National ID card to confirm Nigeria’s population - Buhari

NIMC records 7m registration

The National Identity Card will confirm Nigeria’s population and those entitled to vote, President Muhammadu Buhari said as he was registered on Monday.

This is even as Chris Onyemenam, director-general, National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), said that so far about 7 million Nigerians had been captured in NIMC’s database.

Shortly after he was registered at the Presidential Villa, President Buhari said the National ID card “will complement the exercise of the permanent voters card,” saying that for those who want their votes to count from whichever party or constituency, they should ensure that they and their families were properly captured.

Onyemenam told journalists that harmonisation of the database was ongoing and so far the commission had a record of 7 million on its database.

However, in collaboration with other agencies, in the next three months or so, the number is expected to quadruple, he said.

“In the past, the private sector was expected to perform that role, so government did not focus on that. The close to 7 million that we have in our database is the product of the pilot scheme that we embarked upon to demonstrate the value of the scheme.

“Now that the MDAs are going to step up the harmonisation, the database will be populated in a matter of weeks. As a matter of fact, we are at the stage of migrating the data from the Bank Verification Number and that is about 20 million,” he said.

Thanking the president for the recent directive that biometrics databases in government agencies should be expeditiously harmonised, Onyemenam said records of birth and death would also be incorporated.

“We are taking deliberate steps to ensure that enrolment centres are opened in each local government. In collaboration with MDAs, we are now extending it to universities. It will also be extended to primary schools and hospitals. With the cooperation we expect from INEC, we are meeting INEC today, it will be extended even further.

“Because of the records of births and deaths that are the primary responsibility of the Nigerian Population Commission, it will even become wider because there are more centres for the registration of births and deaths.

“The ID card registration exercise, he said, is not a one-off thing in the sense that there is no time limit. It is a continuous exercise. So, every enrolment centre that we have established remain open forever, they are like branches of banks.

“Once a centre is established, it remains there and people can go there and enrol at their convenient time. They will do the pre-enrolment first before going to any centre for the biometric data capture,” he said.