National Identity Management Commission, NIMC, has reaffirmed that it is committed to carrying out its statutory responsibility to Nigeria and Nigerians.
Also, the commission appealed to all Nigerians to visit the NIMC enrolment offices across the country to collect their identity cards, saying that millions of unissued cards were lying in the NIMC state offices as the owners were yet to collect them.
The Director-General/CEO of the Commission, Engr. Aliyu Aziz, who gave this assurance over the weekend in Abuja said that a very good national identity management system was not negotiable.
He maintained that in line with the NIMC Act 2007 which establishes the Commission and clearly defines its role and responsibility to Nigerians, so far, the commission had enrolled over N11 million unique data into the National Identity Database (NIDB).
According to him, “we have printed about one million national e-ID cards, and have issued over 400,000 of these cards to their owners. Most of the unissued cards are lying in the NIMC state offices, the owners are yet to come and collect them.
“There are ongoing plans to outsource the personalising and printing of the National e-ID Card to private printing bureaus, so that we can clear the backlog of the unprinted cards and issue them to their owners before long.
“Although the Commission is recently facing funding challenges which seems to be slowing down its planned activities and timeliness; this is not peculiar to the Commission as the country is currently undergoing economic restructuring, and scarcity of funds, as such, allocations are not readily made available to MDAs, including NIMC. This is a temporary interruption that will soon be over, as government is geared towards reinvigorating the funding mechanism for the Commission.
“However, the funding challenge has not deterred NIMC from carrying out its obligations as it has continued to provide service at its over 400 enrolment centres across the country, and the number of citizens who have obtained their NIN has continued to increase, even as more Nigerians have been urged to go to the closest NIMC enrolment centers to register.
“NIMC has also refocused its efforts on the harmonisation of data with other agencies as it has become imperative to ensure we ramp up the records in the National Identity Database to deliver better service to the nation.”
NIMC boss also disclosed that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) had also agreed to release data from the ongoing Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) cards registration exercise to the Commission, saying all these are in line with the federal government’s directive to sister agencies collecting biometrics to harmonise and integrate with the NIMC being the central repository of biometric data in Nigeria.
“By 2019, it is projected that NIMC should have over a hundred million unique records at the central database.At that time, we would have commenced the enforcement of the mandatory use of the NIN for all services and transactions requiring the authentication and verification to confirm individual’s identity,” he said.
NATIONAL MIRROR
