Nigeria. 1st, January, 2012. New year Sunday afternoon. The president declared the removal of the subsidy on petrol on the first day of 2012, to nationwide uproar.
Freeze that scene and press rewind for a bit. Shortly before that, there was a startup. A small startup called BudgIT.
After emerging first runner-up at the first edition of the Co-Creation Hub’s Tech-in series (the governance edition) in the first quarter of 2011, and officially launching to the public on the 13th, September of the same year, Budgit was building and maintaining a platform with which they planned to stimulate citizen interests around public data and trigger discussions towards better governance, using graphic and interactive technologies. At just shy of four months into the execution of their stated objective, they’d hardly even begun what promised to be a long wearying trek to mass adoption, significant buy-in from all the relevant stakeholders in the polity, and hopefully nationwide ubiquity, in the long run.
Now fast-forward…and stop. We’re back at the subsidy snafu.
Seun Onigbinde and the rest of the Budgit team must have been as shell-shocked as everybody else at the announcement of the subsidy’s removal, and the inevitable reality of fuel price hikes. But they got over their surprise quickly, and got to work. That same day, protests erupted in the nation’s capital. The next two weeks of nationwide pandemonium that would follow presented the perfect opportunity for the new startup.
On the surface, it looked like the protests were about reinstating the subsidy, an economic perk most Nigerians perceive to be the only benefit of being citizens of an oil producing country. But for others, the ideological underpinnings went far beyond that. Occupy Nigeria, as it was quickly christened on the Twitter wire and beyond, was also about questioning deep-seated corruption and the culture of excess that is the hallmark of Nigerian government.
In ordinary times, the average Nigerian could not be bothered to attempt unravelling Nigeria’s perennial paradox — how it is that a country full of impoverished masses, the majority of whom live on less than a dollar a day, can somehow afford to pay the highest legislative and executive salaries in the world. But these had ceased to be ordinary times. “Badluck” Jonathan had just ordered his subjects to make more bricks with less straw, and they wanted to know why.
For the first time in a long time…if ever…Nigerians were demanding accountability from their government. It is because of this newly heightened interest in governance that Budgit could not have come at a better time.
The Budgit team wasted no time in crunching data relevant to the situation on hand and churning out information that was relevant to the current context and helped give focus to the collective angst of the citizenry, all the way up from the activists at the vanguard of the protests to the ordinary people who followed behind them. Budgetary allocations by the billion mean nothing to a Danfo driver. But the reality of government waste can hit him like a rude slap when he first learns that breakfast, lunch and dinner at the presidential quarters costs Nigerian tax payers like him N3 million every day.
It was this idea of contextualising government spending for the average Nigerian that informed the creation of “Budget Kut“, an interactive web app that dynamically visualises the Nigerian 2012 budget proposal with granular breakdowns. The app’s main attraction is that it invites the user to modify the government’s budget proposal and cut waste in whatever areas they see fit.
But as Budgit’s utility became obvious to journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens alike, so did a major drawback with the platform. Predictably, most of the traffic to Budgit’s website came from mobile phones. Unfortunately, Budgit had not been designed with mobile in mind, resulting in a poor user experience for most, as well missed opportunities for growth and traction on the platform, especially by the time the occupy fever eventually broke and everyone had returned to their former occupations.
With the lessons learnt from the Occupy experience, the team have pushed through a number of aggressive iterations to finally come up with a design that scales to mobile devices, and at the same time guarantees decent amounts of functionality. On the mobile version that went live a few days ago, visitors can view/search the 2013 Federal budget proposal, capital projects and monthly allocations to each state. With better support for mobile devices, one might say that Budgit is inching closer toward its goal of putting governance where it should be — in the hands of each and every Nigerian.
Things have since returned to normal, normal being no public protests and placard-toting activists on the expressway. But while the flames from burning street tires have long died out, Budgit’s self declared mission is to keep the conversation around public spending alive, by working to create intelligent, data driven and most of all, accessible context to those interactions — regardless of whether their audience is a general manager or a general messenger.
Note: This post is the first part of a lengthier profile piece that I’m writing on Budgit and citizen governance in Nigeria.
