NIMC Targets Registration of 28m Nigerians by End of 2017

The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) saturday disclosed that it has a target 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 briefing on Saturday in Lagos,
said anyone without the NIN issued by the commission ran 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,” he said.

He listed the many benefits of the NIN to include one person one identity, enhanced participation in the political process and its value as an important tool to fight corruption and terrorism.

Aziz said the NIN would enable citizens to exercise their rights and facilitate management of subsidies and safety net payments as applicable to internally displaced persons.

He said to achieve this, 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.
Others, he said, were up-scaling deficiency, legal framework peculiarity and the challenge of political will.

He also bemoaned the poor funding of the commission which he said had hampered execution of its mandate and targets.

According to him, poor funding and inadequate staff remuneration had led to constant loss of strategic human resources.

Aziz, however, said the commission had also made some achievements which included increasing the National Identity Database which currently boasts of about 18.5 million records.