A Nigerian entrepreneur, Joel Poopola has invented a new app, “Rate Your Leader”, an abuse-proof digital platform which connects voters and politicians.

Joel Popoola

In a statement sent to TheLagostimes, Popoola, a Nigerian-born British tech entrepreneur expressed worry that 84% of Nigerians own a smart phone but less than half of them voted in the 2015 election.

“The irony is that the technology now exists to allow both people and the politicians elected to serve them to connect at the touch of a button. But that technology all too often falls into modern mob rule. Whether it’s Brexit in Britain, Trump in America or Jeune Gillets in France, voters no longer believe that politicians represent them– it’s time to take back democracy with technology.

“Across the world, democracy is changing forever, and Nigeria is no different. Voters expect to have more influence on politics than our traditional representative democracy can necessarily accommodate. As a result, voters are either defecting to anti-establishment parties or becoming more and more attracted by direct action.

“People’s political priorities and motivations are becoming more and more disparate and unpredictable, and politicians are clearly failing to ascertain what voters really want”, he said.

The tech-preneur quoted a research from YouGov, an international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm, headquartered in the UK, with operations across the world, which declared that only 18% of voters trust politicians to ‘do what is right’, with 66% believing their elected officials put personal interest before communal interest.

This decline in faith in traditional politics, he said, has coincided with the election of explicitly anti-establishment leaders in the United States, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines and India, the result of the Brexit referendum in the UK and in the case of the Jeune Gillets Paris direct action on the streets.

He added that the “Rate Your Leader” app – whose mission statement is “Take back democracy with technology” – has recently been launched to connect politicians with verified local electors using abuse-proof technology.

According to him, electors need to embrace new technology to ‘take back democracy’ or risk the downside.

Meanwhile, the “Rate Your Leader” app is a global online platform which helps politicians engage only with voters in their constituencies in an abuse-proof way and allows elected leaders to truly understand what matters most to the people who elect them while allowing local people to identify and contact their representatives at the touch of a button, direct from their phones or tablets.

The app, which also allows people to check to see if they are registered to vote and identify their elected representatives at the touch of a button, is free to download from the App store and other app marketplaces.