NIMC to register 28m Nigerians by end 2017
The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has said that it plans to register 28 million Nigerians into the National Identification Number (NIN) system by the end of 2017.
The Director General of NIMC, Mr Aliyu Aziz, who made this known at a media parley in Lagos over the weekend, warned that anyone without the NIN issued by the commission runs the risk of being regarded as a non-citizen.
“The commission embarked on an enrolment strategy in 2012 which has grown exponentially since 2015. Now, we have reached 18.5 million and the focus which is our goal is that by 2017 ending, the commission would have reached 28 million people.
“The main aim of the registration is to have a single identification,” Director General of NIMC said.
Many benefits of the NIN, he said include one person one identity, enhanced participation in the political process, its value as an important tool to fight corruption and terrorism, enable citizens to exercise their rights and facilitate management of subsidies and safety net payments as applicable to internally displaced persons.
To achieve this, the DG said the commission needed to tackle some of the challenges it was facing, such as data captured being very poor and absence of a central ID repository, up-scaling deficiency, legal framework peculiarity and the challenge of political will.
He also decried the poor funding of the commission and inadequate staff remuneration had hampered execution of its mandate and targets and had also led to constant loss of strategic human resources.
According to him, the commission had also made some achievements which included increasing the National Identity Database which currently stands at about 18.5 million records.
He underscored that 809 NIN enrolment centres had also been created nationwide just as it had launched the new electronic National ID cards with multiple functions and achievement of Global Vendor Certificate Programme (GVCP) Certification.
Aziz hinted that the next step for the commission would be the achievement of the presidential directive on harmonisation and consolidation of biometric data into the national identity database.
He assured that the NIMC would soon commence the enforcement of the mandatory use of NIN and issue directives to banks to accept NIN as a valid means of identification.
Tony Nwakaegho
