The Director General/CEO of the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Barrister Chris Onyemenam, said the Commission has achieved a paradigm shift with the successful implementation of the components of the National Identity Management System (NIMS) in the country.
The NIMC DG who made the statement in an interview session with journalists at the weekend, also said the specific value proposition that flows from the NIMS cuts across the three tiers of government, as well as the private sector and includes the family, and even the international society.According to him, if you take it by extension to the civil service generally, the concept of ghost workers or duplicate identities will be eliminated. “No one can be in the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) more than once, because the individual will be traced through the alignment of the ‘unique’ identities in the biometrics driven IPPS and the National Identification Number (NIN).
Expressing confidence in the current setup of the Unique Identification Scheme under the NIMS, he said what the Commission is doing is in tandem with global best practice, which says, “Uniquely identify every citizen and legal resident, in terms of ‘who you are’ and not what you are eligible to like benefit identities or what you can participate in like the Voter card, or what you are obliged to like Tax, or what you need to have like the driver’s license.”Onyemenam explained: “Therefore, the ability to create a single version of truth of the identities of individuals that will serve the entire country is what we have set up at NIMC, because the NIMS is a cross cutting platform. If you don’t know people and they commit a crime, they can deny it.
If someone is able to have more than one identity then they can benefit from their own acts of deception.Today, Advance fee fraud, popularly known as 419 is rampant because people can claim to be who they are not and still get away with it. So in terms of fighting crime, what we have done with the NIMS is an important tool for law enforcement agencies to fight crime, corruption and/or ensuring that the war against corruption succeeds, because you can’t hide from yourself after having been identified by the Commission” You can only hide for a while, you cannot refuse to pay tax and hope not to be caught somehow, not possible.He added: “Because enrolment on the NIMS platform covers the period from ‘birth to death, it provides economic planners of the country that hardcore data about some of the socio-economic characteristics of citizens in a slightly more factual sense than what other organisation provides, e.g., if you know the people in the age bracket 0-13 and you want to be able to feed them in schools, it’s a bit easier and more purposive with the NIMS becuase you will use the uniqueness of the identity that has been given to them, to ensure that the benefit goes to them only.
The same applies to scholarships, bursaries, stipends to the unemployed, etc. this is the kind of benefit that you derive from the element of non-repudiation and unique identification which make the the administration of subsidies, special programmes, and general economic management or economic governance in the country more targeted and development-oriented.
He also added that the previous efforts driven by the Department of National Civil Registry (DNCR), before it was taken over by the NIMC, focused on Card issuance, and the cards were issued to people aged 18 years and above as if they are the only citizens who were entitled to being identified. “That made a nonsense of that scheme because it created an opportunity for politicizing the scheme and also, it didn’t measure up to global best practice of uniquely identifying every individual.” Unless and until the view that unique identification is different from the card scheme flowing from that infrastructure, the role of the Card will always be misconstrued to mean the ‘end product’ of a unique identification scheme.
The card is not your identity. It is really the number, NIN that is your identity. It never changes and cannot be issued to another person, your card can get lost and be replaced but the number remains.The NIMC DG, who will exit as the DG/CEO of the Commission this week after eight years of active service, was optimistic that by 2016, the Commission would have populated the National Identity database with the data of over 80 million Nigerians by leveraging its harmonization and integration efforts with the various MDAs. He noted that the harmonization of data with the MDAs have started in earnest as directed by President Muhammadu Buhari. He added that harmonization with the BVN is over 95% complete and the data migration which will enable the NIMC have a copy of the BVN data has been successfully piloted and would soon be completed.“Although the harmonization will help populate the database, I hope that Government will stop funding all schemes that are not fully aligned with the NIMS as a way of ensuring the speedy completion of the harmonization and eliminating needless fiscal provisions that continue to undermine the future of identity management in Nigeria.
While admitting that Government would still provide for data capture during this transitional/harmonization period, the DG said this would be very minimal and would certainly stop the planned billions of naira for data capture activities for 2019 and the 2016 biometric census – two needless duplication of efforts, he said.He noted that most of those who today are critical of the NIMS project have neither enrolled nor visited the NIMC to ee the state of the art infrastructure before making unguarded comments about the NIMS.The NIMS he said, now needs to be scaled up, from this ‘pilot phase’ , having proven that it is ‘fit for purpose’ .
