Tweets for Change

Amara Nwankpa, a young internet-savvy Nigerian, has been traveling between polling stations in the past few weeks to encourage people to come out and vote. Despite the cancellation of the election for the National Assembly last Saturday, Nwankpa continued to travel and promote activism as well as to ask people to keep an eye out for potential corruption or flaws in the system so that Nigeria could have a clean vote in order to keep moving in their journey towards democracy. Amaru would best have been identified by his t-shirt that read "Light Up Nigeria" and the cell-phone that never left his hand. At one polling station, Amaru took a moment to speak to the crowd saying, "What we're doing essentially is encouraging young people to participate and to do the right thing. This election in Nigeria -- the vote, it's all of us -- government is us too." After the European Union characterized Nigeria's last election that occurred in 2007 as the worst ever witnessed in the world Amaru became determined to make change in his country and cleanse the election process riddled with fraud, crime, and violence. Amaru uses the internet to reach as many people as possible (which is a promising strategy given that Nigeria has some 43 million internet users). One of his tweets read, "In the end, it is not the bodyguards of the guns, or the aircrafts or bombs that give you power. It is the people". After the voting delay last weekend Amaru tweeted, "Saturday was an #epicfail. We won't lower our standards for credible elections tho". At the very least, Nwankpa has stimulated discussion in his country and others; "It makes me feel we can make a change. We can move things in the right direction. It's not perfect yet. Our democracy is still young but there's only one way to grow it and that's participation."

Amaru Nwankpa is a fantastic example of positive, respectful, peaceful, and progressive political participation in Nigeria. In the past few months it seems that the only stories being published about Nigeria have been related to some form of violence in coalition with the election process; bombings, shooting, threats, exc. This demonstrates how the future of Nigeria and it's democracy rests in the hands of the youth and that technology represents a good way to get the message out about participation in coming elections. Hopefully this symbolizes some type of political reform within Nigeria, or at least in some of the members of the rising generations.