Digital dawn for Enugu: Appraising Mbah’s smart school projects

Long foretold, the world has finally gone fully digital. How did we get here? First came the modern binary system in 1679, thanks to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Then George Boole’s work in 1847 on mathematical logic opened the door to universal computation. Decades later in 1954, General Electric installed UNIVAC I, demonstrating the first business use of a computer in the United States. In 1956, IBM developed the first computer storage system based on magnetic disks and practically invented RAM.

Fast forward to 2007 when Estonia became the first country in the world to use Internet voting in a parliamentary election. And now, in 2024, Tesla is sailing the ship of digitisation and technology through uncharted waters, leveraging the ‘superhuman’ power of artificial intelligence.

If Tesla’s genius in the design of electric autonomous vehicles including spacecraft is not impressive enough, what about Optimus, a robotic humanoid Elon Musk recently showcased to an intrigued audience, which is poised to automate most human tasks, from the mundane to the cerebral. Someday, Optimus or its likes will serve you food in a restaurant and stop by your house in the afternoon of the next day to teach your kids advanced algebra.

Finally, Artificial Intelligence-backed large language models are inspiring a rethink of the philosophy of intelligence and compelling the overhauling of global education systems. ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini have become easily accessible ‘all-knowing’ companions. The digital era is here and no society can afford to be left behind. Governor Mbah has sworn to plug Enugu State into this grid. 

Like most things in life, technology has wrought its fair share of ills. It is powering cybersecurity attacks and internet frauds. Nothing from financial systems to municipal utility distribution systems is safe. It is catalysing mis- and dis-information, with far-reaching implications for the integrity of electoral systems and the sanctity of democracy. Technology is birthing weapons with unimaginable powers of guided destruction. Intercontinental ballistic missiles have never been as efficient and precise as they are now. And armed with nuclear warheads, mankind is the flick of a few knobs away from an apocalyptic anti-climax. Global superpowers are even spawning robotic soldiers that will completely eliminate the interpersonal and emotional dimensions of warfare.

However, the benefits of digitisation and technology far outweigh their demerits. It is growing economies through stimulating creativity, invention and manufacturing, and through enabling global economic connectivity. It is the unsung hero of modern agricultural breakthroughs such as the development of drought and insect resistant crop species, and the installation of sophisticated irrigation systems that make fertile paradises of arid climes.

Thanks to technology, surgeries are becoming more daring and efficient, at a fraction of associated traditional risks. Finally, technology is re-modernizing education, the bedrock of society’s continued development. It has taken us from chalks and blackboards to slides and projectors, smartboards, learning management systems, and realistic instructive simulations. 

While developing countries in Africa and Asia are playing catchup at excruciatingly slow pace, Enugu State’s visionary leader, Governor Peter Mbah, is making lunging strides into the digital landscape. Barely over one year in office, the Mbah administration has launched the 260 Smart Green Schools initiative, whose transformational tentacles will permeate every ward in the state. He is bringing a digital tomorrow to our own very shores, targeting every demography.

The significance of this initiative is multi-faceted and goes beyond its face value or readily decipherable elements and implications. It is a gift for the present but also a gateway to a new dawn. It will ignite a cannon of milestones that will integrate Enugu into the arterials of the world’s globalised economy. Ages ago, geographies could connect to one another through pigeons, and horse and camel rides. Then human civilisation progressed to vehicles, ships and aircraft, and further to telephone and the Internet.

Now, a teenager with a vision and access to rudimentary technology can tap economic value from the Silicon Valley ecosphere, from the confines of his modest apartment in Obiagu. Social media content creation is making millionaires of ordinary plebians who earn foreign exchange from countries they haven’t even heard of. India’s economy is boosted by concerted leveraging of digital technology to provide in-demand services to global corporations.

A family-owned start up in New Delhi makes millions off doing business with Amazon and ExxonMobil, based thousands of miles across the ocean in North America. The direct immediate impact and future prospects of Governor Mbah’s smart schools initiative and other similar programmes currently in incubation, will position Enugu at a vantage point to replicate the digital-enabled economic growth spurts of countries like India and China, and bridge the chasm between us and the Goliaths of the Global North.

These will be accomplished through raising technology-aware educators, future generations and bureaucrats, and doing away with the analog infestations in our current systems across sectors. In Governor Peter Mbah, Enugu, Nigeria and Africa have our own Xi JinPing and Elon Musk, contemporary visionaries of like mind and drive.

From as early as next year, your kids and mine will be receiving world-class education using state-of-the-art technologies. Using digital resources, they will start gaining early experiential exposure to the fundamentals, theories and practice of circuit theory, genetic engineering, mechatronics, robotics and cosmology.

We will soon produce generations of software gurus who will develop modules for futuristic exoplanetary exploration and create robotic humanoids to perform groundbreaking brain and fetal surgeries. This is the future Governor Mbah promised and is on track to deliver. He is laying a solid foundation and sparking an unquenchable chain reaction that will linger through political transitions.

Construction is at an advanced stage and nearing completion in several wards across the state. Over 11,000 smart school teachers are already recruited and being trained at the Centre for Experiential Learning and Innovation, in preparation for takeoff. This is far from business as usual. We have a governor thinking and acting with superhuman convictions and cloaked in divine armor, on a mission to pluck Enugu State from the doldrums of analog ideologies and systems, into digital eldorado. Our schools are getting launched into the era where hackathons will be a regular afternoon activity in primary schools, and secondary school jet clubs will boldly reimagine cancer therapeutics through molecular engineering.
 
Governor Mbah’s smart schools initiative integrates sustainability, the “green” phenomenon our planets needs to heal and survive the massively growing anthropogenic pressures exerted on it.

The industrial revolution was an economic messiah but unlike the infallible Almighty, was a double edged sword – in its trail were disasters such as ozone layer depletion, proliferation of so-called forever contaminants like PFAS that cause incurable diseases, and global warming.

The polar ice caps are melting at the risk of cities washed away by heavy floods. Intense heat waves grace us ever so often nowadays, and hurricanes and typhoons are intently wiping out communities all over the globe, like Florida.

Climate change is also exacerbating tropical epidemics and drought, all formidable dangers to life and its quality.Governor Mbah, cognisant of these phenomena, is giving us technology tampered with moral and sustainability considerations so that mistakes of the past are not repeated. What an iconic 21st century leader.

Ndi Enugu, we asked for a leadership above the pedestrian mismanagement of statecraft and public trust. But God in His wisdom blessed us with a man who has strikingly delivered beyond our expectations, perhaps with alluring panache and passion. During the general election campaigns, he succinctly captured the persuasive details of his blueprint. We trusted him with our votes and gave him our resounding mandate. Barely a year after taking the reins, he has hit the ground running at blistering pace.

Development is a marathon but Governor Mbah is dashing through it faster than Eliud Kipchoge, the legendary long-distance Kenyan athlete without recourse to identify politics, clannish profiling and manifest biases in favour of any geo-political zone. Only a few could have believed this was possible.

The Smart Green Schools initiative is one of many pioneering ideas in his political cocoon. Unfortunately, we live in a clime where extremities of wealth and that of abject penury lie side by side. This school will considerably narrow the yawning gulf between the rich and the poor. The children of the elitist class, bourgeois and the business moguls, and that of the truck pushers are unavoidably targeted to be in the same class with equal opportunities. The envisioned world class education will come at no cost. It’s going to be free for all with school buses picking and dropping the kids without charges. Meals will be consistently provided for these future leaders for free. 

Evidently, with Enugu’s Peter at the helm, our state’s education system is on the verge of witnessing unprecedented transformations. We will go digital and produce a solutions-oriented future generation that will lead global think tanks of technological innovation. Governor Mbah, clay in hand, will mould your kids and mine into billionaire techpreneurs and astronauts. Juxtapose this with other developmental programmes like the construction of state-of-the-art Type-2 Primary Health Centers in the 260 electoral wards in the state, the international hospital, the international conference center, the emerging five star hotel, the presidential hotel, the gigantic asphalt plant, the dualisation  of Nike-Opi Nsukka road, and  the pattern becomes more decipherable. Governor Mbah has a multi-pronged plan to make Enugu State the model 21st century society, leveraging the full power of digital technology. 
Interestingly, he is in a haste.