YOUR TURN: “Who is Toomas Ilves of Estonia and Why Should SC Care?” by Phil Noble

Phil Noble

TALLINN, ESTONIA – If you happened to randomly sit next to him at an airport bar as you were waiting on your flight, you would hardly notice him. While mindlessly watching the TV behind the bar, you might strike up a conversation about the great play that Derek Jeter just made on ESPN or the 240-point drop in the Dow. You would quickly conclude that he is what he is – a nice middle-aged guy from New Jersey.

After a bit more conversation, you might notice his bow tie and round wire rim glasses and think to yourself that he is what Harry Potter will look like when he gets older. He seems a little smarter than most and you might get the vague impression that he must work in the computer or technology field.

In keeping with that somewhat strange modern airport bar ritual, you introduce yourself and trade business cards at the end…after you have been talking for a while and it’s time to go catch the flight. As he begins ambling away down the concourse you look down at his business card and notice the fancy blue embossed seal in the corner.  It reads: Toomas H. Ilves, President of the Republic of Estonia.

And indeed, he is all these things – a nice, modest guy from New Jersey who ended up as the President of Estonia – and a man who literally revolutionized his small poor country in the northeast corner of Europe by focusing on the power of computers and technology to build a new vibrant country and economy out of the ruins of the failed Soviet Union.

His personal story is as unlikely as that of his country. After the Russian Soviets rolled into Estonia in 1940, Ilves’s father took his family from rural Estonia and fled the country, ending up as refugees in Leonia, New Jersey. Thomas grew up there, was valedictorian of his high school class, went to Columbia University, and then got a Masters Degree in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

In the 1980s, he ended up in Munich as a broadcaster for Radio Free Europe, delivering the news in Estonian to the people of the land that his family had fled.

When the Soviets left, Ilves quickly returned to the land of his fathers. No one knew his face; everyone knew his name and his voice.

He jumped headlong into Estonian politics and within two years he was the Estonian Ambassador to the US. In quick succession be became Foreign Minister, negotiated the Treaty for Estonia to join the European Union, became a member of the European Parliament and in 2005 was elected President. Last month, he was overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term.

I first met Ilves in the late 1990’s when he has co-leader of a struggling little political party and I was running a struggling little Internet company in the civic and political sector. I had previously been involved in some successful European political campaigns and a former client ask me to go to Estonia and see if maybe I could give them a little help.

Even then, it was clear that they were on to some ‘big ideas’. In 1997, Ilves and others launched the Tiger Leap project to provide computers to every school in the country – this was at a time when a computer cost about the same as an Estonian teacher’s salary. They were widely criticized.

Instead of trying to fund it solely through the government, which was broke, they went to the nascent banking sector, just beginning to sprout after the demise of the Soviet banks. They persuaded these banking upstarts that online banking was the wave of the future and that they needed to begin giving their next generation of customers the needed technology skills.

Today 98% of all Estonian banking transaction are online and this banking industry model led to similar applications in the whole human lifecycle that they call ‘the e-society’.

The results of their innovations have been nothing less than astonishing. A few examples:

• The whole country is totally wired with high-speed access; you can even connect in the middle of the forest. Cell phone penetration is 120% and the monthly cost of unlimited data access for an iPad is about $10.
• Schools, teachers and parents are seamlessly and constantly linked online so that the teaching of children is a true partnership, with each child’s progress measured and fostered in real time among all those involved.
• Virtually every government service you can imagine is ‘e-enabled’ to empower citizens to become active participants, not just passive recipients. Governments at all levels provide services faster, more efficiently and at less cost – delivered 24/7.
• Over 95% of people file their taxes online and the average time to complete the whole process is about 5 minutes.
• In the last national election, 25% voted online.
• Electronic ID cards with digital signatures enable transactions at lighting speed. Entrepreneurs can establish and register a new business online in about 20 minutes.

In the business sector, their crown jewel, so far, is Skype. Started in 2003 by a handful of smart Estonian kids; it now has over 929 million users and was recently sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion.

And on and on it goes though out virtually every sector of a growing economy and society.

So why should South Carolina care? The parallels are obvious.

We are both relatively small, comparatively poor, and have both suffered from political leadership that has failed our people.

The keys to success in the future are equally obvious – a laser like focus on technology beginning with schools, an unfaltering belief that our future can be better than our past, and new leadership that inspires its citizens to dream big and take chances.

Today, President Ilves travels the world telling people of the Estonian miracle and preaching about what is possible….anywhere.

We in South Carolina have it within us to do this too.

We really can. And the proof may be as close as the next barstool.

Phil Noble is a businessman in Charleston and President of the SC New Democrats, an independent reform group founded by former Gov. Richard Riley. He filed this column from Estonia, where he is a keynote speaker at this year’s International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance. Contact Mr. Noble at www.SCNewDemocrats.org or phil@scnewdemocrats.org.

DISCLAIMER: The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the author are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CRESCENT: The Magazine.