The Federal Government’s penchant for poor planning was made more evident recently when on December 15, 2020 it instructed telecommunications service providers to block all subscribers that fail to link their National Identification Numbers with their SIM cards by December 30, 2020. The two-week deadline was inclusive of the Christmas holiday and weekends when even officials of the National Identity Management Commission, undertaking the registration, will not come to work. This meant that Nigerians had less than 10 days to comply with the directive.
The scheme makes it extremely difficult for terrorists to create false IDs. It also makes identity theft much more difficult, especially with the inclusion of biometric data, and acts as a deterrent. Although a well-intentioned initiative, which is expected to help tackle crime and improve the country’s poor database, the Nigerian Communications Commission ought to have known its deadline would never be met. First, the NIMC, which is saddled with the task of establishing and managing the National Identity Database, is weak and inefficient. It has only been able to enrol about 42 million Nigerians in the last 10 years. Nigeria has about 203 million telephone subscribers most of whom are not registered with the NIMC.
The NIMC, by its own admission, has 1,065 centres across the country as opposed to the World Bank’s recommendation of 4,000 for a country the size of Nigeria. How the government expected over 100 million people to register in less than two weeks and link their NIN to their SIM cards despite such inadequacies, remains a question only the government can answer.
Entreaties from concerned Nigerians, including the House of Representatives for the Federal Government to extend the deadline were ignored. The NIMC, acting under the instruction of the overbearing Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, remained adamant despite clear indications that the last minute rush would cause huge crowds to gather at the various NIMC offices nationwide, even as the nation continues to struggle to contain the second wave of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.
As expected, millions of telephone subscribers, including the vulnerable elderly citizens, crowded NIMC offices in flagrant disregard of COVID-19 protocols putting their lives at risk. Ironically, the NIMC had shut its offices nationwide for nearly six months from March to August in a bid to halt the spread of COVID-19. Indeed, the rush for registration would have been avoided if proper planning had been put in place.
That the incident is happening barely a year after a failed attempt by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board to stampede nearly 1.9 million youths seeking to write the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination into registering for NIN is evidence that the NIMC has failed to learn from history.
Having been confronted with reality, the commission has gone ahead to extend the deadline by about a month. While the extension would allow more Nigerians to register and integrate their SIM cards with their NIN, it remains unrealistic as long as the relevant agencies fail to put things in order.
Without mincing words, Nigeria desperately needs an identity database. In fact, Nigeria’s lack of a robust database was one of the reasons the United States imposed an immigrant visa ban on Nigerians in February. The American Ambassador, Mary-Beth Leonard, stated that Nigeria must improve on its data intelligence to ease the investigation of its citizens wishing to migrate to the US, if it wants the ban lifted.
The Federal Government, which set up a committee on Citizen Data Management and Harmonisation to address the complaints of the US, promised to develop systems and processes that would address the security concerns raised. The committee also said it would review the status of Nigeria’s numerous citizen identification data, including biometrics, held by different ministries, departments and agencies, and propose strategies for the harmonisation of the same into an ‘ecosystem.’
But the condition in which registration is done remains unfavourable. The exercise has been undermined by extortion, infrastructure challenges like poor Internet service, power failure and sometimes inadequate manpower or equipment. In several instances, applicants are forced to contribute money to buy fuel for generators or pay extra to print their slips and for data capturing. People arrive at centres as early as 4am but others who arrive much later are first attended to once they are able to bribe officials.
Unfortunately, the government cannot claim to be unaware of this development. This has been the experience of Nigerians also applying for passports, driving licences and voter cards. Nothing is done seamlessly in Nigeria.
Yet, despite the complaints, such sharp practices always go unpunished. Besides, there have also been complaints from Nigerians residing in the rural areas about the absence of registration centres within their localities causing them to trek several kilometres to get registered.
The NIMC, in a bid to decentralise and hasten the process of registration, recently issued licences to 173 private firms and 30 government institutions to conduct enrolment of persons into the National Identity Database while the commission will gradually step back and focus more on regulation. Some of the firms would engage in mobile operations to simplify the process of registration, according to the commission. This decentralisation is a step in the right direction, but it should have been perfected before a deadline was imposed. Clearly, this was not done by the announcement by MTN – one of the firms given licences by the NIMC to register applicants – that it had just ordered the 14,000 devices, which it would use for NIN registration.
But the NIMC cannot be solely blamed for its inefficiencies since it has been starved of funds for several years. The Federal Government had in 2012 promised to ensure that the commission issues the first 50 million NIN cards free of charge but as of today, only two million cards have been issued due to poor funding while its mobile app initiative failed. The NIMC should stop the issuance of cards free if it is too expensive and should rather focus more on registering Nigerians in its database.
Creating a successful database for citizens is not rocket science, but it should inconvenience the citizens. In 2019, the EU regulation gave two years to its Member States to implement security features of ID cards aligned with those of passports. India, which initiated its national identity programme known as Aadhaar, about the same time as Nigeria, has enrolled 94 per cent of its population of 1.35 billion. But corruption drives public service here. For Nigeria’s identity management drive to succeed, corrupt individuals must not be allowed to hijack the programme as they did from the Directorate of National Civic Registration when $214 million was diverted by government officials in 2003.
