieve the kinds of results seen in Iceland, he concedes.
Short-termism also impedes effective prevention strategies in the UK, says Michael O’Toole, CEO of Mentor, a charity that works to reduce alcohol and drug misuse in children and young people. Here, too, there is no national coordinated alcohol and drug prevention programme. It’s generally left to local authorities or to schools, which can often mean kids are simply given information about the dangers of drugs and alcohol – a strategy that, he agrees, evidence shows does not work.
O’Toole fully endorses the Icelandic focus on parents, school and the community all coming together to help support kids, and on parents or carers being engaged in young people’s lives. Improving support for kids could help in so many ways, he stresses. Even when it comes just to alcohol and smoking, there is plenty of data to show that the older a child is when they have their first drink or cigarette, the healthier they will be over the course of their life.
Image: Dave Imms
But not all the strategies would be acceptable in the UK – the child curfews being one, parental walks around neighbourhoods to identify children breaking the rules perhaps another. And a trial run by Mentor in Brighton that involved inviting parents into schools for workshops found that it was difficult to get them engaged.
Public wariness and an unwillingness to engage will be challenges wherever the Icelandic methods are proposed, thinks Milkman, and go to the heart of the balance of responsibility between states and citizens. “How much control do you want the government to have over what happens with your kids? Is this too much of the government meddling in how people live their lives?”
In Iceland, the relationship between people and the state has allowed an effective national programme to cut the rates of teenagers smoking and drinking to excess – and, in the process, brought families closer and helped kids to become healthier in all kinds of ways. Will no other country decide these benefits are worth the costs?