interview with DAYO OKETOLA, speaks on the National Identity Management Scheme
What is the National Identity Management project about?
Under the National Identity Management Scheme, we will be assigning or issuing a unique identification number to everyone in Nigeria. This is not just for Nigerians but for all the legal foreign residents in the country. That unique identification number becomes a unique identity that the person registered will have for life. To generate the National Identity Number, your data and records go through the automated biometric identification system, whereby we make sure you have never existed in our identity database before and there is only one record of you there. So that is what we will use as a unique identifier.
Can the card be replaced in case of theft or loss?
Yes, your card can be replaced, if you lose it or if it is damaged. But we have a process for that replacement. So if you go to any of our centres to report that your card is lost or damaged or stolen and you need a replacement, you will follow the process of replacement. Though, we haven’t yet taken a decision on that but I think it will come at a fee.
Beyond that, this card and all of the security features embedded in it will cost a lot of money to produce but it will be free-of-charge for Nigerians. It’s a fundamental selling point. When we get to the point where we are issuing numbers, we can issue and replace cards.
How far have you gone with the enrolment for the National Identity Number/card?
We started enrolment on February 23, 2013 in Abuja and that was the first phase of the pilot scheme. Phase two will include Lagos and the essence is for us to see how registration can be carried out in busy areas like Lagos. The third phase will cover the other states of the federation. Phase four, which is the last, will be taken to the local government areas.
There are certain connectivity and technical issues involved in the way we select the pilot locations. This is just to be sure that we can handle different technical situations or technological challenges. Once that is done, if the President inaugurates the project today, our plan is to run at a rate that by the 30th month, we would have enrolled 100 million Nigerians.
However, we will not shut down our offices nationwide at the end of the exercise. They will remain open for people who need to update their data. For instance, a woman will go and change her maiden name after getting married. She has to know that there is somewhere she can go to. We hope that by the time we begin, which will be in another three months, we will have the capacity to enroll at least one million people a day. Though we may begin with 100,000 registrations a day, we have the capacity to scale up to 150,000; 200,000 or 250,000 until we are able to do one million per day.
Do you have enrolment centres in the local government areas as well?
If you go to all our offices across the states, work is already ongoing and our personnel are enrolling people. But if you go to the local government offices, you will not see anything. It is not easy to provide power and members of staff in 774 LGAs in the country. We expect that enrolment will take off before the end of the second quarter. Before then, however, if we don’t conclude the local governments, we would have at least started.
What is the role of the private sector partners in the NIM project?
The primary reason for the private sector participation is to ensure sustainability. Government chose to involve the private sector and the responsibility of the private sector can be categorised into three.
The first is to provide the equipment, run the offices, capture the data and transmit it through a connectivity tunnel that has been provided by the government. This is to ensure security.
The second is that it is the responsibility of the private sector to buy the cards, personalise and issue them.
It is also the responsibility of the private sector to supply card devices for authentication and verification. They were supposed to provide these three things.
It is a concession under a Public Private Partnership, which requires that the private sector players bring in investments, which they will recover through charges from those who use the identity management system to confirm the identity of people, using either the card device or the Internet.
But why are the private sector partners/investors not partaking in the pilot scheme as expected?
Shortly after or before we signed the agreement, the economic meltdown disrupted the equation and most of the banking and financial institutions, which wanted to finance the project began to foot-drag. The cost began to spiral upward. Government realised that the initial arrangement could not work because the private partners could not provide the required funding.
Since it is part of government’s policy to make PPP work, government decided to provide a conducive environment required for the concession to take off. What did government do? Government said NIMC offices nationwide could be used. In fact, we renovated and created enrolment centres. Therefore, we decided to provide the offices and we have already deployed Internet connectivity to the offices.
It is now left for equipment to be installed. Government went a step further to install the initial set of equipment so that we can prove to the banks and the lending institutions that the project is visible and workable.
Secondly, government said it did not want to charge citizens for the card but if a citizen loses the one that the government has given to him or her for free, they will pay for it. So, on a recommendation of a committee put in place by the government, a cabinet committee for that matter, government committed to pay for 50 million cards. Last year, it budgeted for 13 million. The balance will be provided for and to make sure that this effort of government does not become a recurrent decimal, whatever flows from the recovery of this fund, the way the private sector would have recovered it, would be used to buy more cards and sustain the scheme. Don’t forget the card is just a way of utilising the database; government is funding the database and the NIM 100 per cent.
Is this sustainable?
Government is helping to jump-start the issuance of these cards to make it possible for the private sector to take over. What will be left is for the private sector to then take over. My belief is that once we issue the first set of cards and we show you the process, the next stage is to allow the private sector partners to take over. Then if they refuse to take over, the process is already in place anyway, it is just for us to manage and continue to handle it. This would just be an extra burden on government and it would mean that the PPP is not working out the way it would have loved it to work out.
