Wanted: Albania-style AI ministers

VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA

I have personally taken little interest in the affairs of Albania since the death in 1985 of its long time Communist ruler Enver Hoxha and the dissolution in 1991 of his Albanian Party of Labour. As students, we bought the Collected Works of Enver Hoxha at the ABU Bookshop and read it from cover to cover. Nothing inspiring came out of Albania since then.

Until last week, when Enio Kaso, head of Albania’s Department of Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency Licensing, unveiled the country new, and the world’s first, Artificial Intelligence [AI] cabinet minister in Tirana, the country’s capital. Albania’s Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama made the appointment in order to tackle the country’s chronic corruption. He said the minister, named Diella, which means “sun” in Albanian, will be a “member of the cabinet who is not present physically” but will ensure that “public tenders will be 100 percent free of corruption”.

Wonderful. This is the first time in nearly 2,000 years that a non-human got a top government appointment. Roman Emperor Caligula, who was known for his eccentric leadership style, appointed his favourite horse, Incitatus, a senator. He gave the stallion all the paraphernalia of office including a marble stable, an ivory manger, purple blankets and even gold-plated oats for meals, enough to make today’s National Assembly Principal Officers green with envy.

The Albanian AI minister is a she. They very carefully assigned the minister to the feminine gender, and dressed her in traditional Albanian women’s clothing. This must be because, like most other parts of the world, they have had bitter experiences with the masculine gender. Most cases of fraud, scams, theft and violence are perpetrated by men. In Nigeria here, we see little hope of improvement in the future because most of the Yahoo Yahoo boys paraded by EFCC and ICPC over the years are young men, meaning they fully intend to hold aloft the criminal banner hoisted by their male predecessors.

The advantages of appointing an AI minister are too many to recount. Diella does not need a salary. She does not need any allowances. She does not have closing hours from work; she does not skip work because of weekends, public holidays, sick leave, summer vacation, annual leave or six months’ maternity leave. She does not menstruate, so not for her the low mood at the end of every month. She never gets pregnant, never needs to see a gynaecologist, not to mention going for ante-natal.

Minister Diella is blind to all the human foibles that make for selfish decisions. She belongs to no region; has no tribe; speaks only pre-programmed languages; is neither young nor old; and if women expect preferential treatment from her because she is called a she, they are in for a shock. If it were in Nigeria, she must be sent to the Senate for screening. Our senators will demand to see her school certificates; which certificate when AI is the master of all learning and intelligence? Some Nigerian senators will even ask for her NYSC certificate. Which national service is there which is higher than AI, which can answer any question and solve any puzzle in the twinkle of an eye? One senator here will even stand up and demand that Diella must belong to a political party, as a constitutional requirement. Party, my foot! Which “Tinubu delegate,” “Atiku delegate” or “Obi delegate” at the last major party conventions could stand up to Diella on any political matter?

Very cleverly of the Albanians, they assigned their new super minister to be in charge of public procurement. They put their finger on it! Pervasive corruption in the country is one of the obstacles to Albania being admitted into the European Union. Which aspect of public service is more amenable to corruption than procurement, where Due Process is a sham and no objection certificates are too a penny?

If the rules of public procurement are strictly adhered to, why is it that too many people want to become contractors? Why do people reap riches by becoming contractors when the rules say that the profit margin for a contractor is a maximum 10%? Contractors tend to believe that they can get past any procurement rule by greasing the palms of the officials in charge. Even though civil service’s founding fathers installed all kinds of procurement, financial, administrative, audit and political checks and balances in order to protect public funds, most of them are now observed in the breach. I remember a television debate during the SAP saga in the 1980s, when then Secretary to the Federal Government Chief Olu Falae said the cumbersome public sector financial rules and processes are meant to protect public funds but they also slow down service delivery. In later years these processes not only slowed but they killed service delivery, while they never got round to protect public funds from conspiracies. A conspiracy can get around any system. There was an occasion in 2008 or 2009, during the Yar’adua presidency, when ten top officials of a federal ministry, including the minister, minister of state, perm sec, director of finance, chief auditor and several other directors were said to have conspired and shared N300 million unspent funds rather than return it to the Treasury at the end of the year. Which check-and-balance system can beat that?

Hence the need for an AI minister in charge of procurement. No contractor can grease Diella’s palms because she has no need for money, whether naira, cedi, pound, euro, dollar, rupee, yuan, yen, kwacha, dalasi or ruble. What will she do with money? She has no bills to pay; no hospital charges, no children’s school fees, no landlord’s rent, no bills from the milkman, grocer, baker, butcher, newspaper vendor, insurance salesman, tenement rate collector, vehicle particulars or even the funeral undertaker.

We must therefore hurry up in Nigeria and borrow a leaf from Albania before others steal the show. In our own case, we need AI ministers not only in charge of procurement but Defence as well. If only we had an AI Defence Minister, would we have caved in to American hoodwink and bought Tucano jets, which are of little use in fighting bandits? An AI Defence Minister, who is extremely logical and will make all the calculations within a split second, would have said, “Let’s go for Apache helicopters. If the Yanks will not give us Apaches, let’s go to Russia and get Mi-24 helicopter gunships. They are just as good.”

Nigeria needs an AI Minister of Education. Such a minister will be extremely logical and will make educational decisions solely based on data, not sentiments. She will say, “Look, let us replace all the human lecturers with AI ones. AI lecturers will not ask for earned academic allowances; they will never form a union and they will never go on strike.”

In fact, we should go beyond the cabinet and appoint AI key government officials. Such as, an AI Inspector General of Police. Even Omoyele Sowore will not be able to fight an AI IG. What can he allege? That the AI IG has stayed beyond his retirement age? Which retirement age is there for an AI IG? The only thing that will slow her down is when her battery needs charging, but these days there are powerful UPS batteries and power banks.

Why not have an AI CBN governor? In which case, there will be no need for quarterly Monetary Policy Committee meetings, stuffed as they are with managing directors of top banks. Who trusts such a body to make decisions in the overall interest of the people, when all they are concerned about are bank balance sheets and fat dividends for their shareholders? All the things that the top bankers will say in the course of several hours’ meeting, an AI CBN governor will calculate it within a few seconds. With no sentiments; no ifs or buts; no margins of error and no Ways and Means.

In this country, we will only begin to believe government figures when the next Statistician General is an AI person. Anytime the Bureau of Statistics [silently prodded by the Coordinating Minister of the Economy] does GDP “rebasing,” many citizens shake their heads in disbelief. Similarly, when it says that “inflation is down last month” and you know that the price of meat in the market nearly doubled, don’t you see the need for a cold-calculating AI Statistician General who does not care to call a spade a spade, no matter which ruling party’s ox is gored?

Right now, ambassadors’ chairs in Nigerian embassies all over the world are gathering dust. We hear that it is because the government has no money to post human ambassadors and high commissioners, who must be paid hefty salaries and allowances. Simple solution: let’s appoint AI ambassadors. They will be far cheaper and will also do the work more efficiently.

If our experiment with AI ministers and agency heads succeeds after some years, we must move ahead to install AI labour leaders, AI civil society chiefs, AI student union leaders, AI television newscasters, AI newspaper editors and even AI columnists. The next time you are reading this page, it must have been written by an AI “Mahmud.”