Way back in the spring of 2012 — when work-based travel was still excessive and it was not unthinkable to fly from Cape Town to London for a three-day conference — I was invited to speak at Google Zeitgeist, the company’s discreet annual global technology and public policy gathering, convened by then-CEO Eric Schmidt.
The location was a sprawling countryside retreat in Hertfordshire in the UK, and the guest list was an intimidating cross-section of the well-heeled and the powerful. One of my co-panellists in an early evening discussion chaired by Google doyen Jared Cohen was Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who was then the president of Estonia.
That weekend remains a profoundly impactful memory for me because it was the first time I was introduced — by president Ilves himself — to the extraordinary possibilities of e-government.
A former Columbia University academic and journalist who also has a background in computer programming, Ilves was the ideal champion for such a radical public sector innovation.
During his tenure as Estonia’s ambassador to the US in the early 1990s, and again when he became the country’s foreign minister in 1996, Ilves became seized with the question of how Estonia might rebuild its post-Soviet economy when it was decades behind its European neighbours in terms of traditional infrastructure.
Ilves’s entry into politics and government happened to coincide with the 1989 invention by Britain’s Sir Tim Berners-Lee of the hypertext transfer protocol — or http — the progenitor of WorldWideWeb, the world’s first-ever web browser and web page editor.
In 1993 Ilves purchased Mosaic, the first commercial web browser — which cost him $30 and came in the form of a set of floppy disks — and uploaded the client to his desktop computer. He had found his solution: Estonia would become the world’s most advanced digital economy and society.
Three years later, Ilves partnered with Estonia’s education minister, Jaak Aaviksoo, who holds a PhD in astrophysics, to launch Tiger Leap, a national government project to invest significantly in the country’s network infrastructure, while rolling out internet access and computer hardware to most of the country’s schools.
A funding partnership with local governments required the strategic reallocation of local resources and ensured that schools would invest heavily in transitioning the curriculum online in order to gain an adequate return on their investment.
What was initially a much-derided project became a huge success with the country’s school children, and education reform was quickly followed by broader reform of the platforms upon which public sector systems and processes were built.
The ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic around the world have necessitated significant innovations in the worlds of work, travel and the service industries
Today, both the personal and publicly held information of every Estonian is housed in a distributed network that can be accessed through a piece of open-source data exchange software called X-Road, which was developed by the Estonian information system authority.
Information is connected to a chip ID card held by each of the country’s citizens, and it operates on the principle that everyone owns their own data, and personal information need only ever be captured once.
Thus, both private and public sector institutions — from doctors and banks to the electoral commission and land registry — are able to access people’s information via an encrypted and highly filtered network.
Application forms in Estonia are a thing of the past; medical professionals are able to access only the patient information that is relevant to their particular treatment protocols; traffic fines may be disputed online; and voters have the ability to cast their ballots over the internet, from the comfort of their homes during a set period preceding the election date. Voters can even change their vote online in the run-up to elections.
The ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic around the world have necessitated significant innovations in the worlds of work, travel and the service industries. E-commerce is on the rise and offices are increasingly home-bound.
Where Zoom was once a platform we used to communicate with stakeholders in a different time zone, board meetings, conferences and workshops between people in the same city now regularly take place online.
The public sector has always lacked the political will to make these kinds of technological transitions with the same urgency as the private sector. That is, until Covid-19 introduced significant uncertainty into the election and re-election prospects of political leaders because of the health risks associated with standing in long voting queues.
In the US, this risk was mitigated in the 2020 general elections by falling back on postal voting, using the country’s highly sophisticated federal postal service. But emerging democracies like ours cannot rely on aged state infrastructure, which has either been woefully mismanaged or was not built to serve the entire population in the first place.
If we have learnt anything from the debacle surrounding the scheduling and implementation of SA’s local government elections this year, it must surely be that the time has come for our politics and the government to move online more effectively.
In a country with strong and universally accessible network infrastructure, political parties could effectively campaign online, the Independent Electoral Commission would not need to organise in-person registration weekends, and there would be no need to even consider the dangerous precedent of moving election dates and extending political terms in office because of a global pandemic. We would simply move the ballot online, enabling people to vote from the safety of their homes.
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