In April 2018, while the country was still litigating a nullified presidential vote, a Kenyan-founded venture put a school’s student government election on a smart contract. Nobody – including the people who wrote it – could see the count.
In September 2017, Kenya’s Supreme Court did something no court on the continent had done before. It annulled a presidential election, and it did so not because of the ballots but because of what happened to the numbers between the polling station and the tallying centre. The court’s problem was transmission. The count itself was never really the issue.
Seven months later, four students at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg built a voting system where transmission could not be tampered with, and ran their school’s election on it.
Three of the four were Kenyan. They had been watching.
The Founders
The African Blockchain Initiative had four founders, all at the academy: Cyril Michino as chief executive and Amine Soufaih as chief operating officer, both in their second year, with Gibson Munene Njine as chief technology officer and Gerry Migwi as lead software developer, both in their first. Michino, Migwi and Njine are Kenyan. Soufaih is Moroccan.
They had started ABI the previous October as an education venture, and by early 2018 they had a problem familiar to anyone who has tried to build something while still in school.
“People told us blockchain sounded promising, and then asked, reasonably, where exactly we thought we were going to use it,” Njine says.
“You can explain the technology all day. Nobody is going to let you put it anywhere that matters.”
The Simulator Came First
Before the election there was the Crypto-Simulator.
February 2018. Bitcoin had peaked a few weeks earlier near twenty thousand dollars and was in the middle of giving most of it back, and across the continent a great many people were being sold a coin by somebody who had understood coins for about a fortnight.
ABI’s answer was a simulated market where you traded with virtual money. You could learn how the thing actually behaved — including what it feels like to be badly wrong — before putting rent into it. Around 400 people registered. They also set up six school chapters in universities and high schools, supplied with weekly teaching material, and ran a course and a blog alongside.
“We were not against the technology, we were interested in it,” Njine says.
“What we were against was the idea that the first thing you do with something you don’t understand is put money into it. Let people lose fake money for a month. Then they can decide.”
What they Actually Built
The election system was written in Solidity.
The academy already ran its student government vote electronically, so the team was replacing a mechanism rather than introducing one. The smart contract took the eligibility conditions, opened voting at seven in the morning and closed it at six in the evening, and released the result automatically the moment it shut — to the candidates, the electoral council, ABI and the entire student body at the same instant.
Once a vote was written it could not be altered. And at no point could anyone read a running total, the four of them included.
“Whenever someone votes, once that vote is in the system it can never be changed,” Michino said at the time.
“No person in the middle can change it. Nobody has power over anything.”
Njine is careful about the scale of what that proves.
“I wasn’t trying to fix an election. I was twenty and it was a school.
But the question underneath it is real. Can you build a count that nobody has to be trusted to report honestly? That’s the actual problem. Not the counting. The reporting.”
The Part that Mattered
The interesting consequence was institutional rather than technical.
The academy’s Electoral Student Council had always administered the vote. After the system ran, it could observe the process but could not affect it. A body that had held a power simply no longer held it, and nobody had to be persuaded to give it up, the architecture removed it.
Soufaih put the ambition plainly in an interview with the academy at the time: if it worked at school scale, the argument for using it at national scale stopped being hypothetical.
“No country will really trust the system if it has not been used before.”
The academy published the account under the headline “How African Blockchain Initiative Aims To Transfer Power To The People”.
ABI was later rebranded Chaptr Global.
What Happened to Them
Njine left the academy in June 2019 for a fellowship at the Watson Institute in Boulder, Colorado, selected from nearly 400 applicants across more than 60 countries and named that year’s first Sistla Tech Fellow. He went on to Babson College in Massachusetts on a full-tuition scholarship, graduated magna cum laude in 2023, and is now a software engineer at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, working on backend platform and cloud infrastructure.
Nothing in the intervening years has changed his view of what the 2018 project demonstrated, or of its limits.
“A school is not a country. The electorate is a few hundred people who all have email addresses and all have phones, and that is most of the hard problem solved before you start. Nobody should read what we did as proof that national elections can run this way.
What it does show is that the trust problem is a design problem. You can build a system where the question ‘do you trust the people counting’ doesn’t arise, because nobody is counting. That part was never the hard part. The hard part is getting anyone to let you try it.”
And on the Current Wave
Njine spends his working life around AI now, and says the pattern of 2018 has repeated almost exactly.
“Sometimes AI is the answer. Often it’s just better automation, and knowing which is the whole job. A rule that runs off your accounts. Two systems that finally talk to each other. Half the time that is the fix, and it’s cheaper, and you can read exactly what it did.
The thing being sold hardest is rarely the thing somebody needs. That was true of crypto and it’s true of AI. Somebody has to be willing to say so, and it usually isn’t the person selling it.”
Stay tuned to BitKE for insights into the blockchain use cases globally.
Join our WhatsApp channel here.
Follow us on X for the latest posts and updates
Join and interact with our Telegram community
__________